Chengdu Panda Heaven

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I wanted to call this blog "Chengdu and the 50p hair cut" but decided the pandas were more interesting. I did however get my hair cut, washed and head massaged for 50p, quality!! Anyway..........


We left our hostel in Xian knowing what to expect on the train. It was much the same as our train from Beijing to Xian but not quite as clean. The noise level however was just as loud but bizarly we came up trumps as night time arrived as the 2 chinese lads opposite us hired a dvd player from a guy who was renting them on the train and they chose to watch the new Transformers movie which was in english with chinese subtitles, bargain. Our luck was short lived as when the movie ended they chose to watch chinese comedy, with the volume up, and with half the carriage. A sleepless night lay ahead and when we reached Chengdu we were shattered. We had only booked 2 nights in Chengdu as the main reason was to see the pandas so when we arrived at our hotel we booked our panda trip for the next day. Up early (a pattern seems to be developing with the early mornings!) we were picked up by our driver, Ant & Lisa booked on our trip aswell, and we were taken the 10km to the panda sanctuary. The weather was awfull, realy dark and damp and we were a bit disapointed as it felt like the day would be a washout. As we arrived we had visions of a concrete jungle as it was in quite an industrial area. How wrong could we have been. The place was deserted, i guess this was a mixure of it being silly o clock in the morning and the bad weather, not quite raining but damp. We made our way inside and the whole place was beautifully green and very clean. We followed the map and we had heard it was sometimes hard to see the pandas as they like to stay indoors so when we saw our first panda in the adult enclosure within 5 mins of walking throught the gate we were all excited. They are funny looking things, smaller than you would think, we thought knowing the chinese they may have even been humans in fancy dress! As more people arrived we made our way to the panda kindergarten where there was a huddle of people, as we got closer we could see at least a dozen little pandas. Most of them in the trees but some were playing in front of us. It was great to see that they had such a good area to play/move around in. We took what seemed like a million photos and we heard one of the guides say that it was unusual to see so many and that they had come out because it was nice and cool. Finally the weather was on our side! We spent the next 2 hrs wandering around seeing pandas of all ages and sizes, even new born ones only a few weeks old but we couldn't take any photos as it may damaged the develpment of their eyes. We read that the breeding program there was very successfull and this was evident as there had been many births this year and the place was full of healthy pandas. We left the park with huge smiles on our faces, the Chengu pandas have been Lisa's favourite so far, if there was room in her backpack i'm sure she would have tried to bring one home. We made our way back to the hotel and got showered and ready for our meal that evening which would be our last with out train buddies Ant & Lisa as they are headed to Tibet as we make our way to Hong Kong. We hope to catch up with them in the new year in Australia. Chengdu was our last city in China and was a fitting fairwell to a strange, mad but beautiful country, highly recommended!

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