Next stop, the Stone Sea — a strange collection of rock formations, surrounded by a stunning landscape — and a quick visit to a Bo village re-creation in the same park. We must have been running late at this point because the pace of the tour kept increasing until it was mostly “drive-by tourism” from our little open-air shuttles.

Finally off the shuttles, we took a glass elevator down the side of a cliff to arrive here:

We didn’t take this trail, but instead entered the cliff that we had just come down and found ourselves in one of the larger caves I’ve seen:

That’s looking back toward the entrance once I had finally arrived to a flat surface again. Not until I was half-way down did I realize that I could have slid down that giant, two-segment ramp that you see in the distance. Visitors were given a rugged wrap to sit on before they were sent zipping down the polished trough to the bottom of the cave. Once there, of course, there were more laser lights:

Thankfully, after that long descent, we learned that this would be a one-way, “through-hike” and we wouldn’t be retracing our steps back up the entrance. However, that did not mean that this would be a short trek. This was one large cave:

We eventually boarded small boats to ride the rest of the way to the cave’s exit — which turned out to be the very cave where we had had lunch! We had basically made our way through a mountain to arrive back where we had started.

Back to the buses, and back to Yibin. Time to rest up for another big day tomorrow, when we would visit the bamboo forests used in the filming of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.