Highlights of Sichuan -- Opera, Pandas & The Giant Buddha

On one evening was the time of experiencing some culture, I went to see Sichuan Opera which is famous of face changing. To be honest, at first I was a little bit afraid that it would be purely “singing” in Chinese so I asked about the opera at the hostel before booking it. In China there are two famous operas which are Beijing Opera and Sichuan Opera, Beijing one is more based on singing and Sichuan is more like a show – after receiving this answer from a hostel I encouraged myself to book it and it definitely was worth it! Opera was structured on several episodes everyone including a little bit different kind of arts: Traditional music and singing, shadow theatre, acrobatics, marionette, fire spitting and face changing… Everything just amazing, especially face changing made me just to stare straight and try to realize that how on earth they can change their masks in matter of seconds, or actually even faster than that… (on a video pay attention for the guy in the middle)

Then Saturday and third day was another highlight of my Chengdu tour, waking up early in the morning because tour guide was picking me up. First destination was the panda breeding and research centre in downtown of Chengdu. Giant pandas were almost distinct and even now there are less than thousand Giant Pandas in the world and this was one of the rare places where it is actually to see those Pandas. And yes, who could not love those lovely black’n’white creatures which simply look so cute when they are playing with each other, “chilling out”, or enjoying a delicious (?) bamboo.

From Panda centre the tour continued to Leshan see the Giant Buddha, its (normally) two hours drive from Chengdu and another two hours back, but because of that stupid public holiday there was “small” traffic jams on the way so in total car ride took 6-7 hours (almost same time than a flight between Helsinki-Beijing) and the time to visit at the Giant Buddha site was only two hours… so as one can imagine, doesn't make any sense. Still the Giant Buddha is one of main sights to see when visiting Chengdu, which was worthwhile after all. The Giant Buddha is carved in a stone, the work took almost 100 years to carve it and as a result 71 meters high Giant Buddha was completed, that has nowadays a status of UNESCO world heritage.

Usually for visitors it is possible to walk down and go around Buddha but (again) because of the holiday there were so many people that the queueing would have taken at least two hours to get there… And as the time was limited, plus it was a warm summer day there was no sense to start queuing on there. There was another option to take a boat to see whole Buddha from the river, which of course did cost some extra money (around 8 euros) that I was willingly ready to pay just to avoid that queueing.