Back to Chengdu!

Arrived back in Chengdu after another slow but interesting bus journey to be greeted by some bad news – Chas’n’Dave have split up! The Chinese were devastated, they love a bit of a cockney knees up!! Oh and Tibet had been closed off by the Chinese Government! Great! About 3 days before we were due to leave they have stopped any people from going there over the holiday period for the 60th anniversary of Chinese Communism – the buggers! Last year it all kicked off in Tibet over this period and the Chinese Government don’t want jonny foreigners in Tibet – this isn’t to protect us in case it kicks off again but probably more to stop others from seeing what might actually happen, that way they can feed out whatever stories and news to the rest of the world they want….or am I being cynical!
Anyway this basically meant trying to rework our way to Nepal as Tibet is the only overland (and best) route in! So having finally managed to sort ourselves out we spent the next day out visiting the Giant Buddha, it’s about 2 hours outside of town and is a 70 metre tall buddha carved into a cliff face! It’s pretty cool, even if it doesn’t really look buddha like! It’s more like something from Gullivers travels, but once you fight your way through the masses of Chinese tourists to get a view of the head from the cliff top you see how huge this thing is. Each ear is apparently 7 metres long and it’s fingernails are 6 foot – it’s huge, if only it looked a little more buddha-like!! Caught the bus back to Lilliput, sorry Chengdu and went out for some tofu – the Sichuan area is great for tofu and I’d been making the most of it: smoked, braised, spicy, kebabs…you name it they’ve got it! More tofu than you can poke a stick at – which coincidently pretty much sums up me trying to eat it with my inept use of chopsticks!