Songpan from Chengdu

We just got off a grueling 10 hour busride from Chengdu through the northern mountains of Sichuan. We passed countless Tibetan villages as we are now in former Tibetan land. With Tibetan land comes lots of mountains and high altitude. The road here through the mountains was extremely winding and therefore nauseating, much more so for the two Chinese girls that happened to be sitting next to me. They filled about 5 see-through plastic bags with bright yellow vomit and let them roll down the aisle of the bus for about the last 2 hours of the ride. We passed one turned over truck, that slowed us down about an hour, and three accidents on the 340km road. We are alive however and we are now in the small town of Songpan, it is a Tibetan town that doesn't really see any Chinese tourists as its main activity is horse trekking. We are at about 2800m right now and it is pretty cold (Yann is still wearing shorts). We begin our 3-day horse trek tomorrow with a British couple that we met on the bus on the way up. We stocked up on gloves scarves and warm socks.

Before getting here we were in Chengdu, we stayed a little bit longer than we expected. The day we arrived, after conquering Emei Shan we "treated" ourselves to western food from the hotel restaurant. I had a pizza and Yann had a burger. The first week we arrived here Yann and I made a wager on who would be the first to poo their pants. Well the bet has been settled, and I had the luck of having a single piece of tissue paper left at the time. So we extended our stay a little bit to rest. Being the brilliant person that I am I had spicy BBQ the two nights right after the incident, it was only after three days of stomach cramps that I finally stuck to bread and water (with the insistance of Yann the dictator), it worked like a charm.

We visited the famous pandas in Chengdu and they were really amazing. We got there bright and early to see the feeding. Apparently this is the only time the pandas do anything. We waited as a keeper tried to wake up a big panda with an apple on a stick. He would wave it infront of the panda's nose and as the panda would open his eyes he would pull the stick away to try to get him to wake up. The panda couldn't really be bothered. This went on for about 10 minutes as we all watched on. Suddenly the panda had a burst of energy, got up, turned his back to us and proceeded to scratch his bum on a post for the next 10 minutes. Then he went back to bed. I love pandas!