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My sis, Rach, arrived from Oz for a 1 month holiday with me. The trip was to be overland through China, Tibet, Nepal and India, where she would fly home. After checkin out my place in Xian, we headed south on an overnight train to Chengdu, in Sichuan province. Chengdu is basically famous for good spicy food, the biggest Buddah in the world (70m high), rare Chinese pandas, and Sichuan opera. We were ready to do the lot, but first it was time to just chill... chillin involved standin out in the crowd (bottom right), sayin G'day to Mao (left), eating icecream (right), wishing we had a bike like everyone else (bottom left), and drinking tea in a tea garden and hiring motor boats to cause a ruckus on the otherwise peaceful lake (above).
So the world's largest Big Buddah is basically just that... a big buddah. You climb some stairs and on the way ride a white tiger and see other smaller buddahs and lots of old looking moss lined carvings. Then you arrive at this huge head. You look down and see its attached to a proportionately, fantastically huge body, and then you scale down a cliff of small stairs to arrive at the biggest toenail one has ever seen. His feet are bigger than large boats (bottom right). At over 70m high he looks like a pretty cool guy.
From what I understand, Sichuan Opera is such a screeching mess that most westerners wouldn't like it. Well at least that's what the Chinese seem to think. So we saw some bastardized version of it, including puppets, acrobats, dudes who poured tea from long nosed tea pots, and, a favourite of mine, the hand shadow puppet man (left). Obviously all high class entertainment.
The Giant Panda is pretty rare and Sichuan is one of the only places in the world where it's still found in the wild. We went to the Sichuan's Panda Breeding Centre to see them. You have to get up pretty early so you can actually see them doing something other than sleeping. So we arrived about 7am and saw them doing the only other thing they do... eating. Not so exciting, but still, pretty cute. You can touch a Giant panda for about a hundred bucks, you can hold one for a number of hundred, or you can just look at them, like we did, for a few bucks. Then there are also Red Pandas, which are kinda like racoons, but no one really cares about them, so we got to hold one for real cheap (bottom right).
