Lovely cute Pandas and a Giant Buddha!

Feeding Time
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Another overnight train took us from xi'an to chengdu.  Have to say the trains are dead on, but we are choosing the soft sleeper that houses 4 people in bunk beds, on the first train there was me and dale and this chinese guy and his mother, all ok there.  But on this train we found out bunks and looked in and there was a man, his wife, the mother in law and a kid and Ijust looked at dale and said not a hope that all of us are sleeping in there, but whenthe train was about to leave the man got off and the kid started to wail ... there were other travellers in the sleepers beside us and they were just looking at us with pity ! I thought we were in for a sleepless night but it wasnt so bad in the end, the kid slept most of the night so i can't really give out and anything is better than having an old chinese man that hacks and spits on the floor !!!

Red Panda
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When we check into our hostel, we grabbed a taxi out to the Panda Sanctuary on the outskirts of the town, they were sooo cute, If i could have gotten my hands on one, we would be coming home with a panda but I couldn't get in near them.  We went by the panda nursery where there were about 4 pandas that were only a couple of months being bottle fed and in playpens.  After that it was onto the kindergarten as they called it and there were a good few of them playing around.  We made our way down to see the adult pandas that were a whole lot bigger.

If i could have gotten my hands on one, we would be coming home with a panda ....

Dale & Seo at Dafo
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The next day we got a bus down to a place called Le Shan, to see 'Dafo'.  Hes a giant buddha that was carved out of a mountain to watch over the sailors cause the river used to be pretty rough in that area.  He is massive, will just put pics up to show you all because theres no other way to describe it, his ear lobe alone is about 23ft, and before anyone asks, I didnt find the measurements of anything else !!!

From Le Shan we were reliably informed by chengdu tourist information that we could get from le shan to chongching rather than back tracking to chengdu.  So we got on a bus that wasnt as nice as the first one, it was a pretty rickety old things, and the other passengers were really just a bit weird.  There was one that continuously stared at us, another that hacked and spit on the bus floor and then snotted everywhere.  We were just disgusted.  The bus journey we thought was meant to be about 3-4 hours.  When we were about 5 hours into it, I really thought that we were going the wrong way, no one spoke english and we couldn't figure out where it was going, so when we got to a petrol station for a toilet break we thougth we were nearly there but nope, we had about another 2.5 hrs to go.  When Dale came back from the jacks he didnt look happy, he said that there was a man in there just staring at him waiting for him to unzip - I am surprised the dude didnt get a dig !!

The Giant Buddha
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We eventually got to chongching and were going to do a 3 day cruise down the yangtzee but had met a few people that said the smog/fog was so bad that you couldnt see anything so we made an executive decision to catch a flight to Guilin and spen a few extra days there !