Leshan Hotels
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Giant Buddha
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Leshan has the Biggest Buddha in the World towering in at 71M high. His ears alone are 7M long and his big toe is bigger than an average family. Now I've seen literally 1000s of Buddhas on my trip so far, but this is something you got to see for yourself. I thought the reclining Buddha at Wat Po in Bangkok was big, but it's only 46M long. For yet another early start, I got up at 6am. I had heard that if you don't get there before the tour groups, the lines to walk down to the Grand Buddha's feet are horrendously long. Judging by the many barricades set up at the top of the stairs to go down and the signs telling you to "Keep Morder",
you could be there awhile if you get there any time after noon. Leshan is about 2 hours away from Chengdu so even leaving around 7am we wouldn't get in to see the Buddha until around 10am at best. We were pretty lucky. As soon as we got off the bus, a minivan showed up and picked us up for 2Y per person and took us directly to the entrance (~15 mins). Trust me, take the minivan if it's an option for you. You COULD get to the entrance for 1Y by public bus, but you literally have to traverse the entire city before getting there (~1 hour). You're probably wondering what the catch is, right? Well so was I until they offered the services of their conveniently placed tour guide at the front of the minivan. If you speak Mandarin, maybe it's worth it, but for me, I prefer to wander around on my own. It wasn't a hard sell and when we declined his services, they just pointed us in the direction of the ticket booth.
Once inside, you can't help but notice that the trash cans are very unique.
Each one has a different statue in front of it to make it less obtrusive and quite ornate. There are many more Buddhas inside of varying size and shapes. I rubbed the belly of the happiest looking one for good luck. Stopping to look at some of the detail of the Buddhas, I saw probably the best reconstruction job of a beheaded Buddha I've seen in China. It looked as if the head was chopped off cleanly by a professional stone mason and just set right back on top without missing a piece. It's a long day trip from Chengdu, but worth it to check off that imaginary box of seeing the biggest Buddha in the world. I'd like to tell you about the bus ride from Chengdu to Leshan, but I fell asleep both ways before the bus left the station. Man was I tired. I was sad that Anna and Dennis were leaving so soon after they got to Sichuan, but I was also glad that I was going to be able to sleep in and just chill out for a few days after they left.
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