Chengdu

I arrived in Chengdu in the afternoon just in time for dumpling night at the hostel and it didn’t take long to make some new friends and plan out the next day.  I had read that the Chengdu Research Base for Giant Pandas offers an interactive experience where you can help feed the newborn pandas.  It ended up being really busy but not as bad as every day prior.  The two panda nurseries were closed but it was still worth it to watch the giant pandas stumble around and red pandas climbing effortlessly in the trees.

Two people in the group wanted to go see a giant Buddha so I postponed my plans and tagged along with German traveler named Andreas and the cute and kind Chinese girl named Jianping to Leshan where the 71 meter tall Giant Buddha was carved out of a red sandstone cliff over the span of 90 years.  Unfortunately, the Buddha is being restored so all I was able to see was the head.  However, the rest of the area mostly made up for it as it wasn’t as crowded and there were some nice places to see, such as a giant pagoda and temples.

Later that night, the three of us patiently waited about an hour and a half to get into a popular hotpot restaurant.  The meal was worth it though, even if some of it was incredibly spicy.

The next morning, I left to my next destination but had a bit of a false start. I hopped on the metro to the wrong Chadianzi station.  I followed the instructions I was provided and they were wrong so I hopped back on the metro and transferred to another line to get to the Chadianzi bus terminal station.  The next struggle was to get myself a ticket to a small town about an hour away called Longxing but I had to buy a ticket for a town after Longxing called Anren and just get the driver to drop me off on the highway.  A taxi driver was trying to be helpful by repeatedly saying there was no direct bus to Longxing and I was wasting my time.  He kindly offered to drive me there for 120 Yuan.  I got rid of him after a bit and then managed to get myself a direct bus ticket for just 12 Yuan!