We arrived back in Chengdu on Monday afternoon, and spent the rest of the day relaxing in the hostel and chatting to the other travellers there. We debated whether or not a young guy at the other side of the room was the same guy we'd met at the top of the mountain that morning, and decided that it couldn't be, because "the other guy was chubbier, and he had a beard". Not only were we wrong, but Travis (the guy) overheard the whole conversation. Dan also managed to chat in Chinese several times to a Chinese-looking guy who later had to turn around and explain that he was actually Dutch. Despite these and other potentially-awkward moments, we managed to amass a large group to play drinking games with us all evening whilst we waited for the arrival of a sixth volunteer, Callum, who was coming to join us from Hong Kong.

On Tuesday, we woke late and made our way to an 'ancient' village an hour or so outside of Chengdu. Naturally, it wasn't remotely ancient and it was absolutely packed with domestic tourists, but we had a pleasant afternoon wandering about in the sun and taking photos. The problems began when we arrived back at the bus station and saw the enormous crowd waiting for the buses back to Chengdu. We already had our tickets, but so did everyone else so it was no advantage at all. We followed the example of several others and climbed across the metal seats in the midst of the crowd to get further ahead, but twenty minutes later the queue hadn't moved at all. At times, the people at the front would get excited about the movement of a bus or something outside, and then the whole crowd would push forward shouting dragging each other along in the crush. Beth was caught against one of the metal chairs when this happened the first time, and had a huge bruise for the rest of the week where she was shoved into it. Not fancying the idea of waiting with the mob for who knew how long, we joined forces with an English-speaking couple waiting nearby and pushed our way back out of the queue and went to hire taxis instead. That evening was scheduled for our first night out in Chengdu. We'd heard great things about a club called Jellyfish so, after another evening drinking with our new friends in the hostel, we headed there. Jellyfish turned out to be a tiny two-story club in a small plaza, but it was packed with people and those people were actually dancing, so we were happy.

Wednesday was wet and miserable, but the six of us plus Matt, a new guy staying in the same dorm room as us, walked to People's Park in hopes of having our ears cleaned - apparently the thing to do there! Once in the park, I was beckoned over to dance with a little old man waltzing by himself to his radio. I hadn't a clue what was going on, but I followed his steps (sort of) and spun around obediently when he gestured for me to, smacking my head on the camera hung round my wrist each time. Beth managed to catch a wonderfully awkward film of this, so I might be able to upload that soon! Further into the park, we found the infamous fence where pushy parents advertise for spouses for their children. These adverts give the age, height, often weight, and other details of the children, as well as the criteria that must be met by their prospective partners. The boys made the mistake of lingering too long in front of one sign, which prompted the mother who'd posted the sign, who was lurking several feet back, to leap out and start questioning them about their interest in her daughter, taking out her phone to show them pictures of her and everything. Not long after this, it began absolutely bucketing it down so, after a few minutes refuge in a museum (the lady here gave us newspapers and bags to put over our heads to defend from the rain), we ran into a nearby teahouse to hide. We were given a little room to ourselves, where we closeted ourselves away drinking tea (I ordered Jasmine tea to be adventurous and it was foul) and playing "Beth's Special Rummy", our new favourite card-game, for the rest of the afternoon. Even back at the hostel, we ended up spending a lot of the evening teaching Special Rummy to other guests - and getting increasingly angry with Callum, who was somehow winning every round.

We had to be up early on Thursday morning to go and visit the giant pandas. Somehow we were in the first group of people to reach each exhibit, so we always had a good view of the pandas, who were all as active as could be expected. They are the most useless animals though, they're like drunk babies. We watched one get stuck upside down in a little fence in its exhibit for a good two minutes; another spent a minute stretching out from a balcony area to reach a leaf, dropped the leaf as soon as he caught it and then spent the next minute and a half trying to get safely back onto the balcony. Naturally, our favourite pun game was a key feature of the outing, although Dan kept panda-ing for attention by repeating the same pun at every opportunity. A personal highlight on the tour was the film about how they assist the pandas in the breeding process, which was just hilarious. It started by comparing panda breeding to sending men to the moon and building the Great Wall and continued by showing clips of "Successful Natural Breeding" (panda porn), "Unsuccessful Natural Breeding" (a female panda snarling and chasing the male panda in circles around the room) and several mother pandas repeatedly kicking their newborn cubs across the floor. I liked walking through the red panda enclosure too, as there are holes built into the fences so the pandas can come and run across the same paths as the visitors. For the longest time, we couldn't find see any red pandas at all, let alone ones close to us, but Beth and I spotted one inching closer and closer to a hole in the fence just as the tour guide was calling us all to move on. After several minutes teasing us by sniffing about near the hole and then making as if to walk off again, the red panda came through to the path and scurried about less than a foot away from us - I have photographic evidence! Most of our group had already moved on by this point, so Beth and I were two of only about four people who saw the red panda so close, which I feel pretty smug about!

That afternoon we went for a leisurely walk to a nearby temple; this was fairly uneventful, but we did stumble upon some kind of bird club in the temple gardens. This was where a group of elderly men from the city were sat chatting, surrounded by the pet birds they'd brought with them. The birds' cages were strung along a mesh of bamboo poles balanced amongst the trees, so the pavilion where the men sat talking was completely surrounded. Close behind the temple, we found a small market of metal jewellery, singing bowls, Buddhas of every size and style and a plethora of other nick-nacks, where we spent more time browsing and haggling. (My newest and most successful excuse for not buying things is telling people I'm a backpacker and only have a very small bag. Telling people plainly that I don't like whatever they're showing me also works well, but I feel too rude to use it more often.) In the evening, we gathered our newest friends from the hostel for several hours of drinking games and then an excursion to Chengdu's Bar Street. We were ready to leave the first bar in disgust after learning how much a single beer cost (98Y, basically £10!), but someone befriended a big group of Chinese guys and we were all invited over to share their drinks and play drinking games with them, before going to finish the night at Jellyfish again.

On Friday morning we were up bright and early (ish) to go and visit the Giant Buddha at Leshan. Well, most of us were - Beth opted out, as she wasn't feeling great after the night before and didn't know how she'd cope with the three hour bus-ride. I spent a lot of the journey there suspecting she'd had the right idea, and our semi-disastrous lunch did nothing to reassure me. Dan ended up arguing with the waitress over the quality of his fried rice (she refused to accept that it was burnt, even though half of it was black and you could smell it from a foot away), she banged the bowl down on the table anyway and stomped off and I had to go to the kitchens to argue/plead for it to be replaced. Luckily, the Buddha itself was great: absolutely huge, and exactly how it looks in photos. The steps you had to climb from his head to his feet were brutal though, very narrow and sometimes as high as a foot. As per, other tourists had used the carved niches in the cliff walls to leave their litter, so the wind-worn, thousand-year-old tableaus of Buddhas in the walls were accompanied by empty water bottles and Coke cans. We had the customary group photos taken at the feet of the Buddha and took turns jumping to touch his toes, then began the monstrous climb back up all those stairs.

For our last night in Chengdu, we girls abandoned the boys, who just wanted to stay at the hostel and play pool, and headed back to Jellyfish for the last time. This was probably the busiest we'd seen the club, and the dance-floor was being dominated by a very old, very drunk Italian guy (aka Grandpa Boogy) who spent about 10 minutes dancing on a pole at the front of the club to very loud applause. Beth and Nicole went home after a couple of hours so, as had happened on our first night out, it was just Cat and I left dancing until the club closed.

Chengdu was one of my favourite places we visited. We came very close to cancelling the entire trip after we heard about the earthquake in the same province, only two weeks before we were due to arrive, so we could easily have been sat in Jiujiang twiddling our thumbs for the whole week instead. Luckily, Chengdu itself was totally unaffected by the earthquake - you wouldn't even have known there'd been one - and we had a really brilliant week there.

Ella xxx