Chengdu redeems itself

Chengdu may be a smoggy, car choked city with few attractions (or ‘craphole’ if you prefer) but its one major draw-card makes the trip more than worth it.

The Chengdu Panda Research Centre is a huge sanctuary with nearly 50 giant and red pandas, where they concentrate on breeding and research. We did a tour with our hostel so we could get there early for feeding time, and spent a few hours wandering between enclosures watching the pandas lying on their backs munching their bamboo (very loudly, chewing with their mouths open…that would have never been allowed at the Evans family table).

They really are beautiful animals, and it was amazing being able to see six or more of them eating together, rolling all over each other and stealing the other’s bamboo. Luckily we saw the adults first, because once we saw the babies with their crazy antics and wobbly movements, the adults suddenly seemed a little boring… I’m trying to limit my gushing at the cuteness – for any fellow baby animal lovers, we have a few videos taken on the camera, so I can perhaps arrange a Baby Panda Appreciation party.

(J – Here you go… thanks to the Chinese version of Youtube… you’ll need Flash installed unfortunately.)

The people who put together the panda research museum seemed very keen to assure us that there were no panda babies born out of wedlock…there were mentions of wedding ceremonies occuring before breeding attempts (we weren’t sure whether these were actual ceremonies…I would have liked to see that) and the family tree listed a number of ‘husbands’ for each female. It wasn’t clarified whether polygamy was okay within the panda community, or if each divorce had to be settled first.

We were staying at a great hostel, with big lounge areas, very helpful staff and washing facilities, so we spent the rest of the day planning the rest of our trip (wanting to avoid booked out trains again) and catching up on washing.

We decided to watch a DVD one night (they had DVD players and a massive DVD library) but Josh fiddled around with the player for ages and declared that it wouldn’t open. We know that Josh is considers himself fairly technology savvy, so it was pretty amusing when a little old Chinese man came up to our room to investigate, pressed the ‘Open’ button once and the tray slid open straight away…

Our other Chengdu highlights include:

• spotting many more dogs wearing clothes, to strengthen my theory that at least 50% of the dogs here are clothed
• browsing the supermarket and finding fried rat’s heads, flattened pig’s faces and live fish (just your average Coles)
• listening to other backpackers busting moves on each other in the lounge area of the hostel (my favourite line, which was about three minutes into the conversation was “so, like, what are your dreams in life?”)
• discovering that Pizza Hut seems to be a five star restaurant here – they had steak, and a very classy restaurant interior…we didn’t eat there, despite being tempted by the “Golden Prosperity Pizza” (with sausage baked into the crust)

Stay tuned for our adventures hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge…