DAY 152 - Chengdu, Sichuan, China

By the time we left Dali I was coming down with some sort of flu, but it didn't really hit me until we got to Lijiang. For the next few days I could barely do anything - even standing up sent waves of dizziness through my head. By Sunday though it had worked it's way through my system (from top to bottom) and I was starting to feel better, but Lijiang will be remembered as the town I had to drag myself around.

Lijiang was probably the closest you could come to how old China looked before the modernising started. And how pretty it was. A network of narrow cobbled alleys, each with its own stream and little stone bridges to link them together. Dotted through the town are old wooden water wheels.

Naturally, it hasn't escaped the impact of tourism. Each street is lined mainly with trinket shops, each selling identical over-priced junk, or restaurants, half full at the best of times and with bored-faced locals dressed in local costumes doing a half hearted traditional Naxi jig.

For most of the first day I only noticed the cobbles, as when we did venture out, I barely had the energy to raise my head. Fortunately, by Sunday I was on the mend so we took a tour up to Tiger Leaping Gorge. Apparently at one point it's 4km deep, although from where we were it couldn't have been more than 1 to 1.5. Those nice Chinese people had dug out a cliff-side walkway allowing us (paying) tourists to walk down to the rapids about 3km in. And very impressive it was too, although we didn't see any (real) tigers. On the opposite side of the gorge to where we walked a road had been blasted through, dumping hundreds, nay, thousands of tonnes of rock into the river below. A bit messy really.

On Monday we took a flight to Chengdu in Sichuan. The flight was short but not fun due to a small minority of our fellow travellers misbehaving on the flight (being irritating rather than dangerous), and others using the sick bag as a depository for their flem.

Chengdu is an ugly, grey, concrete, smog-ridden blob. But it does have Pandas. Big cuddly adult Pandas who do nothing but eat and sleep (related to Koalas maybe?), small furry baby Pandas who squeak and roll around like the staff at a PwC Christmas party, and slug-like newly born Pandas who are to ugly to bother with. At the Giant Panda Research Centre we saw all these except the slugs, and learned far too much about the Giant Panda reproductive cycle to be safe just after a large breakfast. The smog was so bad that morning that even though we were outside, we couldn't take a picture without the flash going off, so the results were pretty poor (see the China pictures link at www.energiser.net).

Today we went to see the Grand Buddha of Leshan. It's the biggest Buddha in the world (or summit). It's carved into the cliff by a river about 130km south of here. No-one did a tour down there surprisingly, so we had to make our own way by public bus. I'm proud to say we make it there and back without incident and the Buddha was very... big.

 

The main reason for going to Chengdu was to arrange our trip to Tibet. It's always been expensive and difficult to do, but since the riots there earlier this year it's got a whole lot harder. We've had to arrange and fix our itinerary in advance, we have to have a guide to chaperon us around for the entire visit and we have to pay through the nose for it. That said, it promises to be one of the highlights of the year so hey ho... I'll let you know...