Ok so, I managed to get all my moaning about traveling out of the way in my previous post, so I can stick to the positive outcomes here. A much more pleasant read, I can safely assume.
As I said, we had to spend 3 days loitering around in a hotel before we could go anywhere. I suppose technically it was two days, as we departed on the third day, but it took most the day driving to get to where we wanted to go instead of simply flying directly there.
Getting a driver is something I'm not generally familiar with as a concept, coming from England where you can pretty much go to 800,000 points of interest in any given 1-hour drive or train ride.
This is a massive hurdle in any big country such as China or the USA. In America, you have to drive half an hour just to get to the nearest Taco Shop, as Bill Bryson once pointed out.
The region we were going to, Sichuan, was about the size of France. Think about how much stuff is going on in France, then compare to this region which is mostly nothingness.
So it stands to reason if we're going to be seeing, say, 10 things in 3 days, it's gonna take a hell of a lot of driving to get to and from each one.
One drive took us over 9 hours - the entire day - to get to, with a couple of stops here and there for interesting views.
Overall, it's hard to say it's 'worth' going there when 80% of the time you are there is spent in a car. That being said, the memories created were wonderful ones, and they are the memories that will stick with us, not the car-sitting parts. I suppose it's a perspective thing.
That first day we spent travelling gave us some wonderful views, but the deeper we got into the mountains, the more worthless the original photos we took became, as mountains and valleys started getting increasingly majestic and massive.
Our first hotel was pretty decent all things considered, but it was in what was little more than a truck stop of a town where the laws restricting horn honking were irrelevant and the trucks really wanted to make you know it. There was little of anything to discuss in terms of food, and we were too tired for anything else so we just slept and moved on to the next day.
Unfortunately for us, we were travelling in a country of 1.5 billion people. So, even though it was off-season, no public holiday was going on, and in the middle of nowhere, students were on summer vacations and even though only 0.000000003% of families could get the time off at this particular moment in this particular place, that still leaves you will millions of people. So, on several occasions, even though we seemed to be in pristine, untouched nature, it was in fact an illusion and we got ourselves locked in heavy traffic jams the likes of which you might see in New York or London.
It didn't help that not all roads were built wide enough for two lanes.
If we wanted to get away from all this civilisation - we really did - we would have to go, well, a bit off-road. This is also why we had to do a lot more driving than would be ideal; we had to simply get away from all the people, which took a lot of time and effort on the driver's part.
We didn't literally go off-road so much as the roads abandoned us, as the asphalt slowly turned into gravel, and the gravel slowly turned into fallen rocks and potholes.
I am telling you now I have never had such a hard time sitting in my seat. This was more often than not like a roller coaster, on steroids, for hours.
On more than one occasion, despite me being strapped in, holding on to the door for dear life, I ended up bonking my head on the roof of the pretty tall 4x4 car.
My neck was strained by the end of each day, my abs probably grew several pounds of muscle trying to keep me upright, and I tended to have a headache before bed, possibly due to a bit of altitude sickness, but far more likely because my brain had been bashed around for an entire work day.
I gotta admit it was pretty fun. The driver was truly impressive in this regard. One 'bridge' was actually a road that for some reason they narrowed to half the width of a normal lane, and the rest was replaced by a round metal drainpipe. It's hard to explain but needless to say, I'm still not sure how he got the car over without falling down the cliff.
It was this kind of effort that allowed us to finally get some peace of mind, peace & quiet, and some beautiful landscapes unspoiled by kids screaming and throwing trash into the wildlife.
Well, we did see some kids, but they were embracing nature in a more wholesome way.
This land rapidly became Yak territory. Yaks, seemingly owned by cowboys on a kind of part-time basis? I'm honestly not sure how they're kept or taken care of or owned. They seemed perfectly wild to me but at the same time, we would often see Chinese cowboys rounding them up and taking them somewhere for some reason. either way, Yaks are pretty awesome.
This particular Yak above was so cool, we called him Jack. Jack the Yak.
Although I'm mostly interested in taking scenery shots, the girlfriend of course wanted selfies and such as is life in the modern day, and I was unfortunately dragged into this too. So here are some shots which I guess you can consider proof that I left my apartment.
As you can see the landscape was not entirely mountainous. There was a fair amount of gorgeous, open grassland that would stretch about as far as the eye can see, walled off by very distant mountains which sometimes rolled as softly as the British hillside, other times as harshly as the Himalayas.
So there you have it, part 1 of our trip, not necessarily in chronological order.
We only stopped at a single proper town, at the beginning and at the end of our trip: Kangding. More on that next time.