We didn't have a great start to the day when overzealous hostel staff woke us at 1 in the morning to collect our room fees, despite the fact that we'd already paid in full the day before. After a fitful night's sleep, partly due to the realisation that we were not alone in the room (our friends, the cockroaches) and the open sewer smell rising from the sink hole, we rose at 6am and headed off to Chengdu airport to catch our flight to Jiuzhaigou. Our bad day continued as the flight was delayed by 3 hours, we then had a lively debate on the other side with some shifty looking taxi drivers, who seemed to want to take us and our wallets for a ride...only it turned out that they were decent chaps in the end, giving us a long and difficult taxi ride at a knockdown price.
Of course, none of this matters, because we are in Jiuzhaigou and it promises to be absolutely awesome. You know you're in for a treat when the landing has an entire cabins worth of jaded chinese tourists craning their necks to get the views from the airplane window. Jiuzhaihuanglong airport is set 3000m above sea level between two mountains. The 60km taxi ride in to town was no less dramatic, first looking like we were on some desolate tibetan plateu and then becoming positively alpine in feel as the taxi snaked its way down in to the lush mountain valleys.
We'll spend the next two days visiting the scenic area of Jiuzhaigou.
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