Goodbye to China

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I'm off today, finally getting the train to Lhasa tonight, onto the Promised Land and beyond to Nepal and then Delhi. China has suprised me endlessly. I knew it would be fascinating but I didn't expect to like it so much. It is so accessible for travelling, public transport and domestic travel is really good value, you can survive on street food for next to nothing if you need to and it will be tastiest thing you could have, and the chinese people are really quite welcoming. English isn't spoken outside the major cities but then why should it be? I have been holed up in Chengdu for the last week and it's given me time to reflect on my time here. I would definitely come back - there is so much more of China I want to see.

The birthday excursion to the giant buddha and onto Emai Shan, the massive mountain, worked out lovely in the end. I hooked up with a dude from Plymouth on Sunday (5 October) and we met in the cafe at 7am for a bracing breakfast to prepare ourselves for a hectic 36 hours ahead. He casually said, "Do you know what day it is today?". On this trip, this has always been a valid question to ask, because anyone travelling for longer than a few weeks genuinely has no idea what day it is, an is always really keen to know the definitive answer once the suject is brought up. I simply answered "Sunday?", and he replied "My birthday". I nearly fell off me stool. "Bugger me, it's my birthday tomorrow!!" I screamed. We gawped at each other in amazement. And so there we had it - a perfect yet completely unplanned birthday crew on a mission. Excellent!

The giant buddha at Leshan was... too good. He has the most amazing eyes, lazily peeking open with lovely big soft dark eyes sleepily looking out from his low slung eyelids. He looks like he is pleasantly stoned, or from Bristol, or both. Carved out of the cliff face, and 71 metres tall, he sits at the point where 3 rivers meet. The mad monk who started the project decided to create him to help fisherman pass safely at this dangerous clashing of undertows and currents. It is a lovely idea but having been there, I can't see how this buddha can do anything but increase water traffic accidents. How the hell you are supposed to sail past without looking at him I don't know, and if you do look at him you become mesmerised, leading to certain capsizing and drowning (surely?)

When I got to his feet I fought off the chinese tourists to get a shot reclining up against the front edge of his big toe. The top surface of his big toenail was about 1 metre above my head. That's a big pair of feet right there (as my good friend Texan Bob would say).The rumour that his fingernails are the size of a man is untrue, unless you are talking chinese midgets (there were none about so I couldn't be exact on this). But the fingernails are definitely equal at least to my waist height.

Then we got the bus to Emai Shan, but missed the last bus up the mountain so stayed at the bottom for the night. It was a relatively uninteresting village so we felt slightly crestfallen, my travel partner so because it was his birthday, and me because I had really wanted to wake up on my birthday up the mountain. We found a bar and sunk some beers but admitted defeat early. We got an early night and took the 6am bus up to near the top. It took 2 hours, and we got a cable car up to the top. Nothing could have prepared us for what was up there. The summit reaches out above the cloud cover and there is a HUGE golden temple thing up there. It is a pilgrimage site so loads of chinese tourists and buddhist monks up there having epiphanies and quite honestly I can understand why. The cloud rolls out below you like a carpet out to the horizon and the golden, blinding sun above makes the whole place seem otherwordly.

What wasn't otherworldly was the monkeys that are trained to pick your pockets that we encountered on the way down. We walked some of the way as had the whole rest of the day to get to the bottom, and had heard about them. One bloke at our hostel came back from this trip last week with his bag ripped where a monkey tried to lift his camera and drag his bag off of his back. I didn't see any on the way up so was presuming they were having a day off, but on our descent there they were.

The adult ones are pretty big - I didn't want a scrap with one, put it that way. They are tibetan macaques, and seriously lairy. If you loiter near one for too long it assumes you are fairgame and will just launch itself at you, taking anything in your hand, or your bag off your back, or just goes for your pockets. It is most unnerving. An old chinese litter picker with a massive stick provided one of the most bizarrest moments of the day when he fought off the monkeys in a mister miyagi stylee and then turned to us and shouted "Mon-keh!" in uncanny Johnny Vegas style, before cackling to reveal minimal teeth and nearly falling over because of himself. Someone must have taught him this saying. It freaked me out for the rest of the day.

So now I'm packing up and pissing off. I am going to miss China. I still haven't managed to change any of my redundant currency on this trip, and the further I go, the more useless wedges of bank notes I find stuffed in any crevice my bulging rucksack offers. I tried a bank in Chengdu the other day to change it up and they merely laughed at me in mandarin, loudly. I still have 16,000 mongolian tugriks (I got excited when I counted them out but it is actually only £9.98) and a shitload of rubles. I am on chinese yuan through Tibet and then I will get some Nepali money, whatever that is, and then will end up with rupees coming out of my ears when I hit Delhi.

I'll just stick it all in a pot for one of those very dark depressing mornings in the UK when I realise I am so skint I can't afford toilet roll, or washing up liquid. Then I can remember my useless pot of foreign currencies and spend all morning finding a bank who won't laugh at me and will actually change it up.

I arrive in Lhasa on 10 October and will still be on China time (UK +7 hours) until I hit Nepal. My route takes in Everest Base Camp which I am not really prepared for, but ain't that the story of my life. I do have some superb purple legwarmers and my woollen poncho from Mexico so although I will look like a total gyppo I should make it through the night without contracting frostbite. Will also stock up on local booze to help the cause too...

I have run out of deodorant today and am uncomfortably smelling vile very early on in the day. I must go and get some before I get on this train otherwise it could be highly unpleasant for all involved...