Today, we went to Leshan (which literally means Happy Mountain). I had planned to go tomorrow but that means we’d be visiting on a Saturday and bigger crowds and queues. We thought we could pop into the bus station to get the tickets to Jiuzhaigou (departing in a couple of days time) and then head to Leshan straight after.
We did just that after breakfast at the hotel. We managed to get on the 0950 bus. We had been assigned seats on either side of the aisle but chose to seat ourselves together. The ticket-collector kinda indicated that we should be in our ticketed seats but didn’t seem to care too much. She did likewise to other people. When all passengers were on board, she came back and distributed tickets according to the seats we had taken. What a great way of addressing the issue!
The 2.5h journey was all in pea-soup weather conditions. How much shit do you have to pump into the air to get smog like that! The scenery out of town included tea plantations but with that kind of pollution, I wouldn’t like to drink the tea. I’m not sure if they wash the tea leaves before drying/fermenting them.
John (US) and Kino (HK) were seated in front of us and we got chatting. We grabbed lunch together upon arrival at Leshan and ended up exploring together.
It was a fairly quiet walk to the hilltop after buying the tickets. Once at the top, we were faced with the reality of Chinese tourism. The queue to climb down to the base of Buddha was long, almost made up exclusively of domestic tourists. We were put off by the queue and postponed our problem by wandering the temple area then eased ourselves in the loo. My urinal had a sign “Enjoy fresh air after civilised urinating”. The others didn’t share the same caption so I presume they had other snippets of wisdom instead.
We walked over to the viewpoint to look at Buddha’s face from the side. It didn’t offer a view down to his feet. Kino and I were keen to join the queue down to Buddha’s feet where as Kim was definitely not keen (and was surprised that I was; obviously doesn’t know me well enough). John could be swayed.
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- How much shit do you have to pump into the air to get smog like this 2.5h away from the city.
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- I thought no satellite dishes (parabola) permitted. But it means do not throw anything down the cliff. But if you throw it DOWN rather than up or across, it wouldn’t be parabolic, right?
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- At the temple area.
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- Inside the temple.
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- Inside the temple.
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- Devotees behind the bank of burning candles.
In the end, we all joined the queue. It took about 15 minutes before we descended down the stairs. There was more waiting on the steps but it didn’t matter as we moved intermittently and got to see Buddha from a different angle each time we changed our possie. It helped greatly to have company to chat with and the 1h10 to Buddha’s feet went painlessly apart from the shoving by some others.
We admired the size of the statue from below and looked out at those who were doing the same by boat. Yeah, it would have been better by boat perhaps. But because of the time taken so far, it was going to be one or the other, and not both.
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- Buddha’s head from the viewpoint.
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- Queue to walk down to Buddha’s feet.
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- Queue to walk down to Buddha’s feet.
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- View from the stairway as we descended.
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- View from the stairway as we descended.
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- View from the base of Buddha.
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- View from the base of Buddha.
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- The stairway down.
Walking back up from the base, Kino and John wanted to explore the grounds some more. Kim and I had had enough and slowly bused back to the bus station. We toyed with the idea of taking the high-speed train but couldn’t find a reasonably-priced taxi (but we realised later that’s because it was 40km to the station).
It was a 20 minute wait for the next available bus and Kim was grumpy for not being able to board the immediate one, and also because I didn’t appear to have tried to get us on the train (which was a 1h instead of a 2.5h journey).Even though we had consecutive seat numbers for the bus, Kim was in row 1 and I was in the last row. A very kind man offered his seat so that I could be seated with Kim.
Arriving at Chengdu, we were dropped off around the corner from the terminal. As we were completely disoriented, we tried getting a taxi but to no avail. They were all full. We resorted to an electric motorcycle taxi which dropped us near the flash malls on Hongxing Road where we ate some dumplings at the Food Republic food hall before returning to retire.
Edit: Few days later, I still had very itchy, oozy lumps from insect bites from my day at Leshan.