The majority of first-time visitors to Yunnan would find time to do a full-day tour of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain region located in the city of Lijiang, and many would follow a route that covers at least these places: Spruce Meadow, Blue Moon Valley/Baishui River, and Glacier Park at the mountain itself. And if time permits, catching Zhang Yimou’s “Impressions Lijiang” show too. A trip like this would easily take at least 9 to 10 hours, so most tours that are doing these places over the course of a day would have to start early.
That basically was our plan too: we had an early morning breakfast at 6:30AM in our little boutique hotel — we were the only guests staying at the property — and were picked up at 7AM by our driver with the accompanying tour guide. The first stop was a local shop that was carrying things we needed to deal with altitude sickness, since the areas we were going to visit were all upwards of 2,900 meters and above and, depending on how far you want to ascend up the mountain at Glacier Park, up to 4,800 meters even. We’d already picked up altitude sickness meds from our GP back at home, but just in case, forked out money to buy a lot of oxygen canisters since from Day 04 onwards we’re going to be visiting places in Yunnan and then Western Sichuan of increasing altitudes, and also the local herbal medicine for altitude sickness. Be warned though: these remedies aren’t cheap. We picked up enough oxygen canisters and the small bottles of local remedies for four days (we’re hoping that we would have somewhat acclimatized to higher altitudes by then), and the total damage was SGD300.
We next raced over to vantage points to catch the morning sunrise over the mountain region, and arrived at 7:45AM — ten minutes before the expected sunrise at 7:55AM. We weren’t the only ones: there are several spots to catch the morning golden sunrays over the mountains, and the spot we went to already had lots of cars with visitors all waiting to see the same thing too! The sunrise was incredible and well worth the stop.
The next stop was to the base of the mountain region. There were lots of people already there at 8:15AM. Private vehicles are mostly not allowed into the area: most visitors basically get from point to point through electric carts and buses. Our first stop in the region was Spruce Meadow. This huge lawn offers a magnificent view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain with the meadow in the foreground, and you can walk around the circumference of the large field. The full circuit probably takes about 45 minutes: we made it past about the midpoint, then decided to double back to head to the next stop and get ahead of the crowds. By the time we left at around 10AM, the area was already pretty packed with visitors — and this was relatively low season even!
Next stop: Blue Moon Valley and Baishui River!