The chap at the Tangjiahe Hotel who spoke some English had advised me not to go to Wanglang, because there were “no birds or animals there”, the road was very bad, the hotel was not like the one at Tangjiahe, and there was no bus in the reserve so I would have to walk everywhere. “Instead of going to Wanglang, I have a new plan for you,” he said, which went something like this: “Tomorrow when you leave here, you go from the Tangjiahe Hotel to the Qingxi bus station, you get a bus to Chengdu, then you go to the airport and fly to Wellington, the capital of your country.” I did not think much of that plan.
I had the phone number of the taxi driver who had brought me to Tangjiahe from Pingwu, but there was a guy working at the hotel called Mr. Hu (and, yes, I did wish he was a Dr. instead) who could drive me back to Pingwu for the same amount (300 Yuan) so I did that instead because it was simpler. There seemed to be two ways of getting from Pingwu to Wanglang Nature Reserve. The first was to take a bus to a town called Baima about 60km away and then get a taxi from there to the reserve which was about 40 or 60km further on. The second was to just take a taxi all the way from Pingwu. I had already found out that the cost of a taxi the whole way would be 400 Yuan (which is about NZ$80, plus the 300 Yuan – NZ$60 – from Tangjiahe to Pingwu), so I was hoping to cut it back by taking the bus part of the way. However when we got to the Pingwu bus station the person at the ticket counter said that there are no buses to Baima. So I ended up having to pay the 400 Yuan for the taxi after all (with the same driver who had taken me to Tangjiahe). I'm not sure if “no buses to Baima” meant none at all, none that particular day, or maybe no more that day because the only one had already gone. What I do know is that I saw no buses on the way, only minivan taxis, so I think that bus route has been stopped.
The road out of Pingwu was pretty good. Something you have to get used to in this part of China is that the road tends to be overlooked by dramatically sheer cliffs and very very regularly there are the remains of landslides and big rockfalls beside (or across) the road, the crash barriers are often crumpled up as if they were made of tinfoil, and you see a lot of large impact craters in the tar-seal from boulders hitting the road. Other than all that, it was a pretty good road! I'm not sure which town Baima was, but after the turn-off to Wanglang the road got very very bad. Actually there wasn't really a road left any more. There were the remains of paved road every so often but if you strung them all together it probably wouldn't have made more than a few hundred metres. All the rest had been completely obliterated by landslides (presumably from earthquakes). The “road” was just a dodgy mud track for most of the two and a half hours it took to make this part of the journey. Sometimes it was just a flattened bit across a slip, literally on the edge of a cliff. Very unnerving indeed. The road was in the process of being rebuilt – there were big slabby concrete sections here and there bridging bits where there was no ground left anymore – but it might take a while to finish! I could see why it cost so much for the taxi to get there. Funnily enough, all the way to the reserve's entrance there is no real road, but from the entrance to the HQ 8km further on, the road has a near-perfect seal.
The HQ at Wanglang Nature Reserve has seen better days. I don't want to be too harsh because I really liked the reserve, all the people working there were super-helpful and super-friendly, and I would totally recommend wildlifey-people visit and stay there, but it is pretty shabby. I can see it must have been really grand when built – there are even monogrammed towels in the rooms – but it has been pretty much left to fall apart. Just as an example, many parts of the boardwalks between the buildings are literally rotting and falling apart, everything is overgrown with weeds, and there is rubbish and debris strewn everywhere. My room hadn't been cleaned after the last person had left, and from the amount of dirt and insect frass and spider habitats I don't think it had been cleaned in months. I do wonder if perhaps the place had been isolated after the only road in got wiped out, and so it had been left to decay for a while? The lowest room price was 448 Yuan per night. I hadn't even really seen the state of the place at that stage and it still seemed very expensive. I managed to beat them down to 200 per night. And when I say “beat them down”, I mean I opened my notebook to check how many nights I could stay and the man immediately put the price down to 250 before I could even blink, and when I wrote down four nights total at that price he dropped it again to 200. My bargaining skills are AWESOME! I'm actually not sure what that was about; I think they may have just been desperate to have someone stay there! For meals I just ate when and what the staff were eating, and the total food-bill for the stay came to just 240 Yuan. And in case you were wondering, no, there was nobody there who spoke English even a smidgen.
After a bite to eat in my room (noodles I had brought with me) I went out to get my bearings. I wandered around the HQ, checked out the boardwalks between the various buildings and saw a group of rosy pipits, but there seemed to be no trails anywhere about. I was sure there should be from what I'd read and been told – I knew there should have been one running from behind the HQ up the hill for example – but I also rather suspected that if there had been any in the past they were now overgrown and hidden. I went to reception but everyone had disappeared. Instead I just took off up the road which was a good plan. First bird I saw, just about thirty seconds up the road, was a wallcreeper on a roadside rock-face! Brilliant. I had no idea their beaks were that long!! It was like it had a knitting needle stuck on its face! Above the wallcreeper in the trees on top of the bank was a mixed flock of birds containing long-tailed minivets, a canary flycatcher, golden-spectacled warblers, leaf warblers, green-backed tits, a nuthatch, and rufous-vented tits (yet another new tit!).
Just along the road a bit I found a side track which quickly lead to a little wooden bridge, almost covered in moss and obviously half-rotten. I could see the remains of a trail on the other side of the narrow river, so I gingerly picked my way across to see what I could find (the bridge turned out to be a bit sturdier than it looked). The trail led a few metres to an old campsite but the tent platforms were reduced to sad collapsed piles of rotting lumber. Later back in my room I checked a 2006 trip report (by John and Jemi Holmes) which I had stored on my laptop and found that this trail had once been the Riverside Eco-Trail. There was supposed to have been a boardwalk there then, so the next day I went back for another look. I found the remains of a set of wooden steps which I had missed before (because there were hardly any of them left) and at the top of the rise was where the Eco-Trail had been, but of the boardwalk all that remained were a few rotten planks half-buried in the leaf litter.
Back on the paved road (on the first day) I kept on walking up to the junction (only about half an hour from the HQ) which leads left to an area called Zhugencha 10km distant and right to one called Baixionggou 8km distant. On the way I saw a blue-fronted redstart which was a species I had wanted to see (it's really blue!!), a Sichuan treecreeper and a couple of grey-crested tits, and I also found a seven-foot-high wall running along the roadside. I couldn't imagine what it was for, maybe protection for if the river flooded, but a couple of bends further on I came across some old signboards explaining that it was (i.e. used to be) a compound for rehabilitating rescued giant pandas. As some of you may recall, back in the eighties there was a massive bamboo die-off after seeding and there were fears that the pandas would become extinct because of this. I remember news at the time of starving pandas coming down out of the forests into farmland and attacking sheep they were so desperate for food. This compound was built at that time (in 1986) to bring starving pandas back to health before releasing them back into the forest (Wanglang was the first – or one of the first – giant panda reserves, established back in 1956). Behind these old signboards was another little bridge across the river, the other end of the Riverside Eco-Trail, but this bridge was in even worse shape than the other one. Once I got to the Baixionggou-Zhugencha road junction I found a big map-board and while I was standing there trying to read the very faded name labels so I could compare them to the map in John and Jemi's report later, a flock of streak-throated fulvettas paid me a short visit. I didn't go in either direction from the junction because it was getting late in the day and I didn't know it was only half an hour back to the HQ (it had taken me a lot longer to get there because of all the bird-looking and side-tracking) so I headed back for dinner. Seven new species was a good start to the stay I think.
It doesn't get light here until 7am, and what I have been finding in the Chinese mountains is that the birds don't bother getting active until quite a bit later than that. I will head out at first light but there is usually very little activity for at least an hour or so. Breakfast was at 8am, so I went for a walk beforehand for the first hour of light. As expected there wasn't much around, but I did see a lone Elliot's laughing thrush (later in the day I saw a couple of groups of them), a great spotted woodpecker, a blue-fronted redstart (lots more later in the day) and some other bits and pieces. I also discovered I had been completely overlooking Hodgson's redstarts at Tangjiahe. I had got it in my head that the only redstart with white wing-patches was the Daurian redstart (probably from Russia where that was the case), so at Tangjiahe when I was seeing wing-patched redstarts I hadn't bothered paying them any attention. Pretty slack I know. The females had been confusing me though, because they look like female Daurians but without the wing-patch. Anyway, I've seen them here at Wanglang now, so they are on the trip (and life) list.
The other morning animal worth mentioning was a Swinhoe's striped squirrel which was a new one for me. Today should have been a good mammal day, with three other species seen, but all three had to remain unidentified. First of the three was what I swear was a serow on the hillside up behind the HQ after breakfast. I don't know what else it could have been but it was far away and the photos I quickly snapped proved only that it was a greyish blob! I decided to leave it off the list. The next mammals were both at the top of a mountain above the tree line. One was a tiny shrew which ran across the road (and it could have been any number of species). The other was a very small pika (I think) which dashed past me into cover: it was too large to be a vole and it had no tail so it wasn't a rat, so it could really only have been a pika, but it was a lot smaller than the Pallas' pikas I saw in Mongolia. I couldn't work out from the Mammals Of China book which species it may have been so that also remains “unknown”. Oh, also: giant panda droppings!!! I found one on the road in the bamboo zone and while nothing else really looks like panda poo I broke it apart with a stick to check and it was full of bamboo which confirmed it. From the smell it was really fresh too, so that was pretty exciting. There's not really any chance of actually seeing the animal itself though.
This first full day at Wanglang wasn't too birdy really. After breakfast I walked from the HQ to the junction (4km) and then on to the area called Baixionggou (another 8km). A lot of the walk was very very quiet as far as birds were concerned, but I did still see some nice new species. All the first birds seen were ones seen previously here or elsewhere (streak-throated fulvettas, red-billed blue magpies, rufous-vented tits, that sort of thing) but I saw quite a few males of the red-flanked bluetails; I had only seen females before and the males are gorgeous. After entering the bamboo zone (where the forest is understoried with great expanses of low-growing bamboo) and finding the panda poo, I kept my eyes peeled for any black and white bears that might happen to wander past. None did. I passed a big patch of pines with scrubby bamboo underneath and thought it looked like good pheasant habitat, and pheasants were something I wanted to see while here. Just as I left the pine area, a pair of blood pheasants suddenly jumped up from the side of the road ahead and into the undergrowth. One vanished immediately but the other paused just inside the bamboo and gave some alarm calls. It wasn't the best of views, but I could see it there through my binoculars. Blood pheasants are one of the species I most wanted to see at Wanglang, so that made my day! Then right above where the pheasants had been, a giant laughing thrush appeared in a tree – and it truly is a giant compared to other laughing thrushes!! Not much happened for quite a while after that until I got to the tree-line where I saw a male white-throated redstart (the day was filled with redstarts of all sorts) and a rufous-breasted accentor. On the way back past here I saw a maroon-backed accentor only about twenty metres from where I'd seen the other species. It was funny because those two birds are the only accentors I've ever seen except for hedge sparrows (and they're both way nicer-looking than hedge sparrows!!). The road went over the top of the pass through scrubby grassland – where I saw the shrew and pika – and then dipped down back to pine forest again where there were little buntings. At the very end of the road is a boardwalk. Can you guess what sort of state it is in? That's right: a dilapidated one! You can still walk it but there are broken and missing boards, some whole sections have collapsed from rot, and at one point you have to climb over a big fallen tree which looks to have been there for quite some time. On the walk back to the HQ (all downhill!) I saw a crimson-breasted woodpecker and a pair of grey-headed bullfinches. It took me ages to work out what the bullfinches were because the picture in the field guide looks not a lot like them. Fortunately they were busy feeding in a small tree so I got to spend a lot of time working through the ID points!!
I don't know where all the birds were the next day but it wasn't in front of my binoculars, that's for sure! The total for the day was only fourteen species! Because I had gone to Baixionggou the day before, this day I headed for Zhugencha. I hadn't walked far before some park staff came by in a car on their way to the same place so they gave me a lift. This saved me a long walk uphill so that was good. They dropped me off about 8km from the junction at Dacaoping, which is where there is a looped boardwalk over a marshy meadow. The surrounding mountains were blanketed in new snow – I had wondered why it had been so cold the night before! Good thing I'd brought several layers and gloves with me this morning. The boardwalk here is in a better state than the one at Baixionggou but it is still in pretty bad shape. Apart for a most excellent hoopoe, the only birds around there were little buntings and Daurian redstarts. On the walk to the end of the road 2km further on I found a little bird wave in the pine forest. Wanglang Reserve doesn't seem to go in for bird waves in the same way as Tangjiahe. Here they are more “bird groups”, just a random bunch of birds hanging out in a couple of trees for a bit, and then all dispersing. But this one was a real bird wave, although only a few species were present – leaf warblers, rufous-vented and grey-crested tits, a blue-fronted redstart, and streak-throated fulvettas. I've given up even trying to identify the leaf warblers in China, but I still have a look when I see them, just in case. And in this case it was just as well, because one of the little birds flittering about in the trees was actually a goldcrest! And then a little brown bird popped up from the forest floor and I got to see my first common wren (that's a “winter wren” to Americans). I was pretty excited about these two new birds, which probably sounds odd to Europeans. Later (on the way back down the road) I also saw a chestnut-headed tesia.
The views along the Zhugencha road are much more impressive than along the other road. The forest is mostly pines, but where-ever there's a break in the trees there are huge mountains soaring up into the sky. I kept stopping to scan the slopes whenever I could, looking for blue eared pheasants or gorals, but I saw nothing. At the end of the road, at an altitude of 3000 metres, there is a gravel trail called the Baisha Valley Eco-Trail. This trail, surprisingly, is in very good condition apart for a tree fall here and there. It was very wet though because the pine trees were covered in snow, which meant a continuous dripping as if it was raining. I was so intent on watching the ground in the forest for pheasants that I neglected to also check the trees, and I completely missed what could only have been a Chinese grouse which exploded out of the top of a little tree just above head-height directly over the path, and vanished into the pines. Although I kept my eyes open after that the only other birds I saw were a three-toed woodpecker and a few bluetails and redstarts. I stopped for lunch back at the start of the trail, where the paved road had ended. As I sat there on a rock surrounded by the summits of snow-covered mountains, my breath fogging in the air, blue eared pheasants calling somewhere nearby, I thought “This is what I live for. I'm sitting on top of a mountain in the middle of China. How cool is that?!”
For my last day at Wanglang I decided on doing the Baixionggou road again because it had been more birdy than the Zhugencha road. I spent so long trying to get photos of a wallcreeper on a roadside bank that I didn't even reach the junction until about 10.30am. Before even reaching the junction though, right at the old Panda Rescue Centre buildings, I noticed a couple of birds flying into a tall pine across the valley. I got my binoculars on the tree and saw that it was full of grandalas, a flock of about fifty of them, males and females. With the naked eye they were invisible against the dark tree but through the binoculars it was as if the tree was covered in big purple fruits. I hadn't expected to see grandalas at all this low down, but I checked the field guide and in winter they descend as low as 2000 metres. It also said they wheel about in flocks like starlings, which is exactly what these ones were doing from time to time. Later I saw an even bigger flock, probably a couple of hundred birds, which were flying back and forth across the road. On the way back down in the late afternoon I didn't see a single one.
The bulk of the individual birds seen today (grandalas excepted) were various species of redstarts: they are exceptionally common here at the moment! Other notables were a giant laughing thrush hopping about on the ground looking for food, like some sort of hybrid kangaroo-pheasant; a yellowish-bellied bush warbler which poked out of the bamboo for a look at me; several small female ducks which I guess were southwards-migrating teal (or maybe garganeys? I think teal are probably more likely) which would shoot up from beside the river and fly off downstream – these were really unexpected because the river is a very fast-flowing rocky mountain river, and the ducks always came up so suddenly that I never got a good look at them other than to say they looked like teal; and I finally found a leaf warbler which was alone, in good light, and sitting still long enough for me to get a proper look at it and decide that it was in fact a Chinese leaf warbler. I dare say most of the leaf warblers up here are Chinese leaf warblers, but I like to be certain of these things. First mammal of the day was a Swinhoe's striped squirrel with tufty white ears. So cute.
Where the road came up out of the trees I saw the rufous-breasted accentor still in the same patch of shrubs as last time. The grassy areas up there were alive with flocks of little buntings, russet sparrows, and pipits. I was checking all the slopes for blue eared pheasants but again they remained unseen. Instead I saw a trio of goaty-looking animals with little pointy horns on top of a ridge. Too small for serow, I thought they could only be goral but they didn't seem quite right somehow, not short-bodied enough. All of them were silhouetted against the sky so I couldn't really make out any details, but there's only a limited selection of ungulates to choose from in the Chinese mountains. I took a whole bunch of photos and zoomed in on them but that didn't help much. After a while one moved below the sky-line and the photos showed it to have black and white leg markings, which immediately said “bharal” to me (aka blue sheep) but I thought that there couldn't be bharal here so it must be an artifact of the zoomed-in picture making the leg markings of a goral look like those of a bharal. This was one of those frustrating sightings where you can see the animals but can't quite get the details for an ID, and you think you know what they are but aren't really happy with it because they don't look “right”. After about half an hour of staring down at me, the animals moved over the ridge and were gone. I turned my attention to trying to find the bird which had been continuously calling from the bushes behind me. A little while later I had another quick scan of the ridge to see if the “gorals” had returned, and saw another three animals moving up the slope towards where the others had been. Because these ones were closer and not silhouetted I immediately saw that they were in fact bharal after all! The huge horns on the male was a bit of a giveaway as well!! If one of the original three had had those horns there wouldn't have been any confusion! So I never saw any blue eared pheasants, but I did see blue sheep which is a good trade I reckon.
Another bit of luck was that this last day at Wanglang was a Saturday. Being a weekend it meant that a number of people had arrived to visit the reserve, and would be going back out the next day (Sunday). So I managed to score a lift out of the reserve on Sunday morning instead of having to pay the 400 Yuan for the taxi. At the bus station in Pingwu I discovered that there is no direct bus from there to Songpan as I had thought. Instead I had to take a bus to the town of Jiuzhaigou and get another bus from there to Songpan the next morning (which will be tomorrow). And what I also discovered, when on that bus, was that it literally goes right past the turn-off to the Wanglang Reserve! The things you learn when it is too late to be of use!! For anyone else, the bus from Pingwu to Jiuzhaigou costs 55 Yuan and if your skills in Chinese are adequate or you can at least draw a rough map with Chinese names on it, you could be dropped off at the turn-off. There are some little shops there and a petrol station I think, so it wouldn't be hard to pick up a free ride into the reserve or, at worst, get a taxi arranged from that spot which would be a lot cheaper than from Pingwu. Theoretically you could get from Pingwu to Wanglang for under 50 Yuan.
The cliff-hugging road to Jiuzhaigou kept going up and up and up, winding into the mountains. Snow started to appear in patches and soon the entire landscape was nothing but snow and pines. It was like a bus ride through Narnia. I don't know how high the pass is, but it must be really high! In Jiuzhaigou (no snow, but quite a bit of rain) I got a room for 120 Yuan in the hotel above the bus station which is handy. It also has Wifi which is even handier! My bus to Songpan is at 6.40am tomorrow. Hopefully next stop Ruoergai.....
