Take me home Chunxi Road!

And so to Chengdu, and more precisely the Chunxi Road area (which gets me singing Country Road every time we come through the metro station). At first sight we see only the similarities with Xian – big city, grey, skyscrapers, traffic, shopping malls etc. But after a day or so it seems we can make out a slightly different character. We seem to be staying in a pretty cool / upmarket area with an art street not too far away and, surprise surprise, a massive selection of restaurants including an aritsan ice cream type place.

The hostel is great and we have dumpling making on the first night. It’s clean, with a fridge full of beers (that you can get Belgian trappiste beers another example of how flat the world is becoming), food, plenty of people coming and going and really friendly staff.

The first day we do the big one – the Pandas. It turns out to be great. I am surprised at how exhilirating it is even if we ask « why look at animals » (pdf), with all the thoughts we have about capitivity, habitat destruction, ecology, anthropomorphism, and so on. And of course there is the usual crowds clicking and videoing everything, as usual I’m not immune! Still it makes for a great day out – giant pandas, red pandas (not the same family – good science homework for Shems), black swans, peacocks and bamboo shoots for lunch. And apart from anything else it was nice to get into a more or less green environment after about 6 weeks in big cities. Pandasseem to be able to sleep in the most amazing positiions and it occurs to us: does Anouchka have some panda blood? The dark skin around the eyes, the ability to fall asleep anywhere…

Once again the kindness of strangers on show on the way home as a woman gets us on an alternate bus when we just miss ours and then walks us to a different metro station – even though we dont think she was going that way.

Then came a couple of days with a Chinese lesson in the morning and a wander around the town in the afternoon. We finally found a cup of tea – a charming street with just tea shops, all full of leisurely tea sippers, not far from the hostel. Getting a cup of tea in a cafe has proved surprisingly difficult in China so far. The second afternoon involved a Toaist temple including a great teahouse! We learned that if you want the local speciality of a spicy hot pot you need to queue, we wandered but decided if you cant beat ’em join ’em and ended up queing. Luckily we ended witha nice guy that showed us what to do and didnt laugh to much!

The next big day trip was to the 1000 year old giant buddha at Leshan. Ear we see one side of his head..

and ear we see the other….

There were enourmous queues to see it up close so we wandered off to explore. And felt like Indiana Jones when we found the cave of 1000 buddhas, full of buddhas and almost empty of visitors. A remarkable place, with a 50m buddha to begin with, then a 30m one and then many more. Towards the end of the cave there was even a series of karma sutra like friezes which prompted an unforseen sex education class (not on the school’s curiculum as far as we can see)!!! By the time we got back to the giant buddha the queues had finished and we got to clamber down the stairs and look at the buddha’s feet.

After a lazy day with some school work the next trip was to the Taoist holy mountain of QinShan. A day of hiking up through verdent forest looking at slightly dilapidated temples, pagodas and so on. A well earned lunch at the top and down past the most spectacular temple of the day – where it turns out we could have slept the night after all after reading conflicting reports on the web. We luck out and get the last seats on a tourist bus to get back, saving the scrum to get seats on the fast train – take me home Chunxi Road!

PS – Next stop is Kunming – 6 hours of train included some school work even if a lack of table made it a bit trickier.