Look for the bear necessities, and a stupidly big Buddha!

Awake at 4:30am, we were nearing our destination of Chengdu and I had asked the train conductor to wake us when we were close so we didn’t miss the stop. The staff carriage didn’t have any lights or notices like the other ones so we had no idea where we were. So at 4:30am the wake up call and the ticket inspection started. Followed by the locals slurping noodles and coughing. 1 hour later we arrived, so much for “just before we arrive” yeah right.

Tom (guy I met in Xi’an train station when the train was cancelled) didn’t have any accommodation booked so tagged along to my hostel and checked in there as well. There was no point in going to sleep as the sun was rising, so we headed to the local 24-hour shop and got a cup of noodles for breakfast.

Not wanting to waste a day in Chengdu we found the location of the local Panda research center and hopped in a cab to get there.

The center was about 20 min out of town by Cab and is a Panda breading and research park. The park was quite large almost like a zoo, and had the full adults, sub-adults and cubs all separated in different pens. They also had red panda’s.

We arrived and so did the tour groups, as we walked up the path there was a American filming the bamboo, his comment while recording the bamboo was quite funny at the time. “There sure is a lot of bamboo here, apparently that’s what the panda’s enjoy eating” he said. It was a bit obvious that there would be a lot of bamboo in a panda park, hmm.

We tried to move away from the tourist groups and they are way to noisy, so we headed to the back of the park. Were we came across some cute little Red Panda’s. They didn’t seem to matter at all that there were people around and were going about their business and playing. After a while you could notice that the Red Panda’s seemed to use the same paths, between trees and areas. They didn’t just cross any sections. They had used the same path so much it had worn away the grass.

From the Red panda’s we double backed as now the tourists “should” have moved on, but no… Everyone was pushing for the prime spot to take photos of the sub-adult panda’s playing around in the morning. We stopped and spent a good 15 min watching them before moving to the nursery and the Adult panda’s.

It was really special to see them play and eat, at times the panda’s almost looked human in the way they picked up things and played. In the nursery the nurse even played with the infant as if it was a human child and it smiled as well.

We left the panda park at about 10:30 when they all seemed to fall asleep after the mornings breakfast.

We took a cab back to the city, which proved to be a mistake, the traffic had banked up in the city and we were going nowhere fast. We hopped out of the cab in the middle of nowhere and with our keen sense of direction we headed in the direction we thought was correct. Stopping off to grab a bite to eat at a small shop.

Attention!

I tried to confirm the directions with a few school kids who I thought were old enough to have learned English but they just broke down as soon as I said hello and giggled, I was getting nothing out of them. We tried the next group of adults and confirmed the location and ended up back at the hostel. On the way walking past an old Chinese rocket launcher jeep.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing; the train ride was still long and had not had a lot of sleep the night before. We did take a walk to the city centre to see a Statue of Mao but it was being renovated so was not that interesting.

The next day we headed to Leshan, the location of the worlds largest Buddha.

The bus was more of a mini-van but it was cheap and fast. The Buddha was located on the edge of a river, a monk created it over 1000 years ago because he thought that if he could create a grand Buddha statue it would calm the raging waters around the river and stop boat accidents and people dying. 700 odd people died creating the Buddha but in the process the rock taken from the carving was deposited in the river and changed the flow of water, ultimately calming the waters and making it safe to sail.

The Buddha is 7 stories high, his ears are 7 meters high alone and you can fit 160 people standing on 1 foot, a truly massive carving.

We walked around in the park for about 1 hour before arriving at the Buddha passing various temples and religious structures along the way, also completing a cliff top walk along the river because we took a wrong turn. But eventually we found the monstrous structure and lined up, there was a 1-hour queue to start the decent. Once on the cliff walk down the sight was amazing. The walls also have smaller carvings and statues in the rock face.

At the bottom you could get an idea of how large it was, his foot was higher than me (6 foot something) and I could not fit him into 1 camera shot from the bottom. Thankfully the queue seemed to thin out the number of people at the bottom as well, which made it a nice place to take in the sights rather than being crowded up the top.

On the way back out of the park we stopped off at a waterfall run we had passed on the way in, the idea was to run under the waterfall an it would heal you somehow. So it was a nice hot day so sure why not. Off with the shoes and socks and away we went. The Chinese people watching found it most amusing and Tom became a celebrity to a bunch of Chinese girls that arrived and watched when he ran.

The bus ride back was long and like all my bus rides they seem to drop me off nowhere near where we got picked up.

Not to sure about this meal.

So once again we tried to work out where we were in Chengdu. While walking around we passed what could only be called a warehouse that was a restaurant.  One of Chengdu’s special dishes was the “Hotpot”.

The “Hotpot” is basically a big soup broth that you put various meats and vegies in and it cooks then you pick it out and you eat it, and then add more. The broth has various spices and you can get bowls with various flavors, hot or mild.

A bit of everything.

The meats and vegies seemed to be on an old bookshelf in the middle of this warehouse and you could take as much or as little as you liked.

They had Chicken, Pork, Beef, Fish heads, Squid, Dog, Spam of various types, Chicken Feet, Various Stomachs.  Downed with a few beers it was a decent meal, and the place was busy so I knew it was “semi, should be, what could possibly go wrong, safe”.

Finishing our meal we were back on the hunt for the hostel and it was now dark so we opted for the easy way out… cab it. It turned out we were just around the corner, 2 min walk. Oh well…

It turned out that Tom and I had the same travel plans or route at least till Yichang, I was heading to Chongqing to look for a boat trip down the Yangzte River and Tom had plans to catch a ferry down the river. So once again we headed to the next town as a group, and would work out the rest when we got there. It was only a short train ride this time, 5 hours or so.