Summer 2007 Travels Part 3: Chengdu

Last time I posted about our hike at Tiger Leaping Gorge, near Lijiang.  After the hike, we flew to Chengdu in Sichuan province.  If you've heard of Chengdu, it's probably because of the massive May 2008 earthquake that occurred near there and killed about 70,000 people.  I also visited Chengdu again in January 2008, but I saw the main sites on my first visit to Chengdu during our Summer 2007 travels.

We spent our first day in Chengdu exploring town.  We also met up with my friend Dan Lewis, who spent the summer in Chengdu and who I know from his visits to my school as part of the ELT Edge English Week team.

A temple complex near our hostel in Chengdu. I've forgotten the name now :(.

Some Chengdu-ites. Or some Chengdu-ers. Or whatever you call people from Chengdu.

Virtually every city in China has a big statue of Mao, but I think this one in Chengdu is one of the biggest.

By far the greatest toilet advertisement I've ever seen.

This is Dan Lewis, the friend we met up with in Chengdu. He performed at this restaurant on a regular basis.

Chengdu is famous for its pandas.  Pandas live in a very particular climate, and are probably the pickiest eaters found in the animal kingdom.  They eat a very particular variety of bamboo that primarily grows in Sichuan province, and the majority of wild pandas live in Sichuan.  Chengdu is home to a panda breeding research center.  We visited the center on our 2nd day in Chengdu, and one of the things I most remember is this hilarious video talking about panda reproduction at the center.  As the wikipedia panda article states, pandas apparently lose their desire to mate when they are in captivity.  The scientists at the breeding research center have tried things like viagra and panda pr0n (videos of other pandas mating) to get the pandas to mate.  The video talked about this in extremely clinical language...something to the effcct of "the scientists show pandas a motion picture of other pandas displaying amorous behavior"  (I specifically remember the phrase "amorous behavior", which I thought was pretty awesome).  One of the other really interesting thing about Pandas is their diet.  They eat about 20 pounds of bamboo a day.  Bamboo has very low nutrition, so the panda is eating pretty much anytime its not sleeping (come to think of it, that sounds a bit like how some people live...).  

"Mmmmm...this bamboo tastes good...."

Pandas apparently enjoy wrestling. Which explains why the WWF symbol is a panda.

Red pandas. They move really fast and were hard to capture on film.

OK, the gown looks a little fruity, but they made you where it if you wanted to hold the red panda. I think you can also hold the Giant Pandas at the breeding center, but it costs about ten times as much.

After visiting the Panda center in the morning, we visited the Leshan Grand Buddha in the afternoon.  I was under the impression that it was the biggest Buddha in the world, but after checking the Wikipedia list, I just learned that it's the 6th biggest.  However, the oldest of the bigger Buddhas was built in 1995, and the Leshan Grand Buddha was completed in 803 AD after 90 years of work...so I still think it's more impressive :).  At 233 feet, it's almost twice as high as the Statue of Liberty.  It's carved directly out of a cliff face.  I wasn't able to get a good picture of the whole thing (you have to pay extra to go on a boat to where you can actually capture the whole thing in one photo), but here's a photo of the whole thing courtesy of Wikipedia:

Look how small the people are!

Anyhow, here are the photos I took...

After our two days in Chengdu, we left in the evening on a sleeper train to Xi'an. The landscape along the train route the next morning was amazing. I was feeling particularly lazy and didn't feel like getting out of bed to take pictures, but my cousin Tim took a bunch, and posted them at his blog, so check 'em out if you like awesome landscape photography.  

I've been two Xi'an two other times, so check out those posts if you want to read about it.  I won't be posting about it this time (I didn't really even take any photos).  After a day in Xi'an we took another sleeper train to Beijing so that Tim could catch his flight back to Japan, and then Mari flew out a couple days later, and I returned to Seattle for the summer a few days after that.

That's it for my posts about my Summer 2007 Travels.  I've still got some more stuff to post about Summer 2008 (including the Olympics), so keep reading/subscribing if I haven't lost you yet.

Summer 2007 Travels Part 2: Tiger Leaping Gorge

Last time, I posted about the time Mari, Tim and I spent in Lijiang.  After spending two days there, we went on to Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the deepest gorges in the world.  Wikipedia says it could be considered the world's deepest gorge, depending on the criteria used.  According to this site, the peaks on either side of the gorge are about 19,000 feet high, and the river at the bottom is at about 6,000 feet, so the gorge itself is 13,000 feet from the bottom all the way up to the peaks above it.  Just to give you an idea of high incredibly deep the gorge is, think of Mount Rainier.  It's 14,410 feet, so the gorge is more than 90% of the height of the tallest thing most of us have ever seen.  Or think of the Grand Canyon.  Wikipedia lists it as being about 6,000 feet at its deepest point, so TLG is more than twice the depth of the Grand Canyon.  I've run out of superlatives to describe the gorge.  And yet, for some reason, virtually no one has heard of TLG, outside of the Chinese and tourists who visit China.  I took tons of pictures (the folder on my computer has more than 160), but it's impossible to capture the grandeur of the gorge on film (or on SD card, as it were).   

The gorge has two main paths.  There is a low road close to the river, where cars can drive, and a high trail, several thousand feet above the road, where you can hike.  We took the high trail and hiked the length of the gorge over the course of two days.  It's easily the most scenic hike I've ever taken in my entire life, and I highly recommend a visit if you ever go to China.

The beginning of the gorge.

Takes your breath away, doesn't it?

There are many Naxi who live and work along the trail. This woman was engraving a sign.

There are many guest houses along the trail. This is the first one we passed, where we stopped for lunch the first day.

More gorge awesomeness.

Periodically along the trail, there would be these signs, letting you know how far to the next guest house. We wound up staying a night at the Halfway Guest House. They're not kidding when they advertise a "Scenic Toilet View", as you'll see shortly.

Tim, sitting on the balcony of the Halfway Guest House as the sun was setting.

This picture didn't turn out so great because there was no way to backup with the wall behind me...but this is the toilet with the scenic view. The wall only goes up to your waist, and you look right out at the 13,000 foot gorge while you relieve yourself :).

Sunset over the gorge.

Sunrise over the gorge, the next morning.

This is the Halfway Guest house from further down the trail.

It's not every day that you meet a herd of wild mountain goats on the trail of a 13,0000 foot gorge.

There were a few waterfalls on the trail.

You can see the road for cars on the right of this picture.

Tiger Leaping Gorge is so named because, according to legend, a tiger once leaped across it. This is the point where the tiger supposedly leaped.

Once we reached the end of the gorge, we caught a taxi back to Lijiang.  From there we flew to Chengdu, which I'll tell you about in my next post.

Summer 2007 Travels Part 1: Lijiang

When my classes ended after my first year in China (back in June 2007), I stuck around in China to do a bit of traveling before returning to Seattle for the summer. Two great friends also came to visit and traveled with me--Tim Marston (my cousin) and Mari Becker. I never got around to blogging about it before, and Tim's been on my case for a long time to post the pictures, so here you are, Tim :).

We went to some of my favorite places in China on that trip. There are so many great pictures to share that I'm going to split this in to multiple posts.  This first will be about our time in Lijiang.

Lijiang

From Beijing, we flew to Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan province, in southwest China.  We stayed there one night and headed straight to Lijiang the next day.  Lijiang is probably my favorite place in all of China.  These pictures don't really adequately capture what was so great about it.  It's this really old city with amazing architecture, canals, bridges and cobbled streets.  It's home to one of China's minority groups, the Naxi people.  One of the more interesting things about the Naxi is that they have the last surviving written language composed of pictographs (check this out for examples).  It looks a bit like Egyptian Hieroglyphics.  

Lijiang at night

The Naxi Orchestra. Unfortunately, the picture looks more interesting than the music was :(.

Naxi Writing.

There were Naxi people everywhere in the city making arts and crafts like this.

The roof tops of Lijiang.

The cobbled streets of Lijiang.

Locals dancing in the city square.

A few of the canals and bridges in Lijiang.

Tim, Mari and I.

A nearby park.

Holding a monkey is...more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Or something.

After spending 2 days in Lijiang, we headed to the nearby Tiger Leaping Gorge, which is one of the deepest gorges in the world.  I'll write about that in the next post.