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Our plan for our last week in China was to go find some rural areas and go for a hike there. Sichuan seemed like the perfect place to do that and we had only heard good things about that province. We got there directly from Lhasa (we took a plane that time, no way we were gonna jump back on the train for another 48 hours episode)
I liked it straight away. Chengdu is just another big city, but people were already nicer than in Beijing / Shanghai and the second you get out of Chengdu, there is loads to do.
I chilled around town for the first couple of days, waiting for Abe to get back from Everest. I checked out a few museums, the Mao statue in the middle of town.
When Abe got there, we checked out the Panda reserve (awesome by the way, tons of pandas, including baby ones and you get to take a picture with a panda if you want to) There was a section with red pandas, but they looked like raccoons and nobody cared about them. The same day in the afternoon, we took a bus to Leishan to go see the biggest buddha ever.
The buddha was cool, and big indeed, but the place was crowded with tourists everywhere and we couldn't really work our way to a good spot in the crowd, and we got over the whole thing real quick. The pandas had made our day...
We then went to Emeishan, a village in north Sichuan with a sacred mountain that we decided to hike. It was pretty serious stuff : two days of going up (we slept in a monastery on the way up). Cool part about it : there was monkeys everywhere on the mountain. And since it's a sacred mountain with monasteries everywhere, the monkeys are used to people and they come right up to you to beg for food.
The monkey I decided to feed was a bit of a bastard and stole my whole bag of peanuts the second I got my eyes of his. Burn on me...
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