Hi, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I couldn't keep up with my blog for the rest of the semester. Things were crazy... since my Inner Mongolia trip, I went to Shanghai, trekked across China (well not actually trekked and also not all over China but it was still a huge awesome trip), went to Korea, grudgingly took exams worth 60% of my grade and finished final projects worth 60% of my grade, and experienced so much more of Beijing.
But, I want to dedicate this post to my amazing trip during the last week of April and first week of May (this is our break due to Tsinghua's founding date and Labor Day holiday).
1. PLANNING
It's much more advantageous to plan if you know Chinese (a.k.a. me and 2 others in our travel group of 6). To buy the cheapest flights and trains, you use a mobile app that's only in Chinese. As the mom / person who's always willing to volunteer (sigh), I booked the flights and some trains for my group, and planned our first days of the trip. It took a while to decide where we wanted to go, but we settled with Chengdu (in Sichuan province), nearby destinations (Leshan, Emeishan, Qingcheng Shan/Dujiangyan), then Yunnan province, specifically the capital Kunming and the well-known travel destination of Lijiang. I WAS SO EXCITED!
Although we did split up "planning" initially, another matter was people actually following up on what they say they'd research, book, be responsible for, etc. A good half of our group followed through, but some didn't and that created some conflict later, as some of us who planned a lot felt that we had to carry the whole group throughout the trip (again, across China still, people only know Chinese, so if you need to ask for directions, order food, call taxis, figure out tickets, etc. etc. etc. Chinese is your life saver - I'm quite grateful that my parents made me go to Chinese school and that my Chinese was improving due to the class I was taking during the semester).
We budgeted that the whole 10-day trip would cost around $1000 USD. Not bad, huh? I miss China's prices... Read till the end to see if we stuck to that budget.
2. CHENGDU
Chengdu is known for 2 things usually. (1) GIANT PANDAS (2) INSANELY SPICY FOOD. We obviously checked both off the list and more.
DAY 1
In the middle of the night, we arrived at our awesome hostel (FlipFlop Hostel; check ratings online for hostels because the ones we booked for the whole trip were actually quite nice). After a 6 hour sleep, we woke up to check out the center part of the city, which was covered in restaurants and shopping malls.
Our first stop was "Du Fu Cottage," an extremely peaceful, nature-y, well-put together site where the famous poet that I heard my grandma always talk about, Du Fu, used to live. The old red Chinese buildings, the beautiful trees, flowers, bonsai, ponds, etc., the soft sounds of birds and bugs, honestly made me feel like I could be poetic too (lols). Thank goodness for student discount - we got in for half price at 30 RMB.
Our next stop was a late lunch; quickly using Dianping (the better Yelp), I found a hot pot skewer place. We biked our ofos/mobikes to this restaurant, where from a huge selection of skewers, we chose the ones we wanted onto a woven tray. Though we ate a lot, we all ended up paying around 30 RMB each for the around 20 skewers we each got. Delicious and cheap!
Our 3rd stop was Wuhouci Temple (武侯祠), a temple built for an extremely famous Chinese character Zhugeliang from the Three Kingdoms period, known in one of the most famous works of Chinese history: Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I've heard about the story and the characters often, but I still don't know exactly what happened... the gardens and buildings were again really scenic and enjoyable. I tried to read as much Chinese as I can. Here, the best Chinese speaker in our group (not me) had to argue for several minutes to finally get the student discount on the tickets (they wanted to scheme us and not give it to us because our ID's were not full-time student IDs).
Next, we went to one of my most favorite streets in China: Jinli Ancient Street (锦里古街). Chengdu is known for a slower pace, a more "sit around and enjoy life" kind of vibe. This ancient street is so conducive to that perspective. You can lost for so long in the narrow streets, packed with tons of food stands, restaurants, tea houses, opera houses, craft stores, and more. After picking up street food here and there (cold spicy noodles, fried potato sticks, fried dough, meat skewers, spicy tofu, passion fruit juice, etc. etc. etc.), I bought a few souvenirs and took time to appreciate the liveliness as the sun set. The small streets were lined with tiny canals (I'm not sure about the right term); the water reflected the lights everywhere. We got to one area where there were tables to sit and appreciate the lights strewn across the whole area and live singing. It was so enjoyable...
Click through the photos to get a better idea :) But really my photos and words don't do this justice - definitely go visit for yourself. I'll help!
DAY 2
PANDAS!! Bright and early like 7:30AM we arrived at the Panda Research Base b/c we heard that the pandas are actually awake in the morning b/c they're hungry and want to eat food. But... the pandas weren't let out till 9AM and by then the whole park was so crowded with people (the most Westerners I've seen the entire trip). We were able to see some big, older pandas munch crazy aggressively and fast through bamboo, we saw another panda that fell asleep right after it pooped (in the same spot), and we saw lots of cute baby pandas! (They all have names and little intros.) We even got to see some red pandas and boastful peacocks. We later checked out a nice lake/garden area, but still not far away from stands selling food and souvenirs (that was a little annoying throughout the trip - most places were quite commercialized).
Soon after, we returned back to our hostel, grabbed our stuff, and took a 1-hour high-speed train to a sleepier town/city called Leshan to see the Leshan Giant Buddha. It's a massive Buddha built into the mountain, with lots of drawings on the walls, caves into which there were more statues of Buddhist figures, water spouts with dragon heads, etc. (we asked ourselves: who came up with this idea?? Did someone just feel bored and propose this and people just all put their time towards making this?? Interesting.) Over the course of the trip, I learned bits more about Buddhism, which has been fascinating. The steps to climb up and down this copper red-colored mountain were extremely steep, and my legs became so sore the next day. I also received a rude comment from Chinese tourists about the thickness of my legs - well sorry they have MUSCLES to CLIMB THESE BIG STEPS.
After that sweaty endeavor, we took the bus (we managed to do public transport across all the cities we went to quite well! Bless Amap!) to our hostel. On our way there, we saw middle school kids crowd around a snack stand with really tasty cheese sausages. Our hostel was once again quite nice - our room was Totoro themed! We freshened up, then ate dinner next door to eat a popular tofu dish () that has awesome sauce and Chinese people's favorite: innards! Don't worry, I stuck to pork. Then headed out to a night market for some food, not as lively but really local-feeling... unfortunately b/c I love food so much I rarely remembered to take photos of the food before consuming, but I remember having an interesting fried dessert, then mango shaved ice.
DAY 3
Yes, we're intense - we book a car to go to another popular destination: Mount Emei / Emeishan (峨嵋山). It is one of the most famous Buddhist mountains in China (has >100 monasteries/temples), is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and is known for all the scary monkeys a.k.a. Tibetan Macaques - they're known to go up to people, steal food, and even injure them. Feeling scared, my friends and I gobbled up all our snacks before we arrived. The bus ride up, and cable cars even further up, were quite pricey... and they only took cash, goodness.
When we got to a walking point, the tourist centers tricked 3 of us (not me) into buying extra clothing b/c it was apparently "cold" (it really wasn't cold up in the mountain). All along the path walking up, there were food and souvenir stands. Chinese tourists were plentiful too, since it was the Labor holiday. Skinny men repeatedly advertised their manual rides, where they hoisted you in a chair, all the way up the steps, so you wouldn't need to walk. People kept murmuring about the monkeys, which were no where to be seen. Apparently, they had stolen enough food the day before, so they were just sleeping in their caves today. Disappointing... but also safe for us I guess. We took another cable car up (so squishy... Chinese tourists don't care about personal space either I guess haha). We reached the famous Puxian Bodhisattva (Samantabhadra) statue, made entirely of gold. Surrounding it were tons of lanterns, everyday people praying, and the potent smell of incense. Surrounding it there was a beautiful temple, but likely built somewhat recently. There were tons of elephants, also implying Buddhism (my grandma explained before that an elephant might mean mental strength/luck, or protectors of the temple). As the sky was blue, the site from that high up (the mountain is 3000+ meters high) was magnificent, especially with the statue.
Later, we got dropped off at a midpoint and hiked for 2+ hours.. I hadn't hiked in a long time and it was tiring but rewarding! Not many people chose to take this uphill path, but it was so interesting to see the lives of the few people who lived here, in the mountains in little houses, trying to make 5 RMB off tourists who are thirsty for an ice pop or want to buy a small wood-carved craft. We saw chickens run wild, an abandoned school, mules carrying stuff, trails through forests, ancient-looking houses, tons and tons of nature, and more. Time felt so still... it really is another world. At the top was another of the many temples on the mountain, which we didn't even bother looking at given we had to rush back down to get the last bus down the mountain. We took the bus directly to the train station, and took the high-speed train all the way back to Chengdu, back to FlipFlop hostel. Then, we went to another lively food street (literally hundreds of people sitting on stools eating in the street), and a more bougie but still lively food/ancient street known as Wide and Narrow Alleys.
It was a tiring day.
DAY 4
Thankfully, China has the whole lucrative tourist business down, so we took a panda bus from the city center (5 minute walk from our hostel) that would bring us to another 2 top destinations: Mount Qingcheng (青城山) and the Dujiangyan irrigation system (都江堰, built 250 BC). The ticket price we paid included discounted entrance tickets and transportation tickets. The whole area is a national park.
After a 3 hour bus ride, we first got to the irrigation system part, where we had to take a cart ride to the official entrance, then walked a bit through mountainous areas. It was an extremely hot day, so we took tons of water breaks and went to the restroom quite often (one improvement China made: more toilets!). I took an awesome photo at a small waterfall, surrounded by tons of green (first photo). Again, it was awesome to be surrounded by so much nature, but it was getting a tad bit old, given our experience yesterday. The irrigation system was novel for its time - basically they divided the water to an inner and outer stream, and the inner stream would be used for the crops. The area of the split was called "Fish Mouth" given its appearance (it's the gray, fin-looking photo).
Then, we walked around and made our way through the mountain, which is known for its numerous Taoist temples. I remember studying Taoism in middle school, but don't remember much.. we were also a little tired of temples, so we solely concentrated our efforts on making the hilly trek back out. We were already so exhausted from our couple days of intense traveling that we were not as interested in checking out the temples (which almost always required even more uphill climbing). The heat prompted us to buy cheap and tasty boba on the way down, plus some yummy spicy noodles and spicy fries. We also ate a really strange fruit that that was a less sweet, Asian pear. Finally, we made it out into a really cute, authentic-seeming historic street area with lots of small shops. Unfortunately, we had to rush back to our bus and didn't get to check it out. We really tightly packed our travel agenda - normally, people spend a week to do what we did in 4 days! At night, we went to a very popular hot pot restaurant to eat THE Sichuan hot pot... we got "mild" spicy and most of us were sneezing, having runny noses and teary eyes, and going through our entire tissue packs. Some of the meats we put in were unusual too. The spice was numbing and heating, and we left the restaurant smelling a bit stinky of food, sweat, and spice. But of course, it was a memorable experience.
DAY 5
As we were so tired, we slept a lot this 5th day, and decided to watch the Sichuan opera at the Wide and Narrow Alleys area (so crowded!). Sichuan opera is different from Peking opera, and it's known for the exciting face-changing performance (a skill that is kept secret, only passed along from master to master). The show we went to was lively, starting with women playing traditional Chinese instruments, then comedy that I couldn't get because of the Chengdu accent / speed they were speaking at, actual opera singing obviously, and Chinese martial arts acting scenes (one which had Mission Impossible music playing in the background... modern haha). As we watched, we munched on fruits, while the other Chinese people munched on seeds and nuts, drinking tea or beer even. Back then, this was how many people spent their afternoons, just watching shows, relaxing, drinking tea and eating. The last segment of the show was face-changing, which was so exciting; they literally look into an audience-member's face and instantly change the mask they were wearing to another one underneath!
In my next post, I will detail our travels to and throughout Yunnan province!
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