The road to Bing Hu
While most trekkers try hard to get out early in the morning in order to maximize their days, we were kind of lazy trekkers... we'll say our excuse was our honeymoon, but it is entirely possible that we are just extremely lazy trekkers in general. Nevertheless, we finally got our gears in motion, probably close to noon on our second day in Meili Xueshan National Park. We asked around to the locals how long it would take to get up to BingHu 冰湖 (the glacial lake or literally 'Ice Lake'), and we were told 2-3 hours there and back. That sounded quite reasonable to us, so we headed out of town towards the lake.
We got a little lost once or twice, but eventually we found ourselves on the correct path to the lake. It was rainy, and we were very thankful that we had both bought ourselves quick drying hiking pants before coming on this trip...
After two hours of hiking up (and no sign of any other hikers) we started to wonder if we really were on the right path... Finally, we met one person coming down and they informed us that we should expect to arrive within an hour to 1.5 hours. Hm... not quite 2-3 hours there and back as we were originally told....
Finally, after three hours of hiking we were finally within sight of the end. We could see the glacier now, and we just had to climb up one more small peak to reach it...
Utterly exhausted we finally made it to the top of the peak and looked down at the glacial lake. While it was a lot smaller than I expected, I would recognize that blue color anywhere from the last time I was near a glacier, way back in 2006 in Patagonia. If only I had been blogging at that time...
Some people ventured down to the water's edge for photos, but we were exhausted, it was getting late and we still had to go all the way back the way we came.
There's not enough houses up here to call it a village, but there seem to be a few people who live way up here in the mountains... and their cows roam freely around the open grassy area near the river flowing from the glacial lake...
Walking back we found a slightly different route that was a little more scenic. Here is another Tibetan prayer wheel, this time it spins with the flow of the water, I guess it's like putting the mantra inside on repeat keeping the world saved from evil... or something like that.
Finally we got back to YuPeng for another night in our guesthouse. We certainly slept well that night... We also learned our lesson. When Tibetans tell you how long it will take to walk/hike from one place to another... double the the time they tell you....
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