Mind-boggling. Exciting. Funny. Diverse. Contradictory.
There are so many words one can use to describe China. But one word I would not necessarily use is beautiful. While China is often stunning, it is rarely stunningly beautiful.
In my three years in China, I’ve traveled to about 25 provinces. And after going to all of these place, very rarely would the word beautiful come to mind when describing them. Sometimes I end up in beautiful villages, however they are usually extremely poor and trash is almost inevitably scattered across the landscape. And when you do see stunningly beautiful areas in China, you are usually surrounded by 20,000 of your closest comrades.
Interesting, exciting, funny, diverse — sure. But beautiful — not necessarily.
However, last week I had the opportunity of visiting Jiuzhaigou National Park on the TIbetan Plateau in Northern Sichuan. And after three years in China, this marked the first time for me that I found a place — stunningly beautiful. Although I was not alone, compared to visiting the Forbidden City, this place was like visiting a ghost town. While in the summer, crowds soar here, in the winter it feels much more like the Sierra Nevada than China.
The national park, which is indeed a famous tourist attractions in China, is also an UNESCO World Heritage Area. UNESCO describes the area as:
Stretching over 72,000 ha in the northern part of Sichuan Province, the jagged Jiuzhaigou valley reaches a height of more than 4,800 m, thus comprising a series of diverse forest ecosystems. Its superb landscapes are particularly interesting for their series of narrow conic karst land forms and spectacular waterfalls. Some 140 bird species also inhabit the valley, as well as a number of endangered plant and animal species, including the giant panda and the Sichuan takin.
Although the park does get crammed full of tourists in the summer and fall, during winter — for the most part this place was extremely empty for Chinese standards.
The road through the park gives very good access to countless waterfalls and lakes. The fauna and landscape are perhaps the only place I’ve been in the world that reminded me of Yosemite National Park. I’m not sure if the rock climbing crowd has truly explored this area, but even from the road, it looks like there is an endless amount of untouched surfaces to climb.
For me this was a great change of pace and it reminded me — there are still pristine areas left in China not completely over run by tourism, pollution or enormous sky scrappers. The facilities that were there, were actually very nice. There were a few resorts scattered around the park and within the park hundreds of kilometers of walking trails — many of which are on very cool wooden paths surrounded by waterfalls on all sides.
Photographically, getting to this park in the winter was truly a treat. Waterfalls, ice and gray skies make some longer exposures during day time hours pretty easy. At f/32, ISO 50 I could get a lot of exposures up to 1.5 seconds and create some nice motion blut. If I were to go back, I would surely bring an ND filter. I saw a couple Chinese photographers with ND filters shooting 30 second+ exposures, which I would love to see how they turned out.
Beyond long exposure waterfall photography the color of the park is very cool. The alpine lakes remind me of those I had seen in New Zealand and in volcanic areas in Hawai’i. Unique minerals in the area create some amazing colors in the water. Combined with some stunning visibility, the colorful lakes contrast very nicely against the white snow and green trees.
According to Wikipedia:
Seven of the nine Tibetan villages are still populated today. The main agglomerations that are readily accessible to tourists are Heye, Shuzheng and Zechawa along the main paths that cater to tourists, selling various handicrafts, souvenirs and snacks. There is also Rexi in the smaller Zaru Valley and behind Heye village are Jianpan, Panya and Yana villages. Guodu and Hejiao villages are no longer populated.
While we did visit some of the villages, like many Tibetan things I’ve seen, the areas seemed a bit fake and people were scarce. However, our guide told us we could rest assured “The Tibetan people here are both very happy and rich.” Sadly, the current series of self-immolation monks is just around the corner from this area … The propagandized statement was just one of many our guide would make.
Oh yes … my guide. The circumstances in which I was being guided around this place is a story in itself.
And while the story itself is not nearly as beautiful as the park, it is a pretty entertaining and includes me walking down a red carpet to the music from Star Wars.
Ill tell that tale next …
