Chengdu is an amazing city and Sichuan, the area where it’s located, is even better. I can totally see it as a place where I could live! There’s plenty of things to do outside the city and, for some reason, we found that most toilets are Japanese style! (with all the shower options for your private parts).

The city

Chengu is one of those cities with enormous sidewalks and a lot of subway and bus lines that can take you all around the city. It has its traditional area, like the Kaozhan Street, where it all has the classic Chinese style (although it’s all restaurants and shops now) and the modern part, like the Downtown.

Visiting the pandas

We went to visit the pandas in the nearest centre to Chengdu city, the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, 40 minutes away from the center in taxi and will only cost you 30¥. It’s a centre which main activity is the breeding and rescue of injured pandas in the wild, Eventually, when pandas heal and are ready to leave the centre, they are reinserted into nature. It’s important to be there before 9:30am because once pandas are fed, they just sleep and they will look like teddy bears, so be there when the center opens: 8:00am.

Mount Emei

The Mount Emei is something like the Mecca of Buddhism, so expect it to be very crowded in peak season. The main idea is to see the sunrise on the Golden Summit as it usually has a sea of clouds at the edge of the cliff, so sleeping over on the top might be a good idea (you can sleep in some temples for 40¥). To go to the Mount Emei, we took a bullet train to Emeishan and from there, we took a bus to the upper area. The bus will force you to get off and pay the park entrance fee for conservation purposes (185¥). It will drop you by the monkeys bridge, where you only need to walk a bit to get to the cable car if you don’t wish to climb all the way up. The way up from the monkeys area is steep stairs. If you aren’t into that, just take the cable car for 65¥, it takes 10 minutes while the climbing will take you 2-3 hours. We did it on our way down (1 hour) and we got muscle pain on our calves. The sunrise is usually at 7:00 and you will find plenty of stalls selling you warm snacks. In our case we were very unlucky because the Golden Summit was IN the sea of clouds that morning. So it was all misty and we could barely see. We had a minute of clarity to take pictures though.

Leishan and the giant buddha

There’s a very cool story about the Leshan Buddha: back in the 700’s, a Chinese monk named Hai Tong thought that carving a buddha on the cliff would calm down the river waters, so he collected founding for it and when the project was threatened, he scared the opposers by gouging out one of his eyes. Ironically, the buddha did calm the waters, but only because the leftover rocks form the carving were placed into the river.

Reaching there is quite easy: just take the bullet train to Leishan, and from there take the bus number 3 (there’s a bus terminal just opposite the train station). It will take you to the whole park where the buddha is.