At the admission of the site as a WHS in 1992, there was a large concern for its conservation: "..hundreds of thousands of visitors pour all over the reserve uncontrolled, picking flowers, throwing stones in the lakes, singing and camping and even lighting fireworks and rockets to brighten up the night air". In 2007 things have improved a lot: staying overnight in the park is forbidden, visitors have to stick to a fixed walking trail or use the park buses and there are sweepers everywhere to clean up after the tourists.

On my first day at the park, I started out at 8 a.m. When I left the hotel I could already hear the chatter of the hundreds of other tourists wanting to get into the park. Fortunately, there were no queues for buying a ticket though (the price of the ticket is a rather steep 220 Yuan, plus 90 Yuan to use the park buses: over 30 EUR in total). I then took one of those buses to Mirror Lake, a little over halfway into the park. There I started to walk back to the exit (14 km). I followed the well-signposted plank trail. Although the views are sometimes better from the road, I liked walking here. There weren't many people around and it was quiet enough to observe colourful little birds eating the berries that are plentiful here. The turquoise water of the lakes contrasts splendidly with the red and yellow autumn leaves.

On the second day, I could reuse the entrance ticket but had to buy a new bus ticket. The weather was the same as the day before: cloudy and cool, but dry. This time I let one of the buses take me all the way up to The Virgin Forests, about 32 km from the entrance. From there I walked down in about 3 hours via Grass Lake, Swan Lake, and Arrow Bamboo Lake to Panda Lake. This is more a kind of mountain trail than the path I followed on the first day. A high variety of trees dominates the view here. It ended at pretty Panda Lake, the bluest of all lakes. One can spend two days easily here at Jiuzhaigou as the park is large and there are many points of interest. I didn't even see half of them.