Chengdu - China

We arrived in Chengdu for two nights, at 5.30am with no accommodation prearranged. We went straight to Sams Guesthouse and managed to get a room (which wouldn't be available until 6.40am or cleaned by 8am), so we decided to book ourselves onto a 7.30am tour to go and see the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base. It was really good. Sichuan Province is the home of the Pandas - 'celebrated creatures'. There are estimated to be 500 to 1000 left in the wild and most live in the North West. The Research Base is 10 kms from the city where they have a dozen pandas. Unfortunately we didn't get to see any baby pandas. We took another trip to Le Shan to see the big Buddha. A Giant Buddha that overlooks the Minjiang River. It claims to be the world's largest Buddha statue, standing at 71m high and is carved out of rocks. Legend has it that the swift currents created the clash of the two rivers and sunk innumerable ships. In AD713 a monk commenced building the Buddha in hope to prevent further disasters. Construction finished 90 years later and waste rocks from the carving succeeded in calming the waters. The head is 15m high, the nose 6m long, and the index finger 8m long. You can climb down the side of the Buddha. It has been cleaned, but there are pictures that show trees had been growing on it. Here the Sichuan food is spicy hot. It also has this bizarre pepper flower that makes your mouth numb, like you've had an injection - it's not that pleasant! I decided to have a Chinese massage. Well by the end of it I had had scraping, cupping, and bruises all over my shoulders and down either side of my spine that lasted for 2 weeks. At some stage you may be lucky enough to have the photo evidence posted on this site. It looks more terrible than it actually felt. Our next destination was to get ourselves to Dali. We paid less commission for our train tickets, which may have not been a good idea because when we got off the overnight train, we had to take a taxi to the bus station and then take an extremely long bumpy ride! There must have been a more direct route! It was a 10 hr bus ride to Dali. The first city on the journey wasn't for 9hrs. The roads were made of dirt, they were wet and in some parts really muddy, which tested our local bus drivers abilities (of which they boys shook his hand when he got us to our destination safely). There were windy mountain roads and over taking on corners. I used my pressure point bracelets and am happy to say I wasn't motion sick at all.