The first morning in Chengdu was spent recovering from the train trip. We walked around the city saw the temple and booked the next train tickets in the afternoon.

On the second day we got up early and went to see the pandas as its the main attraction in Chengdu. We then got a 3 hour bus to a town called Emei to climb a mountain. We found our hostel and had an early night.

The following day we got up at 6 and started to climb. By 3 we were only half way. We managed to navigate to a bus stop and cheated by getting the bus for an hour. It dropped us near the top but it was still a 2 and a half hour hard climb to the top. Once at the top the views were amazing. Above the clouds with other mountain tops peering through. Well worth the days hiking.

Near the top we found a monastery to stop in. Although there weren’t many monks around it was an interesting experience. We got up at 6am again to walk down the mountain, picked up our bags from the hostel and got the bus back to Chengdu.

In the afternoon of the following day we caught our next train which took 26 hours. The first class tickets were silly prices so we decided to give second class a go again. The train is easily the worse we've been on but the people sharing our compartment are all young so their manners are a lot better.

We had a few days in Guilin before moving on to Hong Kong.