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Published: September 22nd 2009
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Well, what can we say about Chengdu? Not much really, we arrived at our hostel Sims Cozy Hostel 80yn for a double shared bathroom, not much to say about this hostel apart from the good food and DVD players in your room, so you can have a good old DVD session. Once settled in and showered we then spent all day trying to sort out our onward trip to Tibet but that’s another story to be put in another section of our blog.
The next day, after an amazing BLT we set off to venture, we finally found the Wenshu Temple after coming to many dead ends along the way. This temple is from the Tang Dynasty and is Chengdu’s largest and best preserved Buddhist temple. We wondered around the beautiful enchanting gardens and T had some Jasmine Tea in the tea house. Next we missioned across the big city which has no subway and desperately needs one to find the massive Mao statue in Tianfu Square before heading back to the hostel for more good food, beers and DVDs. Oh and we also turned into geeks for an hour and went to a slide show about Western Sichuan from
a company called Dragon Expeditions, worth using if you want to do a big trek in this region, it was brilliant to have local Chinese people doing a slide show in English, something we could never do the other way round, well done to them!!!!
The next day was the best day, today was our trip to the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, the base holds nearly 50 giant and red pandas. Breeding is the focus here and we were lucky enough to get to see some tiny pandas in the nursery about a foot long, no photos though. So after a great morning watching these amazing endangered species play and eat we headed back to the hostel. We did this trip through the hostel and to be honest I would get up early yourself and try to sort out your own way there in time for feeding at 9am, we were very rushed about, being pushed from one place to another, with such poor light and lots of people it was hard to get a good shot of these amazing pandas but doing it on your own you would have time to wait for the tour groups to
leave before being able to get right up close for some good shots, G did this and lost Tony because he went off with our lot ops.
The rest of the day we didn’t do much apart from have a few beers and some food while we waited for our trip to a Sichuan Opera in a tea house on the night, this show was amazing, it had traditional Chinese opera, a guy doing hand puppets using shadows, it had the famous face changing guys and even costume changing, we figured out how they did it but wont ruin it for anyone who has not seen them yet. All in all a really good night, naturally washed down with a few beers back at the hostel.
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