Following a visit to Yangshou food market where Rich ate Snake, dog, frog and pigs penises!. We decided our next stop would be the Sichuan province as Rich wanted to “taste spicy food and see big mountains”. Our first stop was the regional capital, Chengdu. We arrived after a 25 hour train journey, the train itself was very similar to those we had experienced in India, but the real highlight was having dinner in the restaurant car (very orient express like) as spectacular scenery whizzed by. On the downside we also had to endure awful Chinese pop music being blasted from the train speakers from 6am until 10pm. Chengdu looks like a Soviet city – it’s a concrete grid full of tower blocks.

In Chengdu we visited the Panda sanctuary which has the largest number of captive giant and red pandas in the world. It was pretty cool to see the Pandas, particularly the cubs – I was very tempted to scoop one up and bring it home. It’s frightening to think that there are now less than 2000 left in the world.

We also visited Leshan, which is home to the ‘Grand Buddha’; this is the largest Buddha in the world and has been carved into a cliff face. To give you a sense of scale its over 71m high and his big toe is 8.5m long.

A highlight of our trip to Chengdu had to be the Sichuan opera, we saw a fairly amateurish local performance which turned out to be quite amusing. It featured high pitched singing, acrobatics and face mask changing. The story which was translated to us by our guide was about a white snake spirit who fell in love with a mortal, as the Buddha disapproved of spirit/mortal relationships, they were forced to separate and the snake spirit was imprisoned. To us this seemed to be a tragic story with Buddha as the bad guy, however to the local Chinese this story was regularly told to remind them that they should accept arranged marriages, duty over love.

A few temples and teahouse visits later we wanted to visit Juizhalgou national park famous for its coloured lakes. The cheapest way to get there was to join a 4 day Chinese tour, whilst we’d learned in the past that tours weren’t for us the tour cost was little more than the entrance fees and included both transport, hotels and food, we’d decided this would also be a good way to experience how the Chinese holiday. We’ll the tour started at 5am and quickly into the journey our Chinese speaking tour guide decided to entertain the coach by singing to us for the next 30 mins and then talked non-stop for another hour! – hereafter we shall refer to him as ‘Cocko the Clown’. The sites we visited were amazingly beautiful but sadly the Chinese way is to stand either in front of or behind a camera for the entire visit and low and push away anyone who gets within the photo. They also take the following obligatory photos – one of them next to the entrance sign for the attraction, one of them doing a catalogue style pose and finally one of them doing a peace sign pose. The problem was that there were just too many people at each of the sites (inevitable for a country with a population 1.3 billion) and it mean’t that we couldn’t simply stand and admire the scenery.

Whilst overall we enjoyed the tour the downside was that we never had hot water at the scummy hotels they put us up in, the food was terrible and no-one spoke any English.

After the tour we left Sichuan and traveled overnight to Xi’an, home of the terracotta warriors. Here we met a good bunch of people at our hostel and have spent the last couple of days traveling around with them. On Monday we went and climbed the holy mountain Mt Huashan which is 2000m approx high. I climbed to the first peak at 1600m (too steep and hot) and Rich made it to 1900m before we ran out of time and had to get the cable car back down. The walk up was very scenic though and the views at the top were spectacular.

Yesterday we joined the crowds and visited the Terracotta warriors. We originally thought that these had been discovered in tact and had been fully excavated, but were surprised to discover that most had been pieced back together and only a fraction of the site has been dug up. Funnily enough whilst there we saw the most hilarious sight – a Chinese tour group dressed in identical clothing – blue tracksuits – there were about 20 of them and they looked just like smurfs!!.
Today we are spending a lazy day wandering around Xian before catching an evening train to Beijing.