Home sweet home

And so we are home again, back to reality. What a super, fun packed year we've had. We've managed to cover a fair amount of ground: Bulgaria, Chicago, Honduras, Australia, India, Nepal and China. 

We've seen some amazing buildings:

Some awesome landscapes...

And sights:

Learnt some new skills:

And met some great people:

Wow, what fun and so lucky!

Now, I wonder, where shall we go next....

Long journey home

After the excitement of pandas we feel we are truly at the end of our year off. We headed back to Chengdu for a couple of nights back in Hello Chengdu YHA with its great travellery feel.

We treated ourselves to a starbucks brekkie, coffee with pouring cream, mmmmmmm. It was free museum day so we joined the incredible number of local people and went to Jinsha Site Museum. They have found relics from the Shu Kingdom that lived here 3000 years ago, uncovering some impressive artefacts and technologies. However, I think we enjoyed the sight of so many locals more than the museum. Everyone was taking a lot of photos!

I don't know why, but this diorama tickled us. The elephants at the back are 2D and 3D at the front.

We also went to a big shopping centre called Raffles for our favourite, Din Tau Fung. Please open one in UK, so we can have more Shaulongbao....

After Chengdu, we caught a flight to Kathmandu, then flew on again to Delhi for one night of curry and beer before the flight home. Delhi is absolutely roasting, 40 degrees and very humid, ouch! It also doesn't seem quite as hectic as in January, must be the effect of four months round Asia!

Now we just have the big flight home tomorrow. Boo.....

Panda poo

We couldn't resist volunteering to look after pandas in Bifengxia Panda Base. With these overalls, can you blame us?

What a cracking day and a great way to end our year off before we start travelling home. We helped look after one section of pandas away from the public eye, where three pregnant pandas lived. Yup, that will be buckets full of panda poo next to me!

As well as cleaning out the areas the pandas live in and replenishing their bamboo, we also got to feed them some treats including freshly baked panda cakes and bamboo shoots.

The cute photos tell you everything else you need to know!

We want to come back in September and see the baby pandas once they are born....

Foggy summit

We stayed in Emei Shan for two nights in one of our favourite accommodations, Teddy Bear Hostel in Baoguo Village. We toyed with the idea of going for a trek up the Emei Buddhist mountain given our EBC experience, but decided to get the bus to Leidongping and cable car up instead!! It was soooo foggy, we literally couldn't see a thing by Jinding Temple and the Golden Summit.

We did walk back down to the bus stop rather than cable car, which took an hour or two and knackered the back of my legs! That pain still hasn't gone days later! I should have warmed up first!!

We enjoyed the hubbub of the town area in the evenings. Although I think we will both remember the sight of one restaurant guy killing a rabbit by swinging it over his head onto the pavement in front of everyone for a long time. We've seen plenty of live animals waiting for the chop over the last year, but it didn't prepare us for that.

Big Buddha

On the way to Emei Shan, we stopped for a night in Leshan. We were pleased we stopped, the 1200 year old Grand Buddha was very impressive at 71 metres tall, the world's tallest.

Two big Buddhas:

We were also impressed by the surrounding sight which felt like something out of Jurassic Park. There were Mahaoya Tombs, Wuyou Temple and a Pagoda to investigate as well.

We didn't sleep great as our room had a little cockroach infestation in the night. We only "removed" four in the night, but they were literally 10cm long. It could of been worse, we saw this ugly bugly the next day!

More tea vicar...

Seriously, how much tea can one drink, and I'm British so I know about tea drinking. Suffice to say we are drinking a lot here! Well it is the done thing in these parts.

We've made a plan to do a round trip South of Chengdu. First stop lovely riverside city Zigong, famous for its salt mines and one of the largest concentrations of dinosaur bones. There were a lot of dinosaurs!

The salt museum was in a stunning building, like something out of a horror film.

Even the tea houses were impressive:

Sichuan Pepper!

We have ten days in the Sichuan province to enjoy some Chinese food and see some last sights before we fly home. The capital Chengdu was a nice surprise. It's the fifth most populous city in China with four million people. We had read it is very polluted, but compared to Nepal where a mask was an essential accessory, it seems a breath of fresh air!

We went to see the lovely Wenshu Temple:

Got excited by a spontaneous queue at a food stall!

Drank tea which is the favourite past time here.

And ate traditional hotpot, bibby included and dastardly Sechuan Pepper! We are not too keen on the numbing effect of this pepper which creeps into most dishes here.

We also managed to squeeze in a visit to the Sichuan Opera. It is more like a variety show than opera, the face changing masks was my favourite bit, changing in a flash before your eyes!

48 hours to Chengdu

Inspired by our train journeys in Australia, we looked forward to spending two days travelling 3,360km to Chengdu. The train left from Lhasa's impressive train station. It went up to 4,500 metres which hit me hard. I was seriously suffering from altitude sickness and didn't take my tablets soon enough, so the first day was shocking. Much better on day two.

The scenery was impressive, certainly on Tibet side, with lots of snow and yaks. It was hard to tell when we had crossed the border, but by the start of the second day we had clearly dropped altitude as I felt much better.

We were the only westerners on the train and no one spoke English. Mealtimes were very interesting, as were the squat toilets and all the men smoking on the train!!

Australia was better, especially Gold Service!

End of Tibet

Natalie left for Beijing a couple of days before our train, but not before we squeezed in the largest Monastery in Tibet, Deprung.

After a tea break in a cave....

...we headed to Sera Monastery where we saw monks debating.

For our last day in Lhasa, we did not one, but two walking tours, taking in lots of sites including more temples and stopping next to a lake with a temple in the middle to give the locals plenty of time for a good stare at us! You don't see many like us in Tibet!

Our favourite bit was the end of the day when we found a holy stone that you rub different body parts on to heal. We both spent a happy ten minutes rubbing our entire bodies!

We then saw a painted rock carving in front of which lots of people were prostrating and a Chorten built from 1,000 painted Buddha images.