As soon as we could walk again we limped out of the Teddy Bear Hotel on our walking sticks and caught a bus about 30km East to Leshan. Together, Emei Shan and nearby Leshan are a UNESCO world heritage area listed for their cultural and natural environment values: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/779 Leshan’s claim to fame is its Giant Buddha, the world’s largest, carved out of the cliff at the confluence of the River Min and the River Dadu that surge and flow around the city’s perimeter. By Chinese standards Leshan is a fairly small town with a population of around 200,000. Like everywhere else it has gleaming apartment blocks and offices coexisting with ramshackle streets, the latter fast disappearing under the onslaught of picks, bulldozers, concrete trucks and cranes. Despite this it retains a laid back atmosphere with pleasant tree-lined streets that carry traffic calmed by the presence of many trishaws. It is also the most humid place we have ever visited.
The Grand Buddha is what attracts tourists to Leshan and we thought we may as well check it out on our way back to Chengdu given that it was so close. Construction of the Buddha started in 713 AD but was not completed until a hundred years later. The statue is an enormous 71 metres high. Its ears are 7 metres long and its big toe 8.5 metres. There is a tourist boat at the downtown river dock that takes visitors out onto the water in front of the Giant Buddha to admire and photograph it. We were about to buy our tickets for a total of 100 Yuan when a trishaw driver approached us and told us about a local ferry further down the road that chugged across to Lizheng Island in the middle of the river in front of the Buddha. He said the ferry fare was only 1 Yuan, and what’s more, he could take us to the ferry dock in his trishaw for only 2 Yuan. That sounded like our sort of deal so we jumped in and less than 30 minutes later we were standing on the water’s edge at the end of the island just out from the Grand Buddha. Many locals took the same ferry trip. The view was very good but with so much swirling water around and the city's air already hot and moisture-charged, the humidity here was extreme and sweat was pouring down our backs even without any exertion on our part. When we returned across the river to the ferry dock, the same trishaw driver was waiting for us, hoping for some repeat business. We rode with him back to our hotel where we needed a shower before hiring a taxi to take us on a drive in the countryside south-east of Leshan. It was lush and bright green, planted intensively to near-mature crops of rice, corn, cucumbers, beans and various fruits. There was also a lot of natural bamboo, the preferred food of the Giant Panda native to these parts. Much of Sichuan province is very fertile with a high annual rainfall and it has become one of the principal “bread baskets” of modern China.
