2-Day Private Tour of Leshan Grand Buddha and Emei Shan including Monastery Stay

This was a great 2-day excursion - Andy our personal guide was FANTASTIC!!! Thanks so much for a wonderful experience. I will always check on Viator first when traveling!!!

The tour was an unforgettable experience--not always easy, but consistently fascinating. My guide, Andy, was well-informed, energetic, and enthusiastic. The Leshan Grand Buddha was worth the trip in itself--huge and impressive. I didn't make the long walk the down the stairway to its base--it was drizzling, and the stairs looked a bit slippery--but it was an awesome sight even from the top. The monastery at the base of Mt. Emai was serene, lovely, peaceful (or as peaceful as China gets). The ascent up Mt. Emai was a bit hair-raising--a couple of hours on steep mountain roads, many hairpin curves, and a driver who passed every vehicle we caught up with, including other tour buses--all while screaming at the other drivers for being too slow. The climb to the cable car and from the cable car to the peak was easy enough, and the ride in the cable car itself was spectacular--I gather that we were lucky, because we had a fairly clear day at least at first, and that is apparently only rarely the case. There are only a couple of minor reasons why I'm giving the tour 4 stars instead of 5. First, the description should have been more specific about what transpires on which day--I thought we were ascending the mountain on the first day and sleeping in a monastery on top--which affected when I took altitude pills. No, the monastery is at the base of the mountain. Second, my room at the monastery was deep inside it, off a conference room that a group of tourists used for meeting--very noisy--instead of on the outside, looking over the courtyard. The rooms themselves are fine, simple but comfortable, but the bathrooms are on a different level, and I did have a touch of turista--so that was a bit inconvenient. Nevertheless--a memorable experience.