Parks, Temples and Pizza Hut

Chengdu Trip - Walking around the City

After coming back to Chengdu a day earlier, we needed something to keep us busy for the 2 days until our flight, so we set out walking around the city and seeing all the attractions on the map that our hostel gave us. We woke up Friday morning and I couldn't put weight on my legs for at least 20 minutes because they were so sore from the mountain and we didn't even hike the whole thing! Once we could walk again, we got breakfast and headed to our first stop - the biggest Mao statue in China. It was cool monument, but there wasn't really anything to do there other than look at it and take pictures.

We then headed over to People's Park, a cool park filled with old ladies doing their Tai Chi and a kids amusement park (both staples of Chinese parks).

SO GREEN!

From there, we headed to "China Lane", a souvenir street filled with panda stores and old style buildings and restaurants. We really liked the area and walked around the whole thing, getting sandwiches from Starbucks for lunch! I also was able to get some postcards and Joe got a map like the ones he's been collecting from every city we've visited. 

There was some cool wall art like this one, where part of it was painted and part was coming out of the wall!

Can't get away from them!

Joe was having fun with his camera taking pictures of me..

Weird name for a coffee shop and pub, but OK

After some shopping, we headed to yet another park called the Culture Park, where we knew there was a huge Taoist Temple nearby. It took us forever to find the temple, but walking through the area was cool and the park was beautiful again.

Kids bottle feeding some fish, a sight I'd never seen before!

An old style street by the temple.

No temple visit is complete without some statue pics!

People on a tour walking across the middle of the yin-yang on the floor.. not really sure what the significance was.

Part of the temple was lined with Monkey statues, which we had to take pictures of seeing as we were both born in the year of the monkey!

After the temple, we both couldn't walk anymore and our backs were killing us from carrying around our backpacks, so we headed to our original Chengdu hostel where we had reservations for the night. We took a nap and then went to a free dumpling party put on by the hostel where we made fun shaped dumplings with the other guests, some of whom were children travelling with their families which was fun. Joe and I both won a "most creative" dumpling contest with his face-shaped one and my rabbit dumpling. After that, we walked around the pedestrian area by our hostel and ate some popcorn that we bought from a movie theater - dinner of champions.

The next day, we woke up and went to a bamboo park which was really cool and as you can imagine, filled with all different kinds of bamboo. It was definitely my favorite park that we went to and we had great weather for walking around!

The bamboo was so thick!

A lady drawing the bamboo.. living the life!

Crazy walkway full of curved trees.

Posing like a Chinese girl

Even Chinese grannies get in on the posing!

A lot of the bamboo was carved with Chinese and people's names, so we decided to contribute too!

A typical sight in China - a girl dressed up as an anime character.

After the bamboo park, we headed to a shopping mall for lunch and ended up at Pizza Hut, one of the few western restaurants we hadn't been to before. It only had 1 page of pizza in the whole menu which was surprising, but the pizza was exactly what we needed after the long week we'd had. 

FEED ME!

What? A sign by where we were walking.

After lunch, we headed to our last tourist destination, a monastery and temple area which was again surrounded by a park. We got to see some nuns and monks chanting which was cool and something we hadn't seen at the other temples before. By the time we had walked through the area, we were exhausted and went back to our hostel to relax for the rest of the day and wait for our flight that night.

This boy was walking his dog around like this, holding onto his paws behind his back - it made for a pretty funny sight.

The temple inside the monastery where they were all chanting.

Joe and a statue of an animal made up of many different real and mythical beasts.

Overall, we really enjoyed Chengdu as a city. It was very modern, well organized and clean. Out of the cities we've been to, it has been our favorite by far next to Shanghai. There was little pollution in the area and so many different places to go and see!

Stairway to Heaven

Chengdu Trip - Mt. Emei

After the panda trip, we caught a bus out to Mt. Emei (about 2 hours away), which is one of the sacred Buddhist mountains in China. We spent the night at the hostel at the base and planned to do a 2 day hike starting the next day. Our plan was to bus up 1/4 of the way and then hike to the top (according to our map, about a 10-14 hour hike) over the span of 2 days, spending the night in one of the mini hotels or monasteries on the mountain.

The next day, we woke up and took the bus to the temple about 1/4 of the way up. To get there, you go up quite a few stairs, which we thought was pretty normal for a mountain, not knowing what was ahead of us. We took a rest at the temple and then started out on the path to the top that started there. What we quickly realized was that the 10ish hour hike was going to be literally straight up stairs. There was stairway after stairway, winding all the way up the mountain. Joe and I did it for about 2 hours and then decided that we'd rather just pay to have the bus drive us the top, so we walked down to the bus and went up that way. The rest of our group actually hiked all the way up the stairs to the top - it took them about 7 hours and they said that it was literally all stairs. I think we made the right decision.

The bus to the top was about an hour and was on the most winding road I have ever driven on. Joe slept while I attempted not to get bus sick in the back. At one point, we got so high that we were driving through the cloud layer and literally could not see out of the windows - comforting when the driver is speeding up winding roads to the top! We got up to the top bus station and had to hike up to the cable car that would take us to the top. It was much colder at the top and we were still in the cloud cover. All you could see off the sides of the mountain was pure white. We had a hard time finding the cable car station because you couldn't see anything until you were standing right in front of it, but we eventually bought our tickets and got on with about 40 other people (it was a HUGE cable car). As we ascended for about 5 minutes, we finally broke through the cloud cover and everything was magically sunny and clear again. Once at the top, we walked around and saw the big Buddhist statue that is the most famous part of the mountain. We decided at that point that we didn't want to spend the night on the mountain because we were done hiking, so we went back down the mountain during the last hour of buses running and thought that we could get a room in our hostel from the night before.

When we made it down to the base, we saw a huge swarm of people that weren't there before. It was the Tomb Sweeping holiday, so they were all preparing to hike themselves. We tried at 3 different places and nowhere had any beds for us. We made the split decision to take the last bus back to Chengdu, which was where we would've been headed the next day anyway. The bus was leaving in 20 minutes, so we sped over to the bus station, cut the line and bought 2 tickets, meanwhile a guy was yelling "tourists! Chengdu! Over there!" in Chinese and rushing us to the bus. We made it on and called our hostel from Chengdu but couldn't get through. At this point, we were exhausted, and just wanted anywhere to sleep so we called one of the sister hostels that is owned by the same people and  managed to get a bed there for the night. It was a crazy experience overall and not at all what we had planned, but we think we did pretty well in dealing with it and we were happy to be done hiking and have a place to sleep that night.

Mount Emei was beautiful and amazing at the top, we just wish that we would've had a better idea of what the hike would be like from the beginning so it wouldn't have been such a surprise!

All of us at the base where we got dropped off.

Me after hiking for 2 hours.. my shirt was a different color when I started!

Compared to Joe after the same hike...

And I want to point out that he was hiking in JEANS!

A view of how steep the stairs were.

This poor guy going up didn't seem so pleased about the stairs either.

There was a pretty cool view here, but you can't really see it in this picture!

View from the hike to the cable car.

You couldn't see the crowd of people up ahead of you until you hit them!

Elephants lining the pathway to the giant Buddha

Still a little foggy from far away, but better than the cloud covered area!

The giant Buddha that we went up the mountain to see.

A temple up by the Buddha. 

It was pretty bright up there after going through the fog.. so excuse the squinting in all of our pictures!

View of the fog over the side of the mountain.

Panda-monium!!

Chengdu Trip - Day 1 Panda Breeding and Research Center

We had a long weekend this week for Tomb Sweeping day, which gave us Thursday off meaning that we had from Tuesday morning until Sunday to travel. We decided to go to a city called Chengdu in Western China to visit their famous panda center and a nearby mountain (to come in a later post) with our roommates and one other friend. We booked a trip to the panda center on our first day through our hostel, and got picked up early in the morning to make our way over there. We had an "English speaking" tour guide who took us to all the areas worth seeing. I put quotes around his English abilities because he basically new how to say "panda", "very cute" and "hold panda  - money money money", referring to an experience where you can hold a baby panda for a big donation of money. We wandered around the park and saw baby pandas, giant adult pandas and red pandas. The center was amazing, like a zoo just for pandas. They are also a breeding center so they have a lot of different aged pandas all with tons of room to spread out, run around and eat bamboo. We really enjoyed watching them all, as they were really cute and also very relaxed. We watched them hang out, "talk" to each other, and eat pounds and pounds of bamboo - living the life if you ask me! Then, 4 out of the 5 of us (Joe wasn't interested) made the big donation to spend some time holding a baby panda. We were very excited, and although it was a lot of money, we couldn't leave the park without getting the opportunity to give this 6 month old panda a big hug and a belly rub. They placed the panda on our laps one at a time and we got to cuddle and play with it while our friends and the staff took pictures on our cameras. When we were done, we were given a printed picture in a frame, a sweatshirt and a certificate thanking us for our donation. Overall it was an awesome day and an experience that I will never forget! Prepare yourselves for lots of panda pictures.....

The first panda we saw munching on his breakfast

A baby panda hanging out on a tree

A mom and her baby

Enjoying a nice butt scratch 

So relaxed

The adult pandas were huge!

The most pandas we saw in one place, all enjoying each others company and eating

One of the red pandas in a different area

A kung fu panda in its natural habitat

All of us dressed up to meet the little panda

SO CUDDLY!

A big kiss before i had to let her go