When looking into things to see around Chengdu, one of the guys in our program, Cas, found a day trip to see the Leshan Buddah. I really had no idea what it was, but I’m not one to turn down a sight-seeing opportunity so I signed up for the tour without knowing what it entailed or really where we were going. Turns out it was a Chinese-speaking tour and neither the guide nor the driver spoke any English. We got onto the bus, which was filled with Chinese tourists, bright and early and most of us fell back asleep to the sound of the tour guide speaking Chinese into the microphone (note: Chinese people almost always sound like they’re yelling regardless of what they are actually saying). Peter, another guy from our group, was sitting behind me and I heard him strike up a conversation with the man next to him, who was a pilot for Singapore Airlines and spoke excellent English. His name was Brian and he would turn out to be our savior for the day.
The first sign that the tour company was a little fishy was when the tour guide asked for our Student IDs. The cost of the admission tickets to the Buddah was included in the price, so through Brian’s translations we figured out that the tour company was trying to make an extra buck by buying discounted tickets using our IDs. They weren’t planning on passing this discount onto us, so we took our IDs back and tucked them safely in our wallets.
After being on the bus for about 1.5 hours, we pulled up a building with many other tour buses outside it. Was this the entrance to the Leshan Buddah? Nope. We got herded off the bus and went into the building—it was a tourist-trap jewelry store where they gave us a presentation about the stones used in the jewelry then left us there for an hour to shop. Stop #2 was another building. Was this the Leshan Buddah? Nope. It was filthy, dank restaurant at which we ate a horrible lunch.
After lunch we finally reached the grounds of the Buddah. The Leshan Buddah is an enormous buddah carved into a bluff overlooking a river, and it was supposedly created to guard against flooding (I don’t speak Mandarin so I’m not sure what the tour guide was saying). You climb a series of step and come up behind it, so your first view of the carving is a giant head. You then can walk down the bluff beside the buddah, until you end up at its feet. It was well-preserved, and I am amazed that it could have been built without modern technology. We spent about an hour walking down the bluff then back up, then our tour guide motioned for us to come with the group.
Brian translated that the group was now going to see an optional side-attraction, the Sleeping Buddah. It cost extra money and we could either go with them or meet them back at the bus parking lot at 3:00. We opted to meet them back at the parking lot, because Brian told us the Sleeping Buddah was just a tiny sculpture and a rip-off. We killed time by taking a boat ride to see the Buddah from the water, and made it back to the bus parking lot by 2:45. We waited and waited, and at around 3:30 Brian started asking the people sitting around if they knew where our bus was. A man came forward and told us that our bus had left (the rest of the group wasn’t going back to Chengdu; theirs’ was a 2-day tour and they were continuing onto some mountain) and that he was there to take us in a van to a public bus station, where we were to take a public bus back to Chengdu. By this time we were all pretty annoyed with the tour company, and most of the group lost it (I tend to remain calm no matter what the situation). We got on the one cell phone we had and called the hostel that we booked the tour through. After about another hour of waiting, our tour bus magically appeared! The guide got out and talked to Brian, we were put on a different bus, and taken back to Chengdu’s central bus depot where taxis were waiting to take us back to our starting point, the hostel.
When we got to the hostel we explained that this was the worst tour ever and that we wanted at least a partial refund. The worker was smug the entire time and didn’t see why we were complaining because “You made it back, didn’t you?” We explained to him that if Brian wouldn’t have been there we would have had no way to communicate with anyone, and that Brian served as our tour guide when in actuality he was just another paying customer. He told us the tour really didn’t strand us because the van driver was there to meet us, and we tried to explain to him that there was no way we were going to get into a strange man’s van. We went around in circles, and after being gone for 13 hours, we went home with no refund. Lesson learned: Don’t go on tours where no one speaks English.
Picutres: Our first views of the Buddah; A shot of the Buddah from the river.
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