Day 2

Before we began our trip we asked Zhang Lin to take us to a place where we could buy cheap clothes. He did so (it was just a couple streets of where we were tried shopping yesterday) and we managed to buy some more T-shirts, etc at a reasonable price/quality.

The second quest was to purchase CF cards. Well, we were expecting to do a really good deal here as I guess most of the flash memories in the world are produced in China. We were basically shocked when we were told there is no 4 or 8 gig cards, only 1 or 2 at a standard Hungarian price which is about 1.5x more than in the US. And those cards were really noname even without a speed indicator. So we decided to buy a hard drive which has a memory card adapter and can automatically copy the contents of your flash memory to itself. It was around 85 USD with an 80 gig notebook HD, not so bad...

So finally around noon we started our trip to Jizhaigou, but before we asked for the road conditions at a tourist info center. We were told that the road we planned to take is basically closed for most of the time because of the heavy rains, etc. so we should consider an alternative route. We did so. On the first part of the road we had nice 4-6 lane highways with minimal traffic. But after 160 kms the joyride was over, and the road conditions dropped dramatically in the mountains. Rocks on the road, huge holes, people parking in the middle of the road, etc. so our avg speed dropped to around 35km/h. The other thing we have noticed that our driver drives slower than expected on these roads and also makes kind of stupid things like overtaking another car in a curve where he cannot see who is coming from the other direction. Well luckily we didn't have any problems, because most of the people drive here quite slowly. But we were curious so asked Zhang Lin about his driving experience. He admitted that he has a license for 1 year only (and we guessed that we has never driven outside the city, where he was doing OK). Anyways we gave him some instructions and his driving is skills are evolving every day as well our adrenaline-livel is dropping slowly while being in the car...


In the mountains we made a stop at ??? Where we had a 2hrs trip including the cableway ride. The place is very nice, we checked out a monastery, a nice bridge, etc. (See pictures). Unfortunatelly we didn't have time to go into the 2km long cave or go to the top of the mountain with the other cableway. Maybe the next time...
























Lover's Bridge









We stayed in Ping Wu at a nice hotel, 30 yuan per person, double rooms w/ bath.

Dinner was great, food chosen by Zhang Lin. When we entered the restaurant we were offered a table instantly, they brought us tea without any questions (this is a habbit around here), and the waiter offered us cigarettes as well.