Once again slaves to the sun we rose at 6 and headed to the peak to hopefully watch the spectacular sunrise. We were well prepared this time, as veterans of another peak sunrise, and dressed in pretty much everything we'd got, including managing to tuck our sleeping bags around our middles and inside our jumpers. Sadly, we'd not accounted for being so far West but in the same time zone and so had a long and lonely wait for an hour before others joined us and the light started to peep through. Once again nature was to deny us and all we saw was a bank of mist getting gradually more light.

We needed to get down quickly as we'd booked on the 3 gorge ship for the 10th so we decided to get the cable car and then the bus down to the base. The bus was an adventure as we headed down at breakneck speeds, relying totally on the brakes to save us at each corner. Thankfully they did their job and were rewarded with a spray of a hose at the base which produced clouds of steam as they cooled. Once off the bus we did a little last-minute souvenir hunt and had a lunch which was a disappointingly bland affair obviously designed with tourists in mind before boarding the bus back to Chengdu.

After checking back in to the hostel in Chengdu some hours later we headed to a restaurant recommended by the receptionist and allowed the waitress to order for us, hoping we'd get some fiery local dishes. Sadly, she must have decided we'd want something more bland and we were disappointed for the second time that day with a rather boring offering. We headed out to try and find a bar to celebrate our trip to the Buddhist pinnacle but found that, yet again, there was a sever lack of bars in our part of town. We had to content ourselves with an obscenely expensive warm Carlsberg and decided to just give up and head back to the hostel. On the way back we walked a different way and all of a sudden came across a nightclub with very attractive girls lining the entrance and the beats ringing out from a modern DJ. We looked at each other and walked on. As we sat having a nice cup of tea back in our room we reflected that maybe, just maybe, we were getting a little old!