On Wednesday (13th) we went on a day trip with our pals Paul and Ian to see the worlds biggest carved stone Buddha. We drove to Leshan which is to the south of Chengdu it took about 3 hours with Jane, Paul and Ian squished into the back seat of a mini mini van whilst Mark was able to stretch out and enjoy the space of the front seat although he did have to watch closely all of the near collisions due to the crazy driving (this driver did use his indicators occasi...

We arrived in Chengdu after flying from Xi'an yesterday and what did we do as soon as we got to our hostel; thats right booked our panda tour!So today we got up pretty early (after watching Jaws last night) and headed off on our tour bus to Chengdu Panda Research Base; this is where the pandas are.What can we say but it was totally awesome, we saw loads of pandas, some climbing trees, most of them were eating or sleeping as pandas do, one stole the others foo...