Day 3

We continued our trip to Jizhaigou in the morning. The 180 kms took about 5 hrs, road conditions were mostly OK, with an exception of about 20kms when coming down from a pass. The landscape is beautiful. On the way there are several mining facilities, hoover dams as well, just to give you some


insight to the Chinese industry. The people here are mixed Chinese and Tibetians, living on agriculture. They use every piece of land to grow corn, cabbage, etc.

Finding cheap accomodation quickly in Jizhaigou is a challange. The whole city is built on rich Chinese tourists who come here and spend a lot of money. We ended up paying 180 yuan (24 USD) for a crappy room, because we did not want to spend much time on finding accomodation, but wanted to go inside the national park ASAP.





So on the first day we decided not to buy a bus ticket (90 yuan) just the normal ticket (220 yuan, for 2 days and they print your digital photo on the ticket for later identification :-). We hiked for about 4 hrs in the park on the first day. The scenery is gorgeous!!! Let the pictures talk...



We managed to eat great food again at a resonable price except for the beer. Paying 15 yuan for the beer which you could get for 3 in any stores is a big time rip off. And of course they always forget to indicate the beer prices on the menu card... Our driver was also shocked by this... He told us he has never paid more than 8 yuan for a beer in Chengdu even at expensive places... So we agreed with him before we order anything anywhere we check the beer price first.

Normally it is 5 yuan in the restaurants (0.6 USD). Beer bottle sizes tends to vary, we have seen 500, 518, 520, 528, 560, 580, 600, 620 ml. Alcohol is usually between 3.3 and 4.3%. Far the most popular beer is SNOW, but it has several types. Funny to notice that SNOW light has more alcohol than regular :-) and it tastes better as well. Just exactly the opposite of Bud and Bud light... BTW SNOW is a lot better than Bud...