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Published: November 18th 2005
Chengdu - Yangshou 15.11.05
Whilst in Chengdu we took the opportunity to do a little shopping and also to catch up on our eating, which had been a little erratic whilst on the road! But the main reason for visiting was to see the pandas and we spent a pleasant morning walking around the breeding centre watching them eat, sleep and play.
Pandas are really lovely, but they are not the most exciting of creatures. They lie around most of the day eating and then they need to sleep because they can only process about 2% of the food they consume! It was cool to see them though and there was a really cute little 2 month old baby, although we couldn't take any photos of him unfortunately.
Anyway, I have now added a panda to the list of things I want to bring home with me!
Our other treat in Chengdu was to see some traditional Sichuanese opera. It turned out to be a bit of a variety show with opera, slapstick, 'changing faces' (a Sichuanese traditional artform of miraculously changing masks right in front of your face without you seeing them do it! 😉 ),
acrobatics etc. The highlight for me was the dramatic solo on an erhu (traditional Chinese instrument), although some of the acrobatic dancing/fighting was also very impressive!
On leaving Chengdu it was cold, wet and misty. Our next destination to properly visit was Yangshou but we had quite a few sights and places to take in on the way. Our first stop was a (very) quick trip to see the worlds biggest budda. This is a 170m budda carved into a cliff face and apparently the big toe is large enough to picnic on! We didn't try. It's worth a look although I'm glad we didn't set aside a whole day for it particularly as the rain would have made the walk around it pretty miserable. We had a bit of a hectic day and finally got there just in time to take a speedboat trip around the front, quickly take some pictures and then dash off for the last bus to Chongqing (and thank god we got it as Leshan, where the big budda is, looked like a horrible dingy place and I wouldn't have fancied staying there).
Afetr a day in Chongqing - surely the smoggiest city
in the world!?! Our next journey was to see the 3 gorges. With time rapidly running out before we have to leave China in order to use our second entry (thanks to the mix up with the visas in Vietnam) we decided on the 11 hour bus/hydrofoil combination to Yichang over the 3 day ferry. We'd heard good things about the 3 gorges however I don't think that they were set off to their best against the grey drizzly weather! I'm glad we saw them but I'm also glad we didn't spend 3 days on a ferry in the rain, though you get more of a chance to explore the other sights if you take the ferry.
We had another piece of luck with the transport when we arrived in Yichang where we managed to get the last sleeper bus to Changsha with about 7 minutes to spare! We even managed to get on a train almost straight away to Zhozhuo but unfortunately that's where our good fortune stopped as we arrived at 10.00am and all the trains to Guilin were full until 20.18... Boo. We are now killing time in Zhozhuo (hence all the web updating!!) but we
shall still have a couple of days in Yangshou (a short bus journey from Guilin) to relax in the famed beautiful scenery.
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