On my way out of Sichuan

Sorry it's been a while since I've written. I meant to do a pre-trip post before leaving Beijing but grad school apps and some very important DVDs got in the way. So now I'm well into the second trip of the fall, doing a short little trek from Chengdu up to Lanzhou, where I'll meet my parents on the train to Lhasa. From there it's a couple days in Hong Kong, then a trip starting from Guilin up through eastern Guizhou, through Hunan to probably Wuhan, where I'll catch a cruise up the Yangtze through the Three Gorges to Chongqing. Then I'll probably just head back to Beijing.

 

Right now I'm in Langmusi, a small town on the border of Sichuan and Gansu provinces, through pretty much everything seems to be on the Sichuan side. It's a lovely little place, though pretty backpackery. I think they have done some major road road improvements between here and Lanzhou since I was in the area previously in 2005, since you can get here easily in a day, so the place is (or was) full of weekend warriors from Lanzhou. Now, it being Monday, it's quieted down a bit. Of course there are some other foreigners here, including the requisite Israelis. Once I head to Lanzhou I probably won't be back to Sichuan for a long time. I'm Sichuaned out.

 

My trip so far was pretty breakneck, from Chengdu to Songpan, then from Songpan skipping through Zoige to Langmusi. The trip to Songpan was rather horrid. It was supposed to take eight hours, and to a certain extent it did, but the road was closed right in front of us at one point for road work for 10 hours! So I became very familiar with a little village sightly north of Wenchuan. Wenchuan, by the way, the epicenter of a major earthquake in 2008, is mostly rebuilt, but you can still see the damage done to the natural environment. Whole mountainsides basically crumbled down into the rivers.

 

Zoige was a bizarre place that seems to be booming, I think because it is also now only a day's drive from Lanzhou and it has a bit more of that high plains scenery that draws tourists. But it is now totally skipped by most western travellers, cause there's nothing really to do there and you no longer have to stay overnight on this popular through route. It's a bit like Sershu, but more Chinese people and fewer mangy dogs.

 

That's it for now. I'll try to get a post up from Tibet, but if not there definitely from Hong Kong.