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Published: July 14th 2006
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Panda's, panda's everywhere.... OK so they weren't quite wandering around the streets of Chengdu but I got to see a lot of them at a sanctuary there. I joined a tour from the hostel I was staying at - the tours are deliberately run in the morning when the giant panda's are at their most 'active'.... well, they sit there eating, and eating, and eating, and...... yup they don't seem to do much else other than eat and sleep! The fact that the keepers place their food close to the barrier that separated us and them contributed to the fact that we were able to get so near but they didn't seem too fussed about having us there.... the bamboo shoots were far more interesting! Although I swear one or two of the teenagers started to show off and pose for photo's..... We just amazed ourselves with how long we were prepared to stand in the pouring rain watching an animal eat - it truly was mesmerising and some of the best few hours I've spent in China... although I guess I've said that about a lot of things now! I did turn down the opportunity to pay 100GBP to have
my photo taken with a panda though.... watching them was more than enough. I thought the Orangutans that we'd seen in Borneo had seemed human like, but sitting there watching the panda's watching us and manipulating the bamboo with their hands to tear off the best bits... I think I'd say the same about them.
Giant pandas are classified as bears but have adapted to a vegetarian diet and depend almost exclusively on bamboo as a food source (only about 1% of their diet is made up of other plants and meat). In the wild they'll spend 11 to 14 hours each day foraging for food, stopping only to sleep or travel. During this time they consume a massive 12 - 38 kg of food - they have to eat large amounts as their digestive system doesn't easily break down the cellulose in bamboo. They are solitary animals that live for 14-20 years in the wild and up to 30 years in captivity. Adult panda's weigh 80- 150 kg, a newborn cub weighs only 90-130 gm and looks like a tiny, naked rat - if you didn't know it was a panda cub then you'd never guess! They are
found in three provinces in south west China: Sichuan (which is where I saw them), Gansu, and Shaanxi, where reserves have been set up in which logging, a major threat to their habitat and hence survival, is banned. Poaching is met with up to 10 years in jail (once upon a time the harshest penalty for those caught poaching was death). Results from a 2004 survey revealed nearly 1,600 pandas in the wild, over 40% more animals than previously thought to exist - the last panda survey in the 1980s found around 1,100 giant pandas in the wild.
Before visiting the sanctuary I hadn't realised that you also get Red Panda's, which look more like raccoons than their closest relative the giant panda. They're only 50-63cm in length and weigh just 4-6kg.... and as their name suggests are red. They are found in a mountainous band that runs through Nepal, Bhutan, India, Burma, China and Laos and like their bigger relatives they're also great fans of bamboo.
In the evening I went along to a Sichuan Opera performance. Fortunately it wasn't all Sichuan Opera - that's definitely an acquired taste (to my ears its akin to strangled cats....)
- but rather a compilation of all different acts. There was some opera but also music, acrobats and an amazing changing faces piece. I'd actually seen this before with Ann in Beijing but was just as good the second time - the performer, either through slight of hand or a shake of the head, somehow switches masks - it might be a change of colour or a change of design but I've yet to see one slow enough that you can work out how they do it.... during the few minutes of their performance they might switch to 5 or 10 different masks!
Next up... lost in Lhasa.
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Ail
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AHHHHHHHHHh
they're so gorgeous!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!