Day 16: we spent the day at Jiuzhaigou Valley National Park.
Short version: try not to visit in winter and/or when it’s a cloudy day, like we did. But if you have to, or it’s unavoidable because of MOE school holidays or the weather is uncooperative, see these pictures below, and be assured that what you’d see in non-winter months would be at least several times even more beautiful. When I visited Kamikochi/Japan in September this year, my tour guide quipped that as beautiful as Taisho Ike and Tashiro Pond are, Jiuzhaigou is even more stunning by many orders of magnitude and expansive in scale. She was absolutely right. There is really no contest.
We set out early in the morning to try to get to the park entrance at its opening hour of 8:30AM — and not to our surprise, the place was already packed with crowds also queuing to be among the first to enter the park. And we’re talking about several hundred guests already queuing. The queues thankfully moved along briskly, and within 10 minutes, we’d boarded the park’s shuttle bus to head to the first drop-off.
We’d watched several YouTube videos of the place earlier on and had taken notes on which were the key spots we wanted to check out. The thing is, most of that prep gets forgotten at -2°C! We ended up just sort of following where the crowds seemed to be heading. By the time we’d reached early afternoon, we’d visited Shuzheng Valley and part of Rize Valley up till Arrow Bamboo Lake. By the time we’d had lunch and visited Nuo Ri Lang Waterfalls, it was 1:30PM and we still had yet to visit Zechawa Valley. But looking at the cloudy and overcast weather and that the two points of interest there would be Long Lake and the Five Coloured Pond, we decided not to visit the left fork and instead just head back.
Pictures!
I guess there’s a real dilemma when planning a visit to this undoubtedly beautiful park. The best time to visit the park is any season that’s not winter, but many of those periods would also be peak season. And if the crowds we saw at the park today are considered ‘low’ season, I can’t imagine what the place would be like when it’s high! I reckon the stress points though are at the entrance when you’re getting into the park, and the major scenic spots. But the park itself is so large — 720 square kilometers, or roughly the size of Singapore — that the crowds do spread out a fair bit.
We spent the rest of the afternoon chillin’ at the west side of the valley main entrance where we huddled at a Luckin’ Coffee joint for afternoon beverages before heading back to the hotel. Continued in the next day’s post!