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Published: October 14th 2013
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Red panda (I wrote this a while ago, only just getting around to posting it now) I took Em to Chengdu as part of her birthday present, as it is home to the main Panda research and breeding centre in China.
I would say Chengdu is in the west of China as it took almost 3hrs to fly there, but I think it is actually slap bang in the middle - it is easy to forget just how huge China is.
It is a much less modern, hectic and more laid back city than any I have been to in China. There are fewer tall buildings, a lot more slummy areas and it is still developing - although you get the impression that they are not in any hurry.
It was more like some of the laid back developing South East asian cities (Siem Riep, Chang Mai, Phnom Penh) than any of the other Chinese cities we had been to.
One of the reasons for this is because it is a lot less touristy. This also means that you have to be a little more careful, as we discovered when some taxi drivers attempted to rip us off.
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Two baby pandas playing Walking around the city is great though as the smell of the food in the air is unreal. This is because Chengdu is in the Sichuan province of China which is known for its spicy foods - cooked using a lot of spices and herbs.
We only had a couple of days in Chengdu, the first of which we went to the Panda research centre. One thing I noticed was how crazy the taxi drivers were here. Having been in China for a while you see some pretty crazy drivers but the ones in Chengdu surpassed them all - which is saying something!
The Panda Research Centre is just outside the city, it is very much like a wildlife park but only containing pandas. We walked around the entire park, seeing a lot of pandas and even bumping into some Scottish people in the process. I had never heard of the red panda before but we did manage to spot one - they look more like a racoon/fox than a panda.
The normal pandas look like stuffed toys, they dont look real! Almost all day they literally just sit around and eat bamboo, as they require a
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Some animals in the 'Tortoise temple' crazy amount of bamboo to get their daily nutritional requirements.
I didnt know much about how endangered pandas were, they are basically struggling due to the lack of climates where bamboo can grow in the wild; also they have a bad habit of accidentally killing their young (by, for example, sitting on them)!
After we (or more correctly, after Em) were (was) all 'panda'd out' we went back into town. On the way in we stopped to see a random temple behind a very busy bus station. It was a typical Asian temple - set in massive grounds - but the one thing different was that this temple was more obsessed (than usual) with tortoises than others! In fact there were many tortoises wondering around and a lot of different frogs and toads bathing in the fountains in the temple!
Back in town, we walked around a large park full of swamps in the middle of the city. The park and the city in general are full of a lot more bugs than other places in China, very annoying!
In the evening we had some local Sichuan food. I love Sichuan food but the problem is
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Park in downtown Chengdu on a cloudy day that they often make it so strong it is inedible - especially for me as I cant even handle mild spice! And because it is not really a tourist city there is no English so you are usually just guessing at what food you are getting - you cant exactly tell the waitress to recommend you something milder!
In fact, one night we ate at a local restaurant where we got the hostel staff to write down the Chinese characters for the dishes we wanted in advance!
Anyways, we tried a lot of different foods since it was so cheap you could order a couple of dishes each to try. We tried Mapo Tufu which is the specialty dish of Sichuan, it is like a spicy tofu stew but since I am not a huge fan of tofu it wasnt my cup of tea... However, despite trying all these foods, we quite often found ourselves having to grab a more western snack back at the hostel as we were unable to finish a lot of dinners due to how spicy they were!
At night time we went to see a famous Sichuan opera show - which was
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The famous Sichuan Opera show! like a mixture between magic, street art and puppetry! It included the famous 'face-changing' puppets - a magic act where they swap masks in the middle of a scene. There were lots in the show, from finger puppets to fire blowing - pretty cool.
Aside from pandas, puppetry and food, there are some other interesting sites around Chengdu. One of them is a large mountain range called Qingcheng which is where we headed on our 2nd day.
There is a lot of trekking you can do at the mountain, but we took quite a short route as we were hoping to fit in another site into the day. It was a really sunny day and there were some great sites including a serine Buddhist temple on top of the mountain where the monks go to study. Just entering the temple and taking in the sights and fresh air made you feel considerably calmer so is it easy to see why the monks chose this spot.
We also trekked down a path that is known to have problems with local monkeys stealing food and water but fortunately (or unfortunately?) we didnt see any.
After the hike we
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Big Buddha overlooking Leshan managed to squeeze in a trip to Leshan which is home to the biggest Buddha in the world - it is carved into a cliff edge. We cut it very close trying to fit this in and almost didnt manage it, as taxis kept taking us to the wrong place but it was definitely worth it as the Buddha is way more impressive than I expected.
Afterwards, we tried to leave the Buddha site through a back exit but ended up in this beautiful little fishing village - with this amazing old antique bridge over the river. One of the coolest sites we saw all day, which we never would've found if we didn't get lost - I love stuff like this! Unfortunately there were no roads nearby, so we had to take a rickshaw from a (very old, yet surprisingly fit) local to the road where we also got on a local bus (I am pretty sure the locals had never seen a Lao Wei on their bus before!). We only just made it to catch our train back to Chengdu.
So it was a very short visit to Chengdu but, as usual, we crammed in a
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Some perspective on how big the big Buddha was... lot! It is a very interesting city and I like the less modern, backward feel and way of doing things.
(Some more photos at the bottom!)
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