The World's Best Xinjiang Diary Ever: Christmas Travels Numero Dos

As I said, following our original plan we were a bit pushed for time and the delay at the airport had eaten up our only spare back-up day. So the next day we already had no leeway for mistakes. And then we spent the morning doing nothing, getting on pointless buses and only really seeing things at the end of the day. There was still a lot of stuff to see in Nanjing and so we knew we'd need at least another full day and a morning here to see it all. This meant that we wouldn't get to Shanghai in time for Christmas, and we weren't having that! We decided to cut Hefei out of our itinerary. We are both loath to cut anything out ever, but we had little choice, and we knew we could always fit Hefei in at another time, and geographically we couldn't cut out any of the other locations sensibly.
We spent our second day in Nanjing being very good tourists. First we struggled to find the tourist bus that would take us to Zhongshan Mountain National Park (Purple Mountain, around the foot of which virtually all the sites are located). We took a taxi to one of the places we knew the bus stopped, which cost us 27 kuai and seemed to be practically in another country considering the distance we went! We found the stop and paid our 2kuai to get to Song Meiling's villa. Song Meiling was the wife of the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, and the sister-in-law of Sun Yat-sen. She was educated in America at a finished school and then returned to China. Her villa is celebrated for its mix of Chinese and Western architecture and decor. After seeing the villa, we waited in the rain for the bus again, and then caught it to the Linggu Temple scenic area. This is a Buddhist temple and pagoda in the settings of a pretty park at the foot of Purple Mountain. We climbed the pagoda which had spiral steps - one of my pet hates! I just can't walk up and down them properly; it makes my legs shake. A few floors up, Liam's were shaking too from the height so he went straight up to the top and then straight back down. I lingered a little longer to look out at the views, but the sky was pretty damp and misty and I couldn't see as much as the views are famed for. After exploring the entire area and checking out all the little buildings and sculptures the map pointed out, we stopped off at a Buddhist restaurant to eat some sweet and sour aubergine. Everything in the restaurant is vegetarian but it was yummy nonetheless. Apparently the restaurant is really old and can feed up to 1000 monks at a time. Impressive stuff.
Next, we went over to the Ming Tombs on one of those little touristy electric train things. I particularly wanted to see the Sacred Path, which is the path leading to the tomb itself. The path here is notable for being curved, where all the others are dead straight. Also, all Ming Sacred Paths are lined with stone animals which denote different protection and respect for the emperor. We had great fun posing pretending to be the various animals... because we are mature.
By this point we were pretty damn knackered but we fought on as all good tourists must. We got the train again to Sun Yat-sen's Mausoleum. It is a very important site in China, because Sun Yat-sen was the father of the revolution and did away with the old Imperial dynasty system, so the Chinese revere him with huge and sincere respect. We struggled our way up nearly 400 steps to see his mausoleum, and then were relieved that we had seen all the sights we had come to see. After our hard day's work posing as good tourists, we slipped back into our naughty ways and went to Costa, where I had a chocolate twist and hot chocolate, just like I have in the UK! Unfortunately it did not taste just like it does in the UK. But it was still good. As if that wasn't enough for us, we went just next door to Starbucks straight after, so Liam could have the coffee he wanted. And then, we went to Haagen-Dazs, and I got a beautiful but expensive fix of good ol' cookie and cream ice cream. Nyam nyam nyam.