Accommodation, Food and Other Tourist Facilities

Garze is still a less-developed place with lots of modern facilities not yet available at present. The accommodations are often with limited options, some without elevator and some without comfortable rooms.

At bigger towns such as Kangding, Daocheng or more popular tourist places such as Yading and Hailuogou the accommodations are good and decent. But at smaller and further places such as Tagong, Derge, Yarchen Gar, etc the accommodations are often more basic with usually unreliable hot water supply, basic toilet and poor heating as authenticity often goes with less comfortabiliy.

Traveling in this part of China, food is also with limited options. The most common food available is Chinese food with Sichuan style, and noodles/dumplings are also available. At many of these places in western Sichuan there are no 24-hour food stores. Big food shopping places are rare but small stores are available at every town.

At certain places you will not have internet coverage and even phone reception while traveling in western Sichuan because some of these places are just simply too far from anywhere. It is normally that you spend half an hour to just load a picture on your phone when internet is not good. However most of the accommodations in Garze will have free Wifi provided. But at some places the Wifi is not reliable. The biggest town in western Sichuan has no more than 50,000 people in total. Each of the towns has a hospital or a clinic that simple ailments can be taken care of but any serious ailments you will probably need to be transferred to Chengdu.

Public toilet has improved a lot but not at this part of China. You will often encounter the very basic public toilet while on the road. And lots of these public toilet charge 1 or 2 yuan for using it. Although using toilet in the nature is an option as there are not many people everywhere.