Gongga Shan, Sichuan, China

I'll post this here for anybody who is interested.

Gongga Shan mountain in western Sichuan is 7500m high and is the
easternmost 7000+ m mountain in Asia. The glacier is accessible and
starts at 2800m.

The access point to Gongga Shan is the Moxi village. This can be reached
by car from Chengdu in five hours (it's 300km) if you drive fast. A bus
most likely will take much longer than that. The road from Chengdu to
Moxi is not too scenic (there are some narrow gorges, but that's it).

A faster way to access Moxi is through the new airport in Kangding:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_6965722.htm

Kangding is less than 100km from Moxi.

My driver told me that his car (Volkswagen Bora) could not drive to the
glacier, which means that either the road is bad and you need a 4WD
vehicle or they only allow the bus. There is a bus which leaves in the
morning from Moxi, brings people to the glacier (from which there should
be a nice view of Gongga Shan) and is back in Moxi at 4:30pm.

Moxi itself is kind of interesting. It's a minority village from what I
understood. There are some old houses, but not much else (the rest is
modern buildings). Surprisingly there is a catholic church there.

In Moxi and in the entire area I was unable to make international phone
calls with my GSM phone using a prepaid China mobile card. Every time I
would get the message that the number dialled does not exist. Making and
receiving national calls to China was no problem instead.
The phone would miracolously start working again after, on the way back
to Chengdu, we passed that long 4km tunnel (which is guarded by the
military).
My guess is that it could be that the area around Moxi is for some
reason a restricted area where the local authorities do not allow
international calls from mobile phones.

By the way, the weather was bad in Moxi when I was there (at the end of
September) and I read in the Internet that it rains 200 days a year in
the area. So if you want to visit the glacier and find good weather you
should either check the weather forecasts or plan some extra days in
Moxi.

I stayed in the Glacier hotel which identifies itself as a four star
hotel (and the room was nice indeed), but they only had hot water for
one hour in the evening and one hour in the morning (7-8am). The room
cost 260 RMB. The hotel has a good restaurant, but the menu is entirely
in Chinese and nobody in the hotel and restaurant speaks English, so
some basic knowledge of Chinese is necessary otherwise you can't order
meals.
--

Alfred Molon
http://www.molon.de - Photos of Asia, Africa and Europe