Holy mountains, huggable pandas and hot pots
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2004
1
39
70
Trip End
Nov 10, 2005
Chengdu,
China
Saturday, June 4, 2005
On arrival in Chengdu, we finally founda guesthouse that actually catered for international tourists and even offered tours. The rest of our day was spent trying to find some cheap local food - once again the places suggested in our guide book appeared to have been demolished to make way for more high rises. We eventually found a food market in amongst the multitude of KFC and McDonalds and as usual had some problem communicating that Kate doesn't eat meat, but we finally managed to eat.
The next day we caught a local bus to Quin Cheng Shan, a holy Taoist mountain, National Park and World heritage site, an hour from Chengdu and had a fantastic day climbing up to the top past many active temples, forests, gorges and tea houses. That evening we tried local Sichuanese hot pot - a pot filled with spiced stock that you cook veggie and meat sticks in then eat - somehow we managed to go through 490 sticks
Grinding the beans for tofu
! our most expensive meal in China to date, but quite delicious. We took a tour out to the country to visit a farmhouse where we got to help make a form of tofu using a big stone grinder, see their huge gardens and try our luck at fishing (we caught some fish, nothing worth eating though), before enjoying a feast of food fresh from the garden. Michael spent the next few hours licking his lips at the thought of the bowl of double-cooked pork he had enjoyed. We also visited a small historic town, and drank more tea, of course.
On our final day in Chendu, we visited the Chengdu Panda Research Centre and had close up views of beautiful pandas who didn't seem to mind us watching them munch down kgs of bamboo. In the afternoon we went to a peaceful Buddhist temple where we enjoyed a feast of vegetarian food cooked by monks. Kate wasn't too keen on trying their imitation meat and we accidently ordered a dessert as a main course but it was all very nice. The gardens around the temples were also particularly nice and we wandered around watching turtles in the ponds and older Chinese playing Mah Jong, drinking tea and socialising. The public gardens in China have been very inspiring in their design and use and seem increasingly important in the booming Chinese cities where public space is rare.
