Emei Shan

Spent the last few days at Emei Shan, a mountainous area with a lot of Buddhist temples. There is one main group of mountains that go up to about 3000m with a lot of walking routes to the top. A lot of the monastries on the way provide basic accommodation so most people spend a few days up there. There are also ways to get to the top using buses and cablecars so its a bit of a major tourist site for the Chinese and a lot busier than any of the hills in Scotland. But I've had a good couple of days walking and it was only really busy at the top and bottom as most Chinese people don't seem to be very interested in walking. There were a few being carried up though. Basically people were lying in a kind of deckchair thing that was carried on the shoulders of 2 men. Although most of the time I was on the hill it was in the clouds so couldn't actually see much of a view, the walk up through the forrest was still very nice and staying in a monestry was good. There were loads of different species of butterflys, some as big as birds and on part of the hill there were some monkeys. Unfortunatly they encourage people to feed the monkeys and sell food to give them, so they have become very used to people. Now if you don't have food they actually attack you so you have to carry a big stick to fight them off. Twice I actually had them grabbing onto my legs as I was trying to walk past. Glad I had the rabies injections now.

Spent the last day in the village at the bottom of the mountain, going to a hot spring later today and then getting an overnight train to Kunming, in the South West