Exit the Yunnan

Two days ago after completing the beautiful Tiger Leaping Gorge hike, it was sadly time to leave the Yunnan. Andrew has made it more or less a personal mission to take ground transportation all the way to Europe. So, at 8Am on Friday morning we left Lejiang for an 8 hour bus ride to the nearest train station. The bus ride was actually really beautiful; we got some last stunning views of mountains and green valleys. As we moved into the Sichuan province the countryside became gradually flatter and more populated, and it was punctuated more and more frequently with giant coal burning power plants and large (sometimes abandoned) factory buildings. There was also a really cute little Chinese boy on the bus who was fascinated by Andrew and his calculator watch. It was the best you could hope for in a bus ride.

We arrived in the city of Panzihua just in time to catch a taxi from the bus to the train station and get on the next train to Chengdu. Unfortunately, when we got to the front of the line and asked for a sleeper the clerk yelled "No! No! No!"- This is a common occurrence here it seems, and it is a little unnerving at first. Because it could mean any number of things- "you are in the wrong line", "the train doesn't have any more seats", "I don't understand your toneless Chinese and I have better things to do" or who knows what else. In this case it meant that there were no sleeper berths available and no soft seats either. So, we took the only available tickets for hard seats and settled in for the 13 hour ride. Needless to say it was a long night. Andrew kindly gave up his seat for a good portion of the night, though, which allowed me to curl up on our two seats and get some decent sleep. (I think he felt a little guilty for dragging me on his land journey crusade.)We arrived at Chengdu feeling surprisingly good after 24 hours on the road, but still spent most of the day resting. Chengdu is more of what we expected to see in China- a large industrial city with block after block of cookie cutter grey concrete buildings which blend into the grey polluted haze hanging over the city. Yesterday we walked to Wengshu Temple and enjoyed a good vegetarian meal before setting in for the night. This morning we went to visit the Chengdu Research Base of the Giant Panda Breeding. We got to see the pandas eating, sleeping and playing. It is pretty amazing- they are not graceful animals at all, and they are huge. But, somehow they still manage to climb up trees and all over the place. We also learned more than we ever needed to know about Panda mating.

That's about it for the last couple days. In about an hour we will move on by train again (this time in a sleeper car) to Xi'an and the Terracotta Army.