In the morning, two incredibly irritating girls disturbed our technique to stave off boredom - sleep. They were screaming, running back and fore and constantly shouting mispronunciations of "mother," "father" and "sister." I was ready to throttle them. They were 20 as well.
On arrival in Chengdu, we didn't go and get tickets for our next stop (le gasp) - we got straight in a taxi to the bus station to do the trip to Leshan. Buses run pretty constantly, so we got one pretty much straight away. The journey was painless and uninteresting, although we did have a brilliant film about a guy that worked at Pizza Hut who was in love with a girl whose office he delivered pizzas to. Really cheesy, and made by China Mobile and NEC.
When we got to Leshan, my heart sank. It looked rather too much like Tangkou for my liking. We walked a little away from the people at the station ("Where are you going?" "Taxi!") and headed towards where we assumed the centre was, but due to heavy bags and things, we got in a taxi. We had no idea what to tell him, so Nikki asked him to go straight on, then that we were going to a hotel. He took us to a Lonely Planet recommended hotel, advertising standard rooms for 230. We didn't know what to do - that was far too expensive. At this point, the lady behind the reception desk informed us there were discounts - 120. Much better. We dumped our stuff and went pretty much straight out to see the Giant Buddha, 71m tall carved/built into the cliff of Leshan where three rivers meet. The story goes that that part of the rivers was really dangerous, so the built a giant Buddha to protect the mariners. There was nice scenery and things, although it was quite misty so you couldn't see far. We joined the queue to get the foot of the Buddha, which moved at a glacial pace and was full of people who felt the need to comment on our whiteness and giant noses. Rather annoying.
After taking photos and things, we decided to head home (the park was about to close and that was all that we had come to see - I couldn't cope with the thought of yet another temple). We walked along the road the bus went and ended up walking the whole way home. Not so bad actually it wasn't that far. We wanted to go to the recommended restaurant. When we got there, they had no tables. But then, it wasn't actually a restaurant, so no surprise there. It was a little side bit on the second floor of a hotel with some large group tables which were all taken apparently. It was also really far away and quite hard to find. It was on 嘉定中路, number 289. Which one would assume is near 嘉定南路 number 200, but no. When 南 (South) becomes 中 (Middle), the numbers go back to zero. We had some awesome kebabs though, some from a Uyghur guy from Kashgar(!). We saw some food places by the hotel, so we went to go there, but none of them could be bothered to cook two dishes and some rice. This is not an annoyed comment, they actually said this to each other in Chinese.
So we went to a kebab place just around the corner, where we had beef, mutton and rabbit (never had it before, 'twas rather nice actually). And I had a random bird which may have ben pigeon, which was far too much hassle to eat. The kebabs shrunk in the cooking process quite considerably, so they weren't enough, so we got more to go. Which included a bug one for Nikki (that's not a typo, that does say bug). And I ate a bug. It was alright actually, bit crunchy with pokey legs and feelers. Full of bug (and real food), we went to bed ready for a good night's sleep (haha).
(apologies for the darkness of the video, here's a photo of what I was eating (oh, and excuse the really bad hat hair))
DAY 27 - LESHAN乐山 => CHENGDU成都
Up bright and early (thanks to a delightful rooster just outside) and ready and packed, we checked out, left our bags with reception and got the bus to the 东方佛都 (Oriental Buddha Capital). We got the same bus out as the day before (it was very near the Giant Buddha), and once again the first bus that came said he didn't go that way. Well, he might have, he said 'no' (in English) and shook his head ambiguously.
We got there, saw the longest reclining Buddha in the world (which is a cheat - they carved the head and the feet, but not the middle - it's just a big blob of trees), and climbed far too many steps to see reproductions of major Buddhist sites from across Asia reproduced here (some bigger than the originals). Knackered, we got the bus back to the hostel to pick up our bags and go to the station, but not before getting still more kebabs (every single thing we ate in Leshan came on a stick) and some of the most amazing fruit in the history of time. No, really.
The bus back to Chengdu was equally uneventful (although there was a 老外(foreigner) on the bus), but on getting off the bus we got rather annoyed that all Chinese bus and train stations (with one or two exceptions) are on the outside of town, almost as if to let their
We checked into officially the cheapest hostel in Chengdu (Mix Hostel - if you go to Chengdu, stay there), and the cheapest hostel we've been to in China (including dodgy operating basically outside the law guesthouses (fear not family, they're not dodgy enough to be classed as unsafe, they just don't bother reporting foreigners that stay there which is required by Chinese law)) (15 a night), dumped our things and booked tickets for the world famous Sichuan Opera. We got a taxi to a recommended restaurant (we wanted the quintessential Sichuan dining experience, given that Sichuan food is world famous (Sze-chuan to those who use Wade-Giles romanization). But said restaurant didn't exist any more, so we went to a different one, where the food was average and the service poor. The rice had only just arrived when we had to pay and leave so as to not be late for the opera, and not once did we get our tea refilled (to be fair, the manager did shout at one of the waitresses for ignoring us).
We got in the car to the opera and got talking to an American girl from California called Claire, who's a teacher in Shanghai. And then she said the one line I hear far too often from Americans: "Oh, I'm British too!" But this one actually was - born and raised in The Big Smoke 'til the age of 9, then the US 'til 14. Not sure what came after.
The opera was quite good, but the other bits didn't please me quite so much - puppets, erhu playing (to be fair, he was really good, but I'm not a huge fan), shadow puppets (utterly bizarre) and some minor acrobating.
The famous face changing is great, and while I think I've worked out the secret, I'm not convinced and have no way of finding out, as it's a state secret in China, and only 300 people know how it's done.
After the opera, we just went to bed for a rather disturbed sleep thanks to our charming fellow travellers.
DAY 28 - CHENGDU成都
In the morning, after a truly awful shower with pressure ranging from painful to drip and temperature from scalding to ice, I had some toast and awaited Nikki. Then, we walked to the Wenshu Monastery. Or rather, we tried to. But the directions from the girl at the hostel were rather vague (apparently they make sense to women and not men) and we ended up walking in the exact opposite direction for rather too long. We eventually turned round and walked back the other way, stopping to get Nikki some sugar cane. I had heard you can eat sugar cane, but had never tried it. I say eat, you don't actually eat in, you chew it then spit it out. It's not that great, it's got the texture of chewing on a branch (unsurprisingly) and not much of a flavour.
We found the monastery and the folk street it's on, and it was mobbed. It was one of the days of Spring Festival (which lasts for 15 days, not just the one like western New Year) when you are supposed to go to the temple and pray. We were somewhat bored of temples, so we had a wander through the grounds and the nice garden and then found the teahouse inside and sat there for quite some time. They say that in a Sichuan teahouse, time slows down. It kind of did actually. I drank lots of tea to see if it would make me feel any less unwell (I was starting to feel slightly ill you see). It didn't. After a walk around the grounds, we explored part of the Folk Street, which was old and full of tat and (surprisingly) Uyghurs selling Xinjiang style kebabs (although they were completely different to kebabs in Xinjiang).
We headed to the Cultural Park to see a Taoist temple "in the grounds," which is Guidebook for "outside the grounds." We found it, and as it was the first Taoist temple we'd seen, I was quite interested to see what it would be like. For those who haven't been, imagine a Buddhist temple but with different statues. Seriously. There are no other differences. Disappointed in that, we went to Dufu's cottage (Dufu was a poet in olden days who lived in a cottage in Chengdu for 5 years, and said cottage has been preserved and turned into a tourist attraction).
But just before we went into the cottage grounds, lots of boys in tarzan-esque costumes came out and performed a bad dance out of time to bad music. It was quite amusing to watch. I got given a red dangly new year thing with money on it, and a cow gave me a card saying 2008 - Ox (which it's not, it's Rat this year). Anyway, we critiqued lots of calligraphy (Chinese calligraphy largely looks scrappy and sometimes just plain illegible)., saw his cottage and it's really rather nice grounds (lots of green, the first real growing bamboo I'd seen and things), posed where Mao did then headed back to the hostel for a short relax.
Around dinner time, we decided to eat at the hostel, so we looked at the menu, but nothing appealed at all. So we went out, and found a restaurant called 老妈兔头 (old mother rabbit head) where the waitress very helpfully asked in English if we could speak China. At first, I thought she said cello. Fortunately, Nikki was slightly more logical and worked out what she was asking. We said yes, and ordered. First, a fried seasonal vegetable dish, some kind of meat strips and 鱼香茄子 (which translates to Fish Fragrant Aubergine, but isn't actually fish at all), all of which should be straightforward enough. But oh no. For the seasonal vegetable, we had a choice, but the choices were fired off at such speed I have no idea what they were. Eventually, she went to the kitchen and brought out some identical looking leaves (the difference was in one hand she had one leaf and in the other hand a bunch of them), so we picked one. Then did we want big or small bowls of rice. She was still going at great speed, so Nikki asked her to go slower, when the waitress got really embarassed and apologised a lot, and then carried on as before.
By this point, I was feeling even more rubbish, so I picked at some aubergine and we headed home to bed, praying I'd feel better for the pandas the next day. We had pegged feeling rubbish on exhaustion (4 weeks constantly moving, less fun than you'd think), and some sleep and a slower next day should see me right.
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