It was straight from one Buddha to another as we were to be staying with Monks for the next three nights or that's what we thought. We had managed to arrive in Emei Shan right at the same time as some sort of Buddhist convention and our accommodation at the Baoguo Monastery had been given to all the visiting followers and Monks that had come from all over China for this conference. But we need not fear as our local guide (crazy Patrick) had sort us our some a...

It was time to leave the hustle and bustle of the city in search of spiritual enlightenment of the Buddhist variety and the first stop on our mini pilgrimage was a small town called Leshan. The bus took us from Chengdu straight to Leshan with a quick stop for lunch on the way. I was steering well clear of any spicy food as the Hotpot from the previous night had turned my insides into a washing machine full of hot lava! So after a quick feed and a short extr...

The transport to Chengdu was rather calm in comparison to our previous transfer day as the bus picked us up from the boat and took us to our train and with a final bus meeting us in Chengdu we arrived at our very nice hotel late on the Tuesday night. We knew that the next day was going to be busy so we hit the hay to save our energy for the early start. We met with our local guide Jonny who had organised our transport to the Chengdu Panda Research Institute ...

Before we could meet our cruise boat for our three night trip up the Yangzi River we had a day of travelling to get there. This involved a train journey of a couple of hours, then a wait for a night train. The first train we had hard seats shared with locals and gave us quite an insight into Chinese society as the majority of people were sitting in groups playing cards in a very excitably loud manner. There was also a family sitting opposite Paul and myself w...

We left Hong Kong by a combination of walking, subway and overland train which when you have a backpack on your back and one your front along with 7 other people all as equally loaded with luggage in probably one of the worlds most crowded cities you can appreciate that it was a bit of a mission. We got to the border checkpoint with mainland China, filled in our health declaration form, were heat scanned for swine flu and had passport stamped and we were in Chi...