JiuZhaiGou really is nature’s paradise. Maesot and ChengMai Thailand were both an amazing adventure. Check out – Looking For a Home. While we got to enjoy our trip, The focus of our time was not primarily on enjoyment. It was on helping refuges and understanding their situations better. It’s true that life isn’t fair and sometimes it’s hard to reconcile that fact that the refuges are living in temporary shelters during the rainy season that leak water or that they don’t have enough food. All the while we have plenty. Anyway food for thought.
Going With Friends
We got home about 1:30 am and were off for another trip the next day, this time to JiuZhaiGou, China. It was a blast. Yes, we were warned about high altitude and Tracy did have to use oxygen, but everything worked out. Tracy and I met our team leader JoAnn in the airport. Immediately she showed concern for me and wanted to know if I could understand Cantonese. I told her that I could and that I would ask for help when I didn’t understand. She was relieved. In addition, JoAnn went out of her way to accommodate Tracy and I so that we could sit with our friends Florence and Sarah. This was our first time to go with friends. She told us that we should have asked to be grouped together with them before the trip started. We told her that we understood and that it would be fine either way.
Almost Celebrity Status Hahaha 🙂
Okay, admittedly I have only gone on Big Line tours so I can’t speak for other companies here in Hong Kong but it seems that the leader and tour guide. Often get elevated to almost celebrity status. They get to explain the places we are visiting, help us out in various ways, share their stories, connect with us and they usually get a lot of laughs as well. On my previous trips, I kind of just observed this from the outside because I wasn’t able to follow their Cantonese or Mandarin well enough.
This trip was different, I understood the majority of what our leader JoAnn was saying and she didn’t speak too fast for me. It felt really good. There were a couple of times where Joan called me out from the crowded. Generally speaking I don’t like it when this happens. Whether it is at school, in a tour group or in the community, most people who are giving a talk don’t take one foreigner into consideration. I usually feel ignored. On one occasions JoAnn called my name, thinking that she would need to translate what she had just said for me. It felt so good to be able to tell her. Nope, I get it and to really have understood what she was saying.
Delicious Food
The tour guide XiaoDu spoke Cantonese, but his mother tongue was Mandarin. On previous trips to China the tour guide spoke Mandarin. XiaoDu’s Cantonese was a little bit fast for me and he does have a bit of an accent. Still he was very entertaining. I followed a general gist of what he was saying asked Tracy to fill details that I missed. XiaoDu did an excellent job and he ordered a lot of delicious food for us to eat. Both of our guides have been leading tours for over 20 years so they are both very experienced. They did a great job.
Giant Panda Research Centre
There is so much that I could say about the trip. First off Joan explained to us how in the past before the high speed rail train service. Getting to JiuZhaiGou used to take a really long time. Now with the high speed rail, Big Line was able to offer their guests less time in transit and more time doing activities. Previously guess didn’t used to stop at the Giant Panda Research Centre because there wasn’t time for it but now there is. Both Tracy and I had been to the Panda Centre so we knew what to expect, but it was still fun. There were tons of people there. As I mentioned in a previous blog, the disadvantage of going with a tour group is that you have to be prepared to move on when the group is moving on. The above picture is a picture of their picture of Panda. He would not smile like that for me. There were lots of variables that prevented me from getting better shots. On one occasion my camera settings were off and I didn’t notice it until it was too late.
Mr. Red Panda
On another occasion, the red panda just wouldn’t look at me and when he did my camera focused on the branch in front of him inside of him. If I had choose a smaller F stop, I could have had a larger depth of field and this problem could have been resolved. Or Mr. Red Panda could have just looked at me more than once. Anyway, he was shy. Okay, I guess that’s his right.
Nature’s Paradice
When it comes to nature’s paradise, JiuZhaiGou it really is like nothing I have ever seen before. Apparently earthquakes have allowed for many of the falls and formations to be formed. Still making it accessible to the masses had to have been a major undertaking. Of course the roads need to switch back and forth through the mountains or in other cases they just needed to blow the mountains apart to make room for the roads. At the actually sites, great attention was given to making paths, bridges, walk ways, buildings, restaurants and more.
The 5 color lake we went to required a cable car to get to. You will see the pictures of it in the video. Tracy was having a difficult time with high elevation, so I went on ahead and she stayed with our friends, but 1 hour just wasn’t enough time to get to the lake and there were tons of people. Even if I had to talk faster, it would have been hard to have because there were just so many people. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining. When you go with a tour group you get a taste of the sites, smells, foods, and life of the particular area. We definitely got our money’s worth.
In Door Activities
But this trip wasn’t just about outdoor nature adventures. It also included a Tibetan Drama performance, a guided tour around a museum with many artifacts from 3 excavation sites in Sichuan, to say I was impressed would be an understatement. For the Tibetan performance, the English translation read that photography was prohibited. I was prepared to not take any pictures but then my friend told me. Nope, in Chinese it says photography is fine just no flash. Here I got a say, I really like my full frame Panasonic S1. It makes a huge difference. I will probably do a separate blog and video on it. I was also impressed with the Sichuan Opera. I don’t really care for opera but this was not traditional Sichuan Opera. They had done an excellent job revamping it for a modern generation. I think there were over 3000 people there at that performance.
