The buddha was very big indeed

The giant buddha in Leshan really deserves its name. It was very big and very beautiful.

The site is a major chinese attraction with many tour buses full with tourists around. I took some nice pictures and enjoyed some quietness in a corner of the park. I needed that after the morning ride with a lot of muddy roads, noise and polluted air.

Chengdu area is a basin that literally fills up with badly polluted air from all the industries that are located in the region. Not to mention the traffic and trucks.

After visiting the Buddha I continued to Mount Emei, one of the sacred mountains in budhism. I am not sure what I was expecting when I looked on the map, but when I arrived in the Emei village it came as quite a shock that the top of the mountain is another 52 km from here and 3000 meter up. I will sleep on whether I want to hike up (10 hours) or ride my bike. Apparently it is possible to sleep on the top and see the sunrise! Going up will also be a good acclimatisation: train low, sleep high...

My new camera is working fine, but there are 2 problems with the promised pictures: 1. I expected the computers to have cardreaders and didn't take the usb cable for the camera to save weight. 2. China effectively blocks the whole of blogspot... so what you see here is uploaded via mail to Sweden.