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Ok so I cant really remember where I was upto before, so sorry if this overlaps a bit.
I managed to (temporarily) misplace my camera in Xian.. I left it in the restaurant but remembered about 15 mins later, luckily the guide was able to ring them up and collect it for me. Oops. At least now I'll hopefully be more careful with it! But at least the food we had in the restaurant was good! Chinese dumplings, but they were more like fried meaty pancakes, but they werenice whatever they were! I think I am getting better with chopsticks, but because we keep going to real Chinese palces to eat, the locals all stare and sometimes point and laugh at our (my) pathetic attempts to eat! Whereas a lot of the time they just seem to bring the bowl to them and use the chopsticks to shovel food in! I'm kinda beginning to get sick of Chinese though, theres no spring rolls and half the time the chicken is on the bone.. yuck. But I'm managing ok. The bigger cities all have fast food places, and at the Terracotta army they even had a KFC right inside the gates.
Theres not much to tell on Tuesday, we spent most of the day at the sirport on and off the plane, as there was a storm in Chengdu, so the flight was constently going and not going, I think we were delayed 6/7 hours altogether but we still had time to find the airport bar! So we spent the first real day in Chengdu we went out to a place called Leshan where they have the largest seated outdoor buddha, or it was at least the largest of some kind of buddha anyway. And it really was massive! The queue to get to the foot of the buddha took ages though, lots of Chinese people around because it was the Moon festival or something so everyone had 3 days off work I think. But it was worth going to the bottom, I dont think the pictures can really give the size of it but I've tried. I cant use the picture uploader on this thing but once I'm in Hong Kong and can get to facebook I'll try again. Wednesday was the panda sanctuary day. Really worth going to see, they were so cute! They didnt have any of the full sized pandas but there were quite a few 1 year olds, which I got a lot of pictures of as they were really close to the fence. They aren't really caged in at all and we quite happy just playing and posing for photos. We also got to see pandas that are just a few weeks old, and they look just like a cross between a cuddly toy and a baby. So cute but there were guards making sure no one took photos. But even though they were really cute, they have so many problems breeding them and there still hasnt been any reintroduced to the wild I dont think. Because we were getting another train we had 4 hours to wander round the panda place and we were all very excited to see the menu, omlettes, toast sandwiches.. it was great! And we managed to get a very fast bullet train this time instead of the hideous sleeper thing to a place called Chongqing where we boarded the "cruise boat". Apparently Congqing is one of the biggest cities in the world (I've never heard of it either!) but then the guide (Cindy) said there was only one place that she knew that we could eat, but it meant we crashed a chinese birthday party, not that they seemed to mind! They enjoyed getting their photo taken with Mike (a really tall guy from the Netherlands who has peoven very popular for chinese photographers!).
So we have just finished our 3 days on the boat.. it was fine just very basic and quite small but it was clean and they had pancakes at breakfast so I was quite happy. The scenery along the Yangtze and the 3 gorges is beautiful, and I dont think that any of my very numerous photos does it justice. We had a few excursions along the way to a ghost town (not great, but with very questionable cable car!), small boat trip to 3 small gorges somewhere called Wushan.. again very beautiful place that had monkeys running around parts of the walls and local people chanting in the background. Definately worth doing if you in China! Then last night at about 10pm we started to go through the dam, its huge and split into 5 parts each dropping 22m in height. They packed as many boats as they could into the loch at a time.. I dont even know how they managed it, boats were literally bashing into the walls and each other. Then we went to visit the dam on foot today before getting off the boat to some farmers who reckoned they werent paid enough by the government for the flooding so instead barricade the bus park until they get 5 or 10 yuan from each passenger or they wont let the buses out. Apparently the local police are on their side so theres not much we can do about it but its only like 50p so not really a big deal! Now in Yichang until 8am tomorrow when we get a 5 hour bus to a train station to get get another 14 hour train and then another 2 hour bus to Yangshuo! Not looking forward to it, but going to McDonalds for breakfast and been to the supermarket to buy supplies for the journey. So I think thats you all up to date for now, cant believe I've been away over 2 weeks already, I think its flown over but not long til Hong Kong and then Thailand so looking forward to that! xx
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