Day 11: Chengdu - Leshan - Chengdu - Sep 30, 2009

The Giant Buddha (Da Fo) awaited us on our day trip to Leshan, and he certainly was big!! I'd seen lots of pictures of him before, but seeing him in real life was amazing - his hands and feet were incredible, and I couldn't stop looking at how huge his fingernails and toenails were - about the size of a person!

Construction on this amazing sculpture began in 713AD, by a Buddhist monk called Haitong, and took 90 years for it to be completed. It has been entirely carved out of the stone of the cliff - just amazing. There was a very steep zigzag staircase that led down the side of the cliff next to him. In good fashioned Chinese form, the locals were even pushing past down this staircase, which was rather dangerous, so I had to resort to stretching my hands across to both the railing and the cliff to stop them. It was quite manic, and as usual, I shouldn't be surprised, but I kind of thought that at a religious place they would try to absorb some of the serenity or something...

The Giant Buddha is located at the convergence of three rivers, which was very interesting seeing three different coloured waters mixing together. The Buddha statue is located in a huge park, so we then spent a couple of hours exploring the rest of the places - a little cave where the monk lived, lots of beautiful pagodas and teahouses, walked through a bush/rainforest area, looked in a couple of temples and in the burial caves, photographed a gorgeous bridge over one of the rivers, walked through an interesting fisherman's village and climbed lots of steps!!

We got back from Leshan fairly late, so it was pretty much time for dinner. A group of us (the four Canadians, two other Australians Joanne and Adelene, and I) decided to go and find Jing Li Street, an area famed for outdoor night food stalls. After asking a few people along the way for directions we found such an area, but after walking up one street and down the other, decided that though the lights and atmosphere all were pretty, that the food looked dodgy, to say the least. It was the usual deal of raw meat sitting out in the heat, dust and flies, together with some very unhygenic looking people cooking the food in some very unhygenic ways. At the end of the second street we found a clean-looking restaurant which wasn't vying for business, so we ended up having a delicious meal there - sizzling beef, deep-fried mini chilli fish and some delicious vermicelli noodles were my favourites from that night!