By Al Wong This is my experience in Beijing, China in the Summer of 2009. If you came to this webpage first, it's better if you start from the beginning of the story. Saturday, July 18 Sightseeing at Jiuzhaigou Set my alarm for 6am. I did get some sleep thanks to Roy`s motrin pill. I woke up and my headache was mostly gone. I wouldn`t go on another 2 hour twisty-turny bus ride today though. I should mention that I put my laptop in a deposit box at the front desk. The receptionist had a hard time with the deposit box keys. I gather they don`t use them very often. I want to describe my hotel room more here in Jiuzhaigou. The bed`s mattress is really hard. Almost like a block of wood. The toilet paper has some plastic in it. It stretches when you try pull it before it tears. Also, there is limited hot water service. I think it`s like 6am-9am and 6pm-9pm. I suppose this is when all good Tibetans take their showers. The hotel toilets here don`t seem to have a handle. There`s a metal button on top of the toilet tank which you push down to flush. 11:32am Seen four scenic spots including two blue lakes and the Pearl Shoals Waterfalls. The waterfalls were VERY IMPRESSIVE! They go on for miles! I really enjoyed this. I cannot overemphasize the beauty of this place! Almost every photo I took looked like a picture perfect postcard. This is a place of unbelieveable beauty and surreal nature. This is Earth as it should be. I took LOTS of pictures! Here's just a sampling below. They are in chronological order below. 03/11/11 Update - I added a video clip of part of the waterfall. Check out the link below. 10:29pm Back in the hotel. It's late, I'm tired and I have a 6:30am wake up call tomorrow! Saw two more wonderful waterfalls and lots of lakes. It really was a great but difficult situation. Great because I'm seeing all these wonderful natural phenomena. Difficult because we didn't have our own bus. We were told we would have our own tour bus but this was changed at the last minute without explanation. With our own bus, we could keep our things in the bus and just take what we need when walking around. Without our own bus, we'd have to carry everything we brought with us at all times. Because I assumed we would have our own tour bus, I did not bring a bag to carry my things. I had to lug around my stuff in an impromptu bag I made with my sweater. That was the only black mark on the whole day because we did A LOT of walking along wooden platform trails. After Jiuzhaigou, I decided to have a foot/body massage with a group of people in my tour. It was an interesting experience. It was very painful but you do feel better afterwards. The soreness in my feet went away for a while. Then we had dinner at the hotel. Our local tour guide, Mike, asked who wanted to see the Tibetan family house. I thought this was part of the tour so I said OK. Later on, when we were going to leave, they said it cost $150RMB. That should have been a red flag for me. But I went for it anyway. The show would have been good if I was more awake but I couldn't understand what they were saying, there was no water with the food being served, and the entertainment was putting me to sleep. I was tired from all that walking earlier at Jiuzhaigou. So I left early. Got my laptop from the hotel's safe deposit box and I'm on the Internet now. I'm going to transfer the photos and videos I made today to my laptop and then I need to pack for tomorrow. We're checking out of this hotel too! The Next Day China 2009 My Writings Al's Wild Web Page