Monday 31st August. Tour Day 9: Chongqing
Our bus from Old Fengdu to Chongqing arrived in the early evening. Chongqing was supposedly good for nightlife but we wouldn’t be there long enough to find out. We booked into a very funky/weird hotel – in the lobby, there were illuminated glass panels in the floor with fruit in them(!), and in the rooms, there was a glass partition between the bathroom and bedroom! Fortunately, I had my own room for the night. The night time view of the city was very picturesque, with the waterfront buildings and main bridge lit up like a Christmas tree. We had an evening group meal of a local speciality – Szechuan hotpot. There were two pots of boiling sauce in the middle of a table – one of mild sauce, the other red because it was full of red chillies. All the meat and veg was on dishes and was raw - you dunked what you want in the sauces and it floated when it was cooked. The food was hot, very, very hot! My mouth was on fire and my tongue had gone numb! You got a dish of sesame oil which you were supposed to dunk your cooked food in to remove some of the heat but it made the food a bit oily so I didn't really use it. We had a bus journey tomorrow and I could be in trouble!
Tuesday 1st September. Tour Day 10. Around Chengdu
The first thing I did in the morning was to take a few "elephant" pills to avoid any after-effects of last night’s hotpot since we had a longish public bus journey to Chengdu, about 5 hours. Chengdu was another smoggy, polluted industrial city in which, during the summer, temperatures got up to 40°C and the sun was rarely seen. When we got there, the rest of the day was free so it was out with the guidebook to decide what to see. One place of interest in my book was Qingyang Gong (the Green Ram Temple) so a few of us (me, Stephen, Robin and Paul) decided to pay a visit. The place was a delight, with about 20/30 halls and temples with huge figures and deities in glass cases, beautiful paintings on the walls, magnificent ornate pagodas, stone sculptures, a really beautiful place. We only had an hour there before the place closed and could have spent two very easily. Also, you couldn’t take photos in the halls / temples out of respect but it would have been nice to taken some.
We met Travis and Krystle when leaving the Temple and headed to Baihuatan Park just down the road, it was an oasis of tranquility in hectic Chengdu. Then it was onto Qintai Road, which had some nice old-style shops and Chunxi Road, a pedestrianised shopping street with nothing out of the ordinary worth seeing. We had a meal at an all-you-can-eat pizza house - apart from pizza, there were meats and veg you could have, and you could drink all you wanted too. There was an alcohol tap too but it was out of order, they must have seen us coming! My stomach was starting to feel dodgy by now from the previous night's hotpot as my pills began to wear off and I had to make a few visits to the toilet during the night!
Weds 2nd Sept. Tour Day 11. Leshan Giant Buddha
We visited the Giant Buddha at Leshan today, the world’s biggest Buddha at 230ft! It was carved into the red, sandstone cliff-face ~1,300 years ago at the confluence of three rivers. The construction was led by a monk named Haitong who decided to protect passing ships in the turbulent waters below by creating a protective icon in the cliffs. The massive construction resulted in so much stone being deposited into the river below that the currents were indeed altered by the statue and the waters made safe. We descended to the toes of the Buddha on the narrow, very steep “Nine Turns Staircase” and then took another staircase back up – a lot of steps and bloody knackering! The statue was very impressive but you needed to view it offshore from a boat to get a good snap of it. There were also many other temples on the site and on an adjacent hill linked by a bridge but we only had time to visit one.
Afterwards, a few of us visited a pizza joint near the hotel called Highfly which one the guidebooks said was quite good. They did a great value kid’s meal – a 6” pizza, chips and coke for a few quid, what a bargain!
In the evening, we went to see the Sichuan Culture Show, a series of short excerpts of local arts, music, culture, etc. This turned out to be one of the highlights of my trip so far, some of the acts were astounding - an incredibly dexterous hand shadow show, skilful normal puppetry, a mask changing show which you couldn't figure out how they did it, and some beautiful music. It really was excellent, I wished I could have got a DVD of the show.
Thurs 3rd Sept. Tour Day 12: Chengdu Panda Centre
Today was panda day and everyone was eagerly looking forward to it! We visited the Panda Research and Breeding Centre. There are only 1,200 pandas left in the wild due to loss of habitat and lack of reproduction (they only have a brief mating window and they are very choosy about who they mate with). The Centre bred pandas and hoped to release them back into the wild, although loss of habitat was a problem as each panda needed a certain territory to live. There were separate enclosures for different ages of panda, plus incubators for the babies (when they are born, they are pink and furless, said to be like baby rats). I wasn't the only one whose camera was working overtime during the visit. Also, for 400 Yuan (which went up to 500 while we were waiting, ~US$80) we could have a photo with an young adult panda, which was a must do as this was probably the only place in the world where you could do this. You could also have a photo with a baby panda on your lap for about 1,000 Yuan but I'd already paid for the former so didn't go for this too. There were also red pandas at the centre, offering much better photo opportunities than with those I’ve seen in zoos (they always tended to be asleep in a tree), a swan lake (although I couldn’t find any swans), and a few peacocks.
After this, some of us visited Wenshu Temple, it was nothing special but pleasant enough. It had a recommended vegetarian restaurant which was why some of our group wanted to go. This was one of the weirdest restaurants I’d ever been to – it was a veggie restaurant but 75% of the dishes were named after meat, these came with a veggie substitute which was supposed to taste like the meat in question, with varying degrees of success or otherwise as we found out. Some of names were really strange (or maybe not considering some of the tings the Chinese ate) – "sheep’s testicles", "monkey brains", "intestines", "chicken giblets", "tripe". How would any vegetarian know what these tasted like, and more to the point, why would even a meat-eater want to eat them?! I ordered a satay “beef” casserole, which when I tasted it seemed to have meat in it, bits of luncheon meat like sausage or ham, very strange. There was a procession through the temple which made the visit slightly more interesting, although we weren’t allowed to leave the temple until the procession passed. I noticed one westerner in the procession chanting away, obviously he’d realised the only way to manage to get out of the temple! There were also some scenic ponds with small tortoises in them.
We then visited Broad and Narrow Lanes, a touristy street with establishments designed in an old-world Chinese style. We had a few drinks sitting at a table outside a bar, where we got a load of opportunistic snappers trying to take some sly snaps of us while we weren't looking and disapproving looks from older passers-by, presumably for drinking in public! It was then onto JinLi Street, another tourist street but very pretty, again with lovely old-world style shop fronts.
We had an overnight train to Xi’an tonight so I grabbed another kiddies pizza meal from Highfly again.
Giant Pandas and Giant Buddhas!
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Chengdu, Sichuan, China
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