Kangding & Mugecuo 3-Day Tour: The Love Song Town

Overview

• ✓The Erlang Mountain tunnel and the old hairpin road into the Tibetan borderlands
• ✓Mugecuo — the Wild Man Lake — at 3,700 m, with its hot springs and red-stone beach
• ✓The Zheduo pass at 4,298 m, the historic gateway to the Tibetan plateau
• ✓Kangding town at the confluence of two rivers, stacked up the valley walls
• ✓The Paoma (Runaway Horse) Mountain of the Kangding Love Song
• ✓Luding bridge, the captured iron-chain crossing of the Long March

1. 1 Chengdu to Kangding over the Erlang Mountain

   🍽Lunch, Dinner 🏨Kangding, 4-star hotel (2,560 m)

   07:30 - Departure: Southwest from Chengdu on the expressway, dropping through the Ya'an region — Sichuan's rainiest corner, and the start of the tea country that supplied the tea-horse road.

   11:00 - Erlang Mountain: The road tunnels beneath the mountain now, in just over four kilometres, but the old hairpin route is still there and worth stopping at to see what crossing this range used to involve. The tunnel changed the journey from a full day's ordeal to a few minutes.

   12:30 - Lunch in Luding.

   14:00 - Luding bridge: An iron-chain suspension bridge across the Dadu River, built in 1706, whose capture in 1935 during the Long March became one of the foundational stories of the Chinese revolution. Twenty-two men crossed the repaired bridge under fire. You can walk out on it, and the river beneath is fast enough to make the point.

   16:30 - Kangding: Arrival at 2,560 metres. The town is squeezed between two steep walls, with the Zheduo river roaring through the middle of it, and the buildings climb the slopes on both sides. It is Tibetan, Chinese and Yi at once, and it feels like the border town it has always been.

   18:00 - Dinner: Tibetan cooking — yak, butter tea, and the barley bread of the region.

   Evening: A walk along the river, which is floodlit and deafeningly loud, and the centre of the town's evening life.

2. 2 Mugecuo Scenic Area (Full Day)

   🍽Breakfast, Lunch 🏨Kangding, 4-star hotel (2,560 m)

   08:00 - Departure: A 40-minute drive north out of Kangding to the Mugecuo scenic area, which covers 350 square kilometres of the Zheduo Mountain range.

   09:00 - Mugecuo lake: Called the Wild Man Lake, at 3,700 metres, a glacial lake around four kilometres long with the snow peaks of the Zheduo range behind it. The park shuttle takes you up to the shore, and from there a boat crosses to the far side. The water is a deep green-blue, and on calm mornings the peaks hold a perfect reflection.

   11:00 - The red-stone beach: Downstream from the lake, a stretch of riverbed where the rocks are coated in an orange-red alga that only grows in clean, cold water at this altitude. It looks like something spilled, and it is entirely natural.

   12:30 - Lunch: Inside the park, at the visitor area.

   14:00 - Rhododendron valley: A boardwalk runs down through a valley that in May and June is filled with flowering rhododendron — the area holds dozens of species and the bloom is the reason many people time their visit for spring.

   15:30 - Hot springs: The park's medicinal springs, where you can soak your feet in water that comes out of the ground at over 40°C while the air around you is close to freezing. There is a full bathing area as well, at extra cost.

   17:00 - Return to Kangding.

   Evening: Free. The town's night market along the river sells skewers, dried beef and the local butter tea, and the square in the centre fills with people dancing after dark.

3. 3 Paoma Mountain, the Zheduo Pass & Return

   🍽Breakfast, Lunch 🏨Not included

   08:00 - Paoma Mountain: The Runaway Horse Mountain above the town, and the subject of the Kangding Love Song — a folk melody collected here in the 1940s that became one of the best-known Chinese songs of the century. A cable car climbs to the upper meadow, from which you can see the whole town in its valley and, on clear days, the snow peaks of the Minya Konka range to the south. Horse riding is available on the meadow.

   10:30 - Departure: South and west out of Kangding, climbing toward the Zheduo pass.

   11:30 - Zheduo pass: At 4,298 metres, the historic boundary between the Chinese and Tibetan worlds, and still marked as such with a gate and a long line of prayer flags. The road beyond it drops onto the plateau proper and continues toward Litang and Yading. Standing here, you are looking at the landscape that the rest of the province's Tibetan regions open into.

   12:30 - Lunch: On the road back down, or a packed lunch at the pass if the weather is clear.

   14:00 - Return: The drive back to Chengdu, around five hours.

   19:00 - Chengdu: Arrival and drop-off at your hotel, the airport, or the railway station.

   Practical note: The Zheduo pass is at 4,298 metres and it is cold and windy at any time of year. If the road beyond the pass is closed or the weather is bad, we substitute a morning in Kangding's Tibetan quarter and the Anjue monastery instead.

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