Sichuan: Off China's Beaten Track

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Baby Pandas on the Rise

Luckily, Chengdu is also home to the giant pandas, and the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base six miles north of downtown was a surprisingly rewarding visit. This is a scientific breeding center, where the caretakers encourage the notoriously reticent creatures to mate, in order to counteract their dwindling population. They've had some recent success—2008 has been a banner year for captive panda births—and a glass-lined nursery at the center lets visitors watch scientists measure progress of the newest born in their incubators, and fawn over the older cubs that nap in a towel-lined crib.

The real action though, is in the grassy meadows cut by walking paths, where visitors can watch fully grown black and white beasts climb, cavort, and gnaw on shoots and apples. The center is also replete with much smaller red pandas, which look more like foxes than bears, and scamper around the fields and wood. The pandas come as cute as advertised, and the research base is well worth its entrance fee of 30 yuan (about $4.40). For an extra 50 yuan (about $7.30), visitors can hold a red panda on their lap while clad in surgical scrubs, and feed it apple slices.

Chengdu has its charms, but more than a few days in the provincial outpost would likely be too much—the sites are limited, and there's only so much coffee one can drink. So we ended our Sichuan journey with three days at Jiuzhaigou national park. We flew China Southern Airlines (ZNH), and I'd recommend making arrangements in advance. We didn't, and buying two tickets involved a generous tip to a hotel concierge in Beijing, a few lengthy and bureaucratic conversations with a travel clerk in Chengdu, and lots of patience. The flight was no small matter either—Jiuzhaigou airport rests at 11,000 feet, and landing involves a precipitous descent through mountain peaks.

Different View of National Parks

From there, catch your breath, get your bags, and step outside the tiny airport where locals are happy to rent you a taxi. We negotiated a price of 200 yuan (about $29) for the 90-minute wind from their airport to the park, down a surprisingly well-paved mountain road lined with yaks, ponies, cattle, and tents pitched in the hillsides.

We stayed at the Sheraton Jiuzhaigou Resort, which has spacious and comfortable rooms, jutting crags outside the front door, and a restaurant called Pearl where we dined on spicy braised lamb and a stew of local mushrooms. The next day we set off for the park, which lies a short walk, or shorter taxi ride, from the Sheraton. A two-day pass to the park costs 220 yuan (about $32), and entitled us to ride a series of buses that ply the mountain's twisting roads.

The scenery is beautiful—mountain lakes, cyan pools, rushing waterfalls. Keep in mind though that the Chinese don't see a national park the way many Westerners do. We needed to ride the bus between scenic spots, and you can't really hike around—most of the scenic outlooks feature planked boardwalks that let you walk a few minutes in a given direction before they end. The park staff and the tour guides on each bus don't speak English, and all the narration and announcements are in Chinese, so we had to guess a few times where to head when we got off at a stop.

Forgetting the Hassles

On the next-to-last day of our trip, we set out for Jiuzhaigou airport again for the return flight to Chengdu. We passed Tibetan-style villages, foggy forests, and a herd of sheep crossing the road. Then the snow began to fall. It fell softly atop the trees and stuck to their branches, nearly wiping clear the memory of the hassles it took to get to this remote spot.

Click here to see more of Sichuan province.

Ricadela is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in Silicon Valley.