Leshan and the Big Buddha!

Hello again after a couple of days of silence. We are now in rainy Macau but there is still a lot to say before we get to that part :)

After the Pandas (which were too cute for words!!! Did I mention we saw the new born ones as well!!!) We visited a little bit of the city of Chengdu. It was just a big city like most of China's sprawling cities (including the suburds it has a population of 13 million!!!) We visited the Wenshu Temple from the Tang Dynasty. It was like most other Chinese temples (we are getting a bit tired of visiting temples to be honest) but is was quite nice and the g arden area was quite extensive and they had a tea house in the middle where we could relax for a bit in the smouldering heat :)

Afterwards we made our way down to the Tianfu Square where we wanted to take a picture with the biggest statue of Mao in China - well, its gotta be done :) We hung around there for a while and then, for dinner we found a japanese restaurant that did buffet for 7.5 euroes!! YES, you read me right a BUFFET of sushi for 7.5 - you cant get a better deal than that - only one downsize, Jo wasnt feeling too good so we werent able to properly enjoy the buffet. Also, we arrived at 8 and it closed at 9 (as the waitresses never failed to stress hehehe) Well, it was still good sushi :)

The next day we woke up early to go to Leshan, which is another city 2 hours south of Chengdu and home to the biggest buddha statue in the worl (well, now after the Taliban destroyed those 2 buddhas in Afghanistan Leshan is now the successor to the biggest buddha).

When we got to Leshan we made our way to the ferries - we had the opportunity to see the Buddha from the river - the Buddha is encaved so the only way to see it properly is from across it and the only way is by boat - it was quite amazing! We had seen photos of it through some power points sent through internet but it is something else to see it up close! And the thousands of people that were going down stairs carved out of the mountain to see the buddha up close was impressive ( we went on a sunday unfortunately, so we got the brunt of chinese tourists!) There are also two guardian soldiers carved out of the mountian opposite side of the Buddha which you can also only see by boat so it was a very good idea to take the ferry :)

After we came back to the entrance of the Buddha park - by the way it is a huge park complex which takes an entire day to visit properly!! Jo and I wanted to go down to the Buddha ( our fellow travellers were a bit weary on the legs so they opted to just visit the park) well, to be honest when we saw the queue of people that were waiting to go down the stairs to see the Buddha we gave up on the idea as well - we had at least a 2 hour wait in front of us!!!! DAmn the authorities for opening up tourism rights in China, just kidding hehehe

Well, we still got to see the buddha (thank goodness we had done the boat!) and the park was really nice to visit as well. We visited the Dafo Temple and the pagoda and just waled around the park (it still took us 2 hours to visit it and we didnt even see everything!!) Afterwards we had a nice meal (oh, the fish was delicious!!) with our driver (we had arranged the trip with our hostel) and our fellow travellers before heading back to Chengdu where we just enjoyed the night and took it easy in the town center :)