九寨沟的路 Jiǔzhàigōu de lù — The Road to Jiuzhaigou

Jiuzhaigou, the 2017 earthquake, and how to be at altitude

Jiuzhaigou is a valley in the mountains of northern Sichuan, close to the edge of the Tibetan plateau, and it is the most photographed landscape in the province: a chain of lakes so heavily mineralised that they are turquoise and transparent to the fallen trees on the bottom, strung down a forested valley with waterfalls between them. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a national park, and the name means Nine Village Gully, after the Tibetan settlements in it — which is the first thing worth knowing: this is culturally Tibetan and Qiang territory rather than Han Sichuan, and the province's western half generally is. In August 2017 a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the valley. It killed a small number of people, damaged the lakes and waterfalls themselves, and triggered the landslides that closed the roads. The park shut entirely, reopened partially in 2018 with a cap on visitor numbers, and has been under continuous repair since; some famous features were permanently altered, and one waterfall collapsed. This is ordinary for the region — it sits on the Longmenshan fault, the same system that produced the far deadlier Wenchuan earthquake of 2008, which killed around 87,000 people and which every adult in Sichuan remembers precisely. So a visitor should expect roadworks, detours and closures as normal conditions rather than bad luck, and should build slack into a schedule. Tickets are capped and sold online in advance, the park is walked and bussed rather than driven, and the season matters enormously: autumn is what the photographs are, winter is frozen and beautiful and half shut, and the summer holiday is extremely crowded. On altitude, the practical list. The valley floor runs from about 2,000 to 3,100 metres and the high points on the road exceed that, which is enough to affect a fit person who has come from sea level that morning. Take the first day slowly, walk rather than climb, skip alcohol, drink more water than you want, and eat even if you are not hungry. 林悦's 哪怕你不难受，也别跑 is exactly the right instruction: feeling fine on arrival tells you nothing about how you will feel at two in the morning. If a headache becomes severe or breathing is hard at rest, the answer is to descend, not to buy more oxygen. And one thing to do rather than avoid. The Tibetan villages inside the park are inhabited, and the guesthouses and food along the valley are run by the people who live there. Buying from them rather than at the visitor centre is both better and more useful, and 你好 in Mandarin is fine — but if you learn one word of Tibetan, ཐུགས་རྗེ་གཟིགས, spoken as tashi delek, is the greeting, and it is received warmly.