I want to buy a Panda!

---

Though we were up late we still managed to get up at 7am to go catch the bus to the Panda Research Centre. We missed the first bus by 5 minutes and ended up having to wait an hour and a half for the next one. The bus stop was a stop for bus 902 (the bus we needed) and bus 904. While standing there probably 10 904 buses went by before the 902 that we needed came. You can imagine how frustrated Tris got! When 902 finally did pull up the driver jumped off so we jumped on and never paid muahaha.

The Panda Research Centre in Chengdu is the largest in the world and has approximately 60 pandas right now. It was so exciting to see them up close and moving around. The majority that we saw were either eating or sleeping. When they eat they sit on their butts like humans.

About 1000 pandas live in the wild. Pandas live to be about 20 years old and 99% of their diet is bamboo. The other 1% is vegetables. The Centre can’t grow enough bamboo so a lot of the bamboo is brought in from surrounding villages. All the food undergoes a cleaning and inspection process before being fed to the pandas. The babies are weaned from their mothers at an early age and are bottle fed cow milk. Pandas are born in pairs but normally only one baby survives. At the Centre they’ve been able to keep both alive with human help.

After the Panda Research Centre we caught the bus back into town. Sonya and Henry cooked us a traditional hot pot meal at the apartment and it was probably one of the tastiest meals we’ve had in China so far!

Tomorrow its onto a 24 hour train ride to Nanjing!

---