It's all about the Pandas ;-)

We finished our cruise at Chongching, and then made our way by train to Chengdu……………to see the PANDAS!!!!!!
I was more than a bit excited, Danny less so, but it just had to be done. I was a bit worried about being disappointed by the whole experience, and worried about how the Pandas may have been kept & treated. But I'm glad to say I wasn't & it was fab!
We visited the Pandas at the Chengdu Sanctuary & Breeding Centre & the whole environment was just so lovely- there were big open spaces for the Panda to climb & feed and they really did seem to happy in their 'natural' habitat. We got to see some babies too, although at 3 months they were quite big!
Unfortunately it absolutely chucked down with rain for over an hour so we couldn't leisurely walk around as much as we would have liked, but we both really enjoyed it & are glad we went. Even Danny ;-)

Beside the Pandas, another trip on our agenda was to visit the 80 foot Giant Buddha at Leshan. Unfortunately for us we visited on a Saturday, during the public holidays, on a red hot scorching 34 degree day, so to say it was packed out was an understatement. We had to wait in a 3 hour queue just to get to the beginning of the queue to even see the Buddah!
So we waited. And waited. And we were about 3 hours into queuing when I had a bit of a funny do, almost fainted and had to be carried out of the queue to sit down.
So after all of that I didn't even get to see the bloody Buddah!! Thankfully Danny did. And the pictures look pretty good so it was kind of worth it.

The Buddha is VERY big :-)

We explored Chengdu on the bus mainly, it was so easy to get around and in the evening we would go the the night market which was just so pretty, full of lots of little stalls & really good places to eat & drink. BBQ skewers & noodles were pretty much our Chengdu diet. Perfect!

The fabulous night market

It's all about the Pandas ;-)

Chengdu, China