Wednesday 4th May - arrive in Chengdu. The hard sleeper train was quite nice as it turns out. Instead of seat the carriages is divided up into compartments of bunk beds, with six beds in each compartment. The bottom bunk also doubles as seating when the person on that bunk isn't sleeping, and there are a few additional seat down the carriage. We both slept really well! In the day time we were mobbed by small Chinese girls once they saw Chris' iPad. We barely got a look in! These little girls were very selfish and not very willing to share. they wrestled the iPad from each other and even slapped our hands away whenever we went near it. It's lucky for them that they're so cute.

Our hostel - Sim's Cosy - is just as nice as others we've stayed in. There aren't many people staying here at the moment though. It's about three times the size of the last place we stayed, but with only half as many people.

Thursday 5th May - around Chengdu. Chengdu is by far the greenest city we have seen so far, and the quietest (by Chinese standards). It almost feels relaxed! We just wandered around town today, taking in the sights. We saw Wenshu Temple, which was lovely. This temple has a more Tibetan layout to it than other temples we've been too, and the architecture is slightly different. We then went to Tianfu Square, where there is a massive statue of Mao waving to the city. Lastly was the Cultural Park, where we attempted to visit the Green Ram Temple. However, all we could find was teahouse after teahouse after teahouse.

On the way to the Cultural Park we passed though the People's Park and got to witness the most bizarre thing we've seen in China so far though! The circular path around the edge of the park had been sectioned off, and in each compartment was either a choir, a solo singer or a dance troupe. There were probably around 20 different acts, though as we kept walking around the path it felt like there were dozens more! And each of them had their speakers turned up as loud as they could possibly go, probably in an attempt to drown put the neighbouring acts, but to no avail. It was so surreal!

Friday 6th May - Pandas! We went with a trip through the hostel to the nearby Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, home of Jian Qiao, the panda adopted by Cambridge University Press. Our tour guide made enquiries but apparently no-one knew which panda she was. We did see lots of pandas though, so we may well have seen her without knowing in! The grown pandas were lovely, although they just lounged about eating whatever bamboo was in reaching distance. The baby pandas were another matter! I'm guessing they were around a year old, and they had so much energy! They were play fighting, scampering up trees, so cute! not so good at getting back down from trees though. All the elegance we saw with the koalas in Australia was lost on these young cubs. Their tactic seems to be to get back down the tree as fast as they can, whether by climbing down the trunk or by dangling from the end of a branch, and then just letting go. Sometimes they fell from quite a height! Silly baby pandas.

Saturday 7th May - Qingcheng Shan. The guidebook describes this as a nice day out to a small mountain which is easily done in a day. Not so! It was quite a trek! Fortunately the Chinese, industrious as ever, have seen build steps the entire way up, as well as line the route with speakers disguised as stones playing traditional Chinese music. The path is dotted with temples, the entrances of which have been taken over by hawkers selling all manner of tourist tat. After climbing the steps steadily for a few hours, the summit was finally in sight in the form of a large pagoda at the top of the mountain. However, we weren't allowed to see it. Chinese tourists were, but we weren't. With a stern "no!" we were turned away from the pagoda. We met an American girl en route who said the same thing happened to her. They told her that they were doing restoration work, and that the camera-laden family that had just passed through before her were actually workers. Needless to say, we were a little disappointed!

Sunday 8th May - We didn't do anything much today. Having been hot and humid so far, the weather finally turned and we had rain and storms.

Monday 9th May - Dujiangyan Irrigation Project. This was actually much nicer than it sounds! The Project is a 2000 year old irrigation system that revolutionised farming in this region. And it was so well built and so effective that it is still functioning today. Pretty impressive! They've turned the area into a lovely park so we had a nice stroll about. The park is so big that we managed to come out of it miles from where we went in. Given that we needed to get a bus back, and the bus stopped at the other entrance, this caused a little panic! But we were able to work it out and it gave us a chance to walk through the town of Dujiangyan a little. They've really made the most of the irrigation system with little stream run throughout the town and waterwheels picking up water and pouring it into little gullies that run along pavements.

Tuesday 10th May - the ancient town of Pingle. 'Ancient' was a bit misleading. The old town certainly is very old, but the air-conditioned shops and restaurants took away any element of ancient. Still, it was a very different experience to the cities we've seen so far. The souvenir shops contained handmade items and not the mass-produced stuff we usually see. The fish restaurants killed your selected dish in a bucket in the street outside the restaurant. And I don't think they get too many Westerners out here, given the way everyone was gawping at us.

Our tour guide, one of the staff from the hostel, is from this town, so for lunch we actually went to her family home and had a meal cooked by her mother. Her family live on a tea plantation, and driving out there we were in proper rural China - rice paddies and rape seed oil crops nestled amongst orangeries and tea plants, with people tending to the crops wearing traditional straw hats. Take away the minivans and motorbikes and we could have been transported hundreds of years back in time.

After lunch we went out the back and picked tea leaves. This was definitely one of the highlights of our trip. It was so peaceful up there, far away from the noise of the city. The sun was shining and we could actually see blue sky for a change, instead of the constant grey haze we were so used to seeing. And to stop us getting too hot in the sun, we had umbrella hats - the modern equivalent to the traditional straw hats. Our guide's mother thought Chris looked hilarious in this and couldn't stop laughing. She said he looked like a mushroom!

The last bit of our trip was out to see a temple. The path leading up to the temple was lined with Buddhas carved out of the rocks on one side, and towering bamboo on the other. At the temple we sat down with a little old lady as she thumbed through an old book of the Chinese zodiac to find which animal we all were and what this year would bring us. Lindsay is a rooster and Chris is a snake, which apparently is a good match! Also, Lindsay need sto by a lottery ticket as this is going to be my lucky year!

Wednesday 11th May - Leshan and Emei Shan. This is the home to a massive Buddha carved out of the rock face along a river. It's quite spectacular. Not long after we entered the park we were able to see the top of his head poking out over some railings. Straight away you get a sense of how big this thing is, when you're standing beside his ear and it's almost as long as you are tall! We then descended the narrow stairs to his massive feet, along with several dozen pushy Chinese tourists. After admiring the Bhudda up close we then hopped on a tour boat to view him as he was meant to be seen - from the water. And it's only from the river that you can see the two guardian figures carved into the rock either side of the Bhudda. I have no idea how they managed to create these massive sculptures on the side of a cliff above a river all those hundreds of years ago.

After this we headed off to Emei Shan and stayed the night at Teddy Bear Hotel (how do they come up with these names?). Although this is billed as a hotel, it's pretty much a hostel. It's got much the same set up as all the other hostels we've stayed in, but cheaper and with lovely hotel rooms!

Please note that we did this trip without any tour guides! We are now gallivanting about making our own way to sights instead of relying on the hostels. It's all terribly exciting!

Thursday 12th May - to the summit of Emei Shan. We'd come here in order to tackle Mount Emei. The plan was to spend a day climbing the mountain, spend a night in one of the many monasteries up there, then climb down the next day and head back to Chengdu. However, this plan went right out of the window once we'd sat down with the hotel owner and discussed it with him. Apparently we wouldn't have made it to the top on the first day, and we wouldn't have made it back down for the last bus to Chengdu on the second day. Doh! So we followed his suggested route instead.

So today we got the bus from where we were staying in Bauguo to Leiping, which is a fair way up the mountain. From there we climbed to the summit of the mountain. This was just two hours solid trudging up hundreds of stairs in the rain. When we got to the top the whole mountain was covered in mist - we couldn't see a thing! At times we could barely see twenty metres away! The mists did lift ever so slightly to reveal one of the most amazing things we have seen in China so far. At the top of some stairs lined with large white elephants is a huge, golden Bhudda with 8 faces pointing in all directions sitting on top of some elephants. It is magnificent and took our breath away. It was just such a shame that it was so misty. The statue kept disappearing into the fog.

Friday 13th May - Emei Shan again. It was another grey and rainy day so instead of the four hour trek we were planning to do around the lower peaks and temples of Emei Shan we decided to focus our efforts on visiting the main attraction - wild Chinese macaque monkeys! There's a whole area in the mountains which is a reserve for them, and there all sorts of wooden walkways and rope bridges to get around and get you up close and personal with the monkeys. The monkeys are well used to getting fed by tourists, so for the most part they sit on the railings grabbing at people's arms as they go past in case they have any treats. Apparently they can get quite aggressive but we didn't see anything like that. Well, apart from the one that growled at Chris. That was a little frightening and we moved quickly along to more friendly monkeys! After a while we left the monkeys and, due to the poor weather, gave up on Emei Shan entirely and headed back to Chengdu.

We finally got round to having hotpot, a dish the Sichuan province is famous for. What an experience that was! There's a gas burner in the middle of the table, onto which goes a large vat full of stock - in our case very spicy stock full of burning chilli peppers and tastebud-numbing peppercorns! You then cook the various meats and vegetables you've ordered yourself by chucking them in the stock and picking them out when they're done. As we had no idea what we were supposed to be doing, we spent most of the time sitting helplessly waiting for various waitresses to show us what to do - we felt very silly! It was very tasty though.

Saturday 14th May - back in Chengdu and off to Lhasa! We just killed time today whilst we wait for our train to Tibet. The train takes 44 hours. Yes, we've got to spend nearly two whole days cooped up in a train! And it's not the Orient Express! I had hoped that, given how long everyone will be on the train, the facilities would be a bit better than the other trains we've used, but no. It will be just like the hard sleeper train we got from Xi'an to Chengdu, except that the carriages will be pumped with oxygen as we head for higher grounds to help us acclimatise and hopefully avoid altitude sickness. We've stocked up on food, books and apps for the ipad, so we should be okay!

We'll be in Tibet for 8 days, during which we'll be chauffeured around with own our driver and guide. This is a condition of the permit to get into Tibet, to make sure we don't sneak off and see/report things the Chinese government would rather we didn't. It makes the whole thing very expensive as we have to pay for both the guide and driver's food and accommodation as well as our own.

Bye!
Lindsay and Chris