Cuddling Baby Pandas

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July 12th 2009

Published: July 15th 2009

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TimboJ

Songpan

Knight guarding the entrance to the town

Chengdu

Chengdu and around Sichuan are also places that I've been wanting to visit for a while. One of my colleagues and his wife were also traveling in the area, so this gave me an opportunity to stop having to pretend to have friends!

Chengdu was a fairly relaxed and laid back city, but with all the amenities you would need. However, it did surprise me just how loud the Sichuan people speak - it seems that the local dialect is one that needs to be shouted to be understood. The food in Chengdu was fantastic - pizza, curry, coffee. It's been a while since I've had decent western food so it was nice to indulge and satisfy my craving. Sichuan food is as notoriously spicy as Hunan food, and my stomach isn't quite right from the last year in Changsha. We did try Sichuan hotpot one day and despite it being rather delicious, I couldn't eat it too often.

The definite highlight of Chengdu was the Panda Centre. Due to the earthquake last year the pandas have been moved to outside Chengdu in Ya'an. Therefore, I chose to go to the Panda Breeding Centre which

Panda 2

is just on the outskirts. This meant we were able to get there at 8am just as they were waking up. I've visited other zoos in China to see pandas, but normally they are a bit dirty and depressed. Here they were wonderful and upbeat. Though, as another tourist pointed out, they really do look like 'a man in a panda suit'. Other than the youngsters who just spent the time bundling each other, it seemed that the panda life involved waking up, going to toilet, eating bamboo and then going back to sleep. Made me think maybe I was a panda in a previous life.

After a while, we came across the red pandas - which I honestly never knew existed. I thought we'd come across the fox zoo, but I was told they were indeed red pandas. I decided to pay the 100 RMB (c. 10 quid) to have my picture taken with one of them. I'd have prefered the black and white ones but they were a hefty 1,000 RMB. The panda sat on my lap munching its apple, quite unaware of me or the pack of chinese photographers.

Songpan

After

Mu Ni Gou 3

a few days in Chengdu, we headed up to Songpan in Northern Sichuan. The bus journey up there was an interesting experience. The earthquke last year hit Northern Sichuan quite badly, and the bus journey showed a lot of evidence of this. Beautiful mountains have been laid bare by landslides, and the journey was broken up by road rebuilding and landslide warnings. There were also houses with huge cracks down the centre and numerous temporary huts on the side of the road.

I loved Songpan as soon as I got there. It's 2,800 metres up so the air was lovely and fresh, though left you gasping for air at times - I felt like I had a hangover for a couple of days. The main reason for going to Songpan was to go to Jiu Zhai Gou, but it also offers horse trekking. We decided on a 2 night overnight trek which also included the National Park Mu Ni Gou. This was definitely worth it though my bum was pleased to get back.

Next is Jiu Zhai Gou and then northwards through Gansu - not officially Tibet but full of Tibetan towns and grasslands.

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