This valley is known for its spectacular green and blue pools, which get their bright colors from travertine deposits. I had read about this Valley in a book may parents gave me for Christmas, and was very excited to see them. As a group we decided to take the gondola to the top of the mountain and just hike down (a four hour feat, whereas hiking up and then back down would have taken eight hours). I had expected a grueling two-days of hiking like the days on the Great Wall had been; instead, I found miles and miles of raised wooden platforms about 2 feet off the forest floor. This was going to be a breeze! The platforms were level and wide, and Jenny told us they are replaced every five years (oh the things you can do with a cheap supply of labor). We hiked for about a half-hour through what reminded me incredibly of Colorado – the smell of evergreens, mountain peaks off in the distance, sunny blue skies, and the sound of what you think is rushing water but is really a breeze moving through the forest. Then we got to the top of the valley that holds the travertine pools and I was definitely not in Kansas Colorado anymore. The pools were an almost fluorescent blue color with rims of white or green and were so clear you could see the bottoms. BUT there was only one set of pools, and I had read that the whole valley was lined with them. Where were all the pools? Jenny then informed us that we were there in the dry season and most of the pools wouldn’t be filled until later in the spring. THAT would have been nice to know before booking the trip…. The walkways by the pools were lined with Asian tourists performing a myriad of hilarious poses with the pools as their backdrops, so we fought our way to get an Asian-free photo of the pools and after doing so headed down the valley.
The walkways continued the entire way down, through the center of the valley, and you could tell that in the wet season you would have water flowing underneath you. There were lots of dried-up pool beds, and even thought I was disappointed that there wasn’t actually water in them, they were really interesting formations and unlike anything I had ever seen before. The day was beautiful, the park was much less crowded than it could have been, and I was hiking in the mountains of China for goodness sake so I didn’t have much to complain about.
One unusual thing was that my headache from the car ride had not subsided and I felt progressively more lightheaded as the day went on. After being told we were at 11,000 feet I realized it had to be one thing – altitude sickness. They had little huts all along the path where for 1 Yuan you could stop and get oxygen for people with my symptoms. Peter and I decided to stop, more for the fun of it than for actually thinking it would help, and we only finished half our oxygen portion before getting bored and running to catch up with the group.
The ride to the hotel in Jiuzhaigou was another three hours of bobble-heading, possibly worse than the first time if that’s possible. Later that night we learned that the bus driver ruined his shocks and we had to get a new bus for the remainder of the trip.
The main town in Jiuzhaigou is divided down the middle by a creek. On one side of the creek was the road, and on the other were hotels, tourist shops, and restaurants. I again felt like I was in Colorado, in one of the little ski towns in the mountains. We arrived at our second-rate tourist hotel and had one of the worst dinners of my time in China. Jenny told us all the food in the valley is imported from Chengdu, and it’s really hard to get anything fresh. I bought some altitude sickness medicine after dinner, took about 3x what I was supposed to, went to my hotel room and tried to sleep off the sickness.
I woke up about three hours later and showered. When I got back into my bed, I thought, “Wow, it’s still really warm!” and accredited it to the thick, woolen blanket. The next morning I realized there was a switch underneath my pillow and that there was a heater in the bed. Best invention ever!
Pictures: The wooden walkways; The travertine pools; Just posing like the Asian toursits; Oxygen break!
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