Chengdu Day 1

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Our boat docked at Chongqing (a city of over 80 million people) this morning - we said goodbye to the Yangtze River and said hello to a 5 hour bus ride to Chengdu (home of the Giant Panda). The long bus rides are a little boring but the scenery was interesting. We arrived in Chengdu and checked into our hotel - the rooms were lovely but very noisy as they overlooked a busy street (as we found out in the early hours of the morning). Chengdu is in the Schezwan province and we were looking forward to trying the spicier food.

The next day turned out to be a very long and busy one. We drove about 2 hours to the town of Leshan to go and see the Giant Budda. The only thing was that when we arrived at around 11.00 it was still extremely foggy on the water. This meant tat no ferries were leaving at that stage. Our guides decided on an early lunch and when we finally made our way back to the ferry dock, we were given the OK to go. The short ferry ride to the other side of the river was uneventful, although the current was extremely strong in one section (we were to find out how strong on the way back). The Giant Budda is amazing - standing over 70 metres tall, carved into the limestone rocks it is truly an engineering marvel. It was built over 1200 years ago by Monks who thought that building the huge budda in this location would help calm the waters below where the three rivers met. It took over 90 years to complete. The best vantage point was from the boat, although we saw many tourists braving the hundreds of steps down to the feet of the budda. It took us over 10 minutes to get through the junction point of the rivers where the current was the strongest. It looked like we were going no where for a while but the captain of the ship had obviously done this trip many times before.

In the afternoon we went to the Little Yellow Dragon village - a preserved village (approx 600 years old) showcasing the beautiful architecture of the era. It was a lovely place although a little commercialised with all of the shops and market stalls.

We had been warned to watch out for traffic in every city but on the way back to Chengdu we were caught in one of the famous traffic jams. It went on for kilometers and took close to an hour to get through - the cause: traffic police directing the traffic on the freeway (more of a hindrance than a help obviously.) The traffic jam meant that we were late for dinner and even later for the Chinese variety show that we were booked in for - luckily they postponed the show for 15 minutes to allow us the time to get there. While the show wasn't the best we had seen, the face changers were amazing (we still don't know how they change their masks so quickly)

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