Chengdu - Home of the amazing panda bears!

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Friday 9th December – Sunday 11th December

We boarded the early 3 hour flight to Chengdu, North-West of Shanghai and slept most of the way, China had been an exhausting experience so far! We arrived in Chengdu and had had the knowledge to ask the girl at our last hostel to write our hostel’s name in Chinese, so we were confident that this taxi journey would be more successful! Sadly this wasn’t the case! The taxi drivers weren’t aware of the hostel, so once again we were dropped by the side of a road and left to hunt for the hostel once again! Thankfully we had been dropped on the right road and it didn’t take more than 15 minutes to find the right place.

It was late afternoon by the time we arrived, so we immediately booked a day trip to see the pandas – our prime reason for visiting Chengdu. We managed to book a trip for the following day, alongside tickets to the Sichuan Opera in the evening. The temperature had dropped significantly from Shanghai, it was freezing and our private room was within an outbuilding that required a mad dash outside and to the next building to the shared bathroom facilities! It was so cold, that we immediately ruled out showering for our 2 day stay…we would rather smell than risk freezing in the process of showering! We were now travelling properly, no more hotel rooms that we had become accustomed to in India!

That evening we ventured to an Italian that we had seen advertised, some 45 minute walk from our hostel, but it was well worth the trip. The food was delicious and it was very much needed! It was the best meal we had had since leaving the UK. I was missing the choice of food available at home already! I went to bed that evening in jogging bottoms, 2 t-shirts and a hoody, with the use of the electric blanket that had been provided! Coming from India the cold was hitting hard and it was only going to get colder!

The next morning we got up early and layered up, ready for the cold and a day out to visit the pandas! We went to the Chengdu Research base of Giant Panda Breeding, about an hour out of the City. The pandas were out and about…it is best to go in the morning as this is when they are most active, but it it luck on any given day as to how many you see. We were in luck, we saw more panda bears that I could have imagined! They are fascinating creatures, they look exceptionally lazy, with most of them simply laying around eating bamboo! We were lucky as we visited in the right season to see the babies. We visited the baby enclosure and sure enough, there were 8 little pandas, the cutest, fluffiest things I have ever seen! The bears were only a month old and still hadn’t learnt to walk properly, they were rolling around each other and being very playful with one smacking his brother or sister around the face causing him to fall over just as he had managed to stand! It was great fun watching the bears, they had children’s toys in their enclosure and it was very amusing to watch one of the little ones try to climb on a rocking sea-saw, only to roll straight off the other side. We then moved on to the kindergarten enclosure, where the pandas were between 1 and 3 years old. They were much larger than the babies and exceptionally playful. They wrestled each other, stole bamboo from one another and were generally causing chaos! The enclosures at the Research Centre were large, the pandas had climbing equipment, trees and all the bamboo that could want. It was good to see that they were being cared for properly. We spent the day wandering around the acres of land and the various enclosures and saw so many pandas. I loved watching them, the pandas had a very humane way of eating their bamboo, tearing it down from the trees with their front paws, then sitting with it while picking off the good bits and all the leaves with their mouths. They then picked everything back out their mouths with front paws and proceeded to eat the leaves one by one. The highlight of the day was going to the nursery, where 5 newborn pandas awaited us, They were only just big enough to be allowed outside and were even smaller and more fluffy than the babies we had seen earlier. It was adorable to watch them try to roll themselves over and try to explore their new freedom. I hope that the Research Centres in Chengdu continue their good work, saving the pandas from extinction and allowing this amazing creatures to continue to lead happy lives in the natural habitat. It was well worth a trip to China, just to have visited the pandas!

We wandered around Chengdu City after our trip and for the short time we were there, Chengdu seems like a lovely small City, where the people were friendlier than in Shanghai. We went to the Sichuan Opera that evening after ending up eating in our hostel, due to once again not being able to find anywhere with an English menu in the surrounding roads. The opera was different to anything at home and consisted of 8 acts each doing something quite different. One was a comedy act between a husband and wife where translations appeared at the side of the stage. The translations in themselves kept us very entertained. It was something we’d noticed already, anything you can find in English is translated very literally from it’s Chinese meaning, often resulting with some very amusing sentences!

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