Internal tourism is big business in China. Along with weather reports for major cities Chinese TV includes the data for Jiuzhaigou. This ‘Nine Stockades Valley’ now has an airport and a motorway connection to the regional capital.  Consequently, the getting-away-from-it-all element of the area is greatly diminished. It was mid-afternoon under a leaden sky,

Testing the waters to ascertain how easy or difficult it is as a foreigner to make my way round China on public transport, I’d succeeded in traveling way out west to Yining where the waters drain westward out of China’s Xinjiang province, and into Kazhakstan. Now three days into the trail back eastward I had arrived in […]