Advertisement
Published: November 23rd 2007
Edit Blog Post
After a straight run of classes since the beginning of the year, we were well and truly ready for a break. We picked up our e-tickets at Tianjin airport and flew to Chengdu. This city is the capital of Sichuan province in China, renowned for its hot, spicy food. Sichuan is also the “home” of the Giant Panda, and there is a panda centre in Chengdu where you can go and see the animals in a recreated environment as close as possible to their natural mountainous habitat.
Upon arrival in Chengdu, we went first to the tour company’s office where we paid for our trip and picked up the tickets for the places we would be visiting during the remainder of the trip. We were then received for afternoon tea and a tour at an international school in Chengdu which may have a program in the near future similar to what we have here in TEDA - namely, the implementation of VCE courses to enable students to gain a university entrance score in Australia, and expedite their travel to and accommodation in Australia to study. After we were treated to dinner with the principal and several staff members, we returned
Sign at Chengdu Hotel
What more needs to be said? to our hotel (a Chinese style hotel, reasonably comfortable and although the beds were quite hard we slept well) on the bank of the river that flows through the city centre.
After a Chinese breakfast of noodles, vegetables and awful coffee, we met our driver who took us in a private minibus to Wolong - some 140 km NE of Chengdu. We anticipated a drive of a few hours, given the size of Chengdu (10.44 million) and the time required to get out of the city. What we didn’t bank on was the fact that a) the roads between Chengdu and Wolong were being totally reconstructed, and b) 90% (or so it seemed) of China’s population was also on holiday and going to the same place we were! After 7 hours driving, during which we stopped once for a toilet break, we arrived in Wolong in the late afternoon. We checked into the Wolong Panda Resort Hotel and went for a brief walk before heading for the dining room for tea. The hotel is in a beautiful setting, at the base of a mountain, with charming views to be seen from many vantage points in the hotel.
Up
early the next morning we travelled a couple of km in the minibus to the Panda Research Centre, and for about three hours we spent some quality time, watching the pandas eating (which they do a lot of in the early morning, and then sleep the rest of the day), having our photos taken beside a large panda who was distracted by being given some juicy bamboo plants to munch on, watching the baby pandas playing in the outside nursery and watching one of our party actually playing with these six-month-old babies, for which she paid the princely sum of 1000 Yuan (about $167) for five minutes in with them. We had to wear blue sterilised over-gowns, gloves and shoe-covers, so that no germs were transmitted into the panda’s playing area. By about midday the pandas had obviously grown tired of entertaining the humans, so the babies were hustled off to bed in their nursery and the older ones just retired for the rest of the day. There are still many pandas in the wild, but all of them have been tagged and are tracked and monitored closely and regularly. It is a credit to the people involved in the
panda management industry that all the pandas are in excellent health, their breeding program has been very successful and the pandas have actually been taken off the endangered species list.
After a brief lunch and quick shopping trip at some of the local stalls we piled into the bus again for the return journey down the mountain back to Chengdu. Some of the scenery on the way is absolutely amazing and beautiful. It is a real pity that there is a constant pall of pollution over much of China, because it cuts visibility severely and detracts from what would otherwise be fantastic vistas as you look out from mountain roads and across valleys.
The trip back down to Chengdu was rather uneventful and much quicker than the trip up the previous day. On our way back to Chengdu, we were dropped off at the ancient Dujiangyan Irrigation System. This is an ancient engineering project, built about 250 B.C. The Minjiang River used to cause havoc and flood damage on a regular basis in ancient times. The governor of the province of that time undertook a detailed survey of the area, and eventually had a channel cut through a
mountain in the west of the city of Dujiangyan. In the middle of the river, a dyke was built of timber, bamboo and rocks. In order to control the flood, two spillways were built at the end of the water-dividing dyke. It now became possible to channel the flood waters away from the main river and direct them to a series of channels which would provide irrigation for the surrounding farmland. The system is still fully operational today, and since that ancient time this gravity irrigation system makes the entire Chengdu Plain a “Land of Abundance” with a bumper harvest every year in spite of drought or flood. The irrigated area has expanded gradually from 126,000 hectares to nearly 660,000 hectares. Across the main part of the river there is a “husband and wife” swing bridge, which swings and sways alarmingly as people walk across it. But walk across it we had to, in order to meet the bus on the other side, which we did after a bit of a mix-up as to where we would rendezvous with him. Once all safely on board again, we continued with the return trip into Chengdu. Our driver delivered us to a
restaurant that had been recommended to us by one of the western teachers at the Chengdu school, and after a reasonably well-imitated “western” meal, with some good Aussie red wine, we returned by taxi to the same hotel we stayed at two nights previously, and had another good night’s sleep.
The following morning, we were to check out and meet another driver who would take us to the main station. This would normally have been straightforward, but we had had to pay a refundable deposit of 200 Yuan per room, and when we attempted to collect it upon checkout, the girl on reception decided to be quite uncooperative. Despite our (at first) polite explanations that we had in fact paid the deposit and were entitled to collect it, she soon lost interest in dealing with us, and in the middle of yet another attempt on our part to explain, she decided that she would serve other (Chinese) people who were just as demanding about their needs. We were starting to get quite aggro by this stage, and it was only through the intervention of our driver, who rang the travel agency that we had done all our bookings through,
that the girl on reception was eventually convinced that we should be given our deposits back.
Because of the hold-up at reception, we were a bit concerned that we would miss our train, especially as the driver seemed to be high-tailing it for the station, but we were delivered in plenty of time, and, typical of Chinese train stations, we and all other the passengers waiting to take the train, were herded like cattle into the waiting room, and kept cramped in there until 10 minutes or so before the train was due to depart. Once the gates were open for people to leave the waiting room and get on the train, it was an absolute bottleneck of mayhem and every person for himself as we pushed, shoved and jostled our way onto the platform and then to find our seats. No sooner had we sat ourselves down than the train started to pull out of the station.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.067s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 11; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0364s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb