After leaving Chengdu we headed for a highly recommended national park called Jiuzhaigou. Many travellers had told us of the beauty of this park so we decided to stop of and see it, dispite the price. It was right on the border with Tibet so we got to have a little taste of their culture and as it was so high up it was cold!! Although we didn't have the clothes for the cold we liked it after being so hot for so long! We woke early the next morning to get to the park for the 7am opening, along with a lot of other tourists (mostly Chinese). We had met some nice Chinese guys in our hostel in Chengdu and they came here on the same day as us so we walked there with them before losing them in the crowd which was a shame as we didn't have a chance to say goodbye and thank you again!
We bought our tickets decided not to also get the bus, that was half the price of the ticket again, to the top of the park. Instead we just started walking and saw lots of beautiful scenery on the way. We were walking alone for about 3 hours before hitting the crowds at the first major sight, about a kilometer stretch of lakes and waterfalls. The lakes were indeed beautiful and a very vivid shade of blue and completely clear. We walked up to Tiger Lake and headed back the way we came. We thought we had not seen very much of the park, but when we got back and looked on a map we realized we had seen almost half the park and walked almost 30km!! As you can imagine we were VERY tired and had an early night in preparation for our 33 hour journey to Xi'an.