China, Leshan: Big Ole Buddha Near a Sacred Mountain

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After a few days in the large city of Chengdu, we decided to venture out into surrounding areas to see a couple of special Chinese sights. The first place we visited on our day trip was Leshan and, after spending the morning there, we ventured on to E'mei Shan. The entire trip lasted over 12 hours, so we felt that we had gotten our money's worth that day.

In order to organise transport to the two places, we first had to find a group of people willing to share a vehicle with us for the day. At the Sim's Cosy Guesthouse travel agency, we asked about transport options to the two places and we were given a form to post on their bulletin board, asking if any guests there wanted to join us for the trip. The cost of hiring a van and driver was fixed, so the more people we could get to fill up the van, the cheaper the price would have been for us. We were in luck and had enough interest to fill a large van with 11 people and, before we knew it, we were all packed into the van, heading for Leshan.

The travel agency at Sim's was very helpful; they told us to leave really early in order to maximise our time that day, since the journey to Leshan from Chengdu took two hours there and two hours back. Also, we told that that Leshan's main attraction was visited by many, many Chinese tourists every day, and that we were advised to make an early start in order to beat most of the crowds there.

The main attraction at Leshan was the enormous Buddha statue that is carved into the side of a mountain. Not only was the statue enormous, but it was also the largest Buddha statue in the world. Upon arriving at Big Buddha, our group agreed on the time for everyone to meet back for lunch, so that we could eat quickly and get to E'mei Shan with most of the afternoon to go trekking there.

To visit Big Buddha, we were given the choice of either walking around the large Buddha statue using a path that circumnavigated it, or taking a ferry that would stop in front of the Buddha, enabling us to take photos. Everyone in our group wanted to walk around Big Buddha to get some exercise, except for a Polish-Argentinian woman (who is actually now American and living near Beijing with her family), who thought that the boat would have been a good idea. Once she heard what the rest of the group wanted to do, though, she easily acquiesced and went on the walk with us.

Walking around Big Buddha proved to be the better option, as the route was simple and it gave us the opportunity to see the giant statue from all angles. The path from the entrance to the statue only took around 5 minutes to get there, and then there was a steep set of stairs that descended to the base of the mountain, where we were able to gain an excellent view of the magnificent stone carving. The extremities on the statue were so huge that it was a struggle to fit the entire statue in our small camera lens; one foot alone was over twenty times the size of a person!

Once we visited the base of Big Buddha, we walked up the other set of steep stairs that were carved into the mountain on the other side. The second set of stairs overlooked the river and were slightly behind the Buddha, and the climb was very steep. At the top of that set of stairs, we walked around the park area and had a laugh at some of the Chinese to English translations on the signs that were posted there. The entire area around Big Buddha was very nice and well laid out, but after another 30 minutes of walking around, we were ready to eat lunch.

For lunch, we ordered a couple of dishes to share; the spicy tofu with minced pork was much tastier than the bland egg fried rice that we ordered. We have mentioned in our Chengdu journal entry that we have had trouble finding good fried rice in China, and we have started to think that Southeast Asia spoiled us a bit with regards to delicious food. Having said that, though, we have eaten some really nice meals in China, but we have had an equal amount of not-so-good ones. Lunch was a pleasant experience; we ended up sharing our food with some of the others in our group because the portions were really large.

Once everyone in our group had made it to the restaurant meeting point and had eaten some lunch, our driver took us to the famous mountain E'mei Shan. It took another 45 minutes to arrive at this next stop and our driver dropped us off at the bus station positioned in the small town at the base of the mountain, where we needed to take a mountain bus up to the cable car ticket office. We had decided to take the cable car to the midway point on the mountain and start our trekking from there.

The bus up the mountain cost 30 RMB (£2 or $3.90) each and we also had to pay for an entrance ticket to the mountain, which was 120 RMB (£8 or $15) each. To top that off, we each had to pay another 40 RMB (£2.70 or $4.50) for the cable car journey to Wannian Monastery, the midway point where we started our trekking. It's amazing how much influence a UNESCO seal of approval on a place can cause prices to skyrocket extortionately and be overpriced compared to non-UNESCO sights that we visited in China...

Once we were all penniless and trekking along the paths cut into the mountain, we had to step back and laugh at the number of men with shoulder chairs dotted around the mountain, carrying tourists who were too lazy to walk up or down the paths. To be fair, the only people we saw taking this mode of transport were some Chinese tourists that we passed; we were glad that we didn't see any foreigners being that lazy!

At Wannian Monastery, there was a group of large, aggressive, hairy monkeys that belonged to a new species of macaques that we had not yet seen on our travels. The creatures were pretty ferocious and attacked visitors who were walking up the stairs leading to the monastery entrance. They were ferocious when kept from taking people's bags or other possessions, but there were plenty of guards around the monastery with very large sticks, and these guards beat the monkeys away when they got too leery.

Part of the reason we think that the monkeys were so aggressive was because they have been beaten many times by these sticks, but also because the Chinese tourists really tease the monkeys in a way that they should not tease them. After spending a lot of time in Malaysia where animals are treated with more respect, it was a shock to see this behaviour from the Chinese.

During our afternoon trek on E'mei Shan, we saw many great views of the lush green valleys situated between the tall peaks. We also passed through an area with many beautiful little bridges over a few small gorges, a couple of waterfalls and an ornate pavilion. We kept a reasonable pace during the trek, but we did have to keep slowing down to allow the American family (mostly the mother) to catch up with our group. The trek lasted for several hours and we visited a second temple called Quinyin Monastery before heading to the Monkey Ecological Area where we expected to see monkeys that were a little more well behaved. Boy, were we wrong.

The preserve was actually more like a cheap circus than what we expected an ecological area for animals to be like. We could buy food to feed the macaques, which was fine since the food packets included natural items such as fruit and nuts. However, we were only allowed to feed monkeys from our hands if we paid to have our photo taken with them. This act alone, being photographed with a monkey, seemed very "unnatural" to us and contradicted the name of the place. There were also several monkey "trainers" in the area, all of whom had large sticks to "train" the monkeys when they got out of hand.

Monkeys living in the ecological area were very mangy and most of them had some sort of handicap due to an injury that appeared to have been caused from a fight, either with themselves or their beloved trainers. We didn't opt to have our photo taken with a macaque, but we did find a few to photograph on their own, as they wandered around the area. One of the boys in the American family that joined us that day was very excited to see the monkeys because he had never seen them before. We could understand his excitement as we felt the same way during our visit to Borneo back in January, but when he had a photo taken with a dirty, scruffy macaque with mange sitting on the top of his head, we had to chuckle quietly to ourselves.

When making our way down the mountain and back towards the town at its base, the path led us through a large touristy area with many stalls selling food items and souvenirs. There were actually many tourist stalls along all of the mountain paths that we took, which aimed to sell stuff to anyone and everyone, and this was quite annoying as we just wanted to enjoy the scenery and get some exercise.

After we made it past the stalls at the end of our trek, the path we were on was diverted across a large bridge spanning an emerald green lake with many mountain peaks behind it. The sky had started to clear for the first time that afternoon, so we got a final beautiful glimpse of E'mei Shan as we left to catch a mountain bus (another 20 RMB each!) down to the town where our driver was waiting to take us back to Chengdu. By this point the day had heated up and was very warm, so we enjoyed our last final walk in the area.

Feeling completely tired after the day's trek, we were glad to sit down in the van and catch a little sleep. Almost everyone in the van slept during the two-hour journey back to Sim's Cosy Guesthouse. When we arrived, it was late in the evening so we decided to have dinner. We were exhausted by this point, but still spent some time chatting with the Dutch couple who had been on our day trip before heading off to bed.