Sichuan

Pandas!

We started out with the babies…

…then went to visit the adults, just before they set down to eat in a totally normal way…

Eating like that is tiring, so they took a post-prandial snooze…

…before continuing with the social activities for the day…

I took many more photos of the pandas, some of which are quite good. We went to see the red pandas, where I had less photographic success (new camera etc. etc. etc.), but I did catch the build-up to an outrageous food-theft…

…as well as snapping the conclusive proof that Kate is taller than a red panda after all.

We used Chengdu as a base for a few days, visiting a monestary one evening and going for a nice walk along the river another day. The main sights (other than the pandas, of course) were away from Chengdu though.

First we travelled up to Leshan to see the giant buddha (the largest in the world). This is carved out of the rockface at a confluence point of various reivers. Like a number of other tourists, though, we chose the rockface itself as our vantage point. Our first viewing was of his face alone, before we climbed down to his feet to get the full view.

The following couple of days, we climbed another sacred mountain. This one - Emeishan - was buddhist. It was higher than Huashan, and we spent the first day climbing to near the summit. Again there was a sacred mountain path, and this time there were donkeys:

We had planned to wake up early the following morning to be at the mountain top at sunrise. However, when we woke up at 5am, it was very thick with fog, and we were unsure about the risk/reward ratio of climbing the last few hundred metres in those conditions. We slept for another couple of hours after which it was at least light, though the fog hadn’t really budged. Of course, we were going to the top anyway, so we dutifully set off.

A hundred metres or so from the top the fog began to lift, and the thick fog just below translated in to some fantastic views once we got to the top. There were many golden things to to mark the summit of the sacred mountain, which were impressive, but the vista of the endless clouds was what made this really memorable.