After getting our bags we exited the train and went through the station to the outside. There was a large fenced off area with hundreds of people waiting for passengers to get off the train. There were many signs being held saying the names of hotels and hostels. Unfortunately ours was not one of them. I had emailed and prebooked a room, they emailed back and confirmed they would pick us up at the train station. It took a lot of work and crafty communication skills, but we finally got someone to use their cell phone and call the hotel for us. They had obviously forgotten about us, they said to take a cab and they would reimburse us when we got there.
We arrived at the Mix Hostel. It was a lively place, lots of travelers from all over the world. Hence the name, The Mix. We stayed in a double with private bathroom, it was in a different building across the street from the hostel. It was a totally different hotel. The Mix must just work out a deal with them to use their double rooms. It was a very nice hotel and only cost 160 yuan ($22 Canadian) a night.
Chengdu is a big city with a population of about 10 million. This many people only has it ranking as the 4th largest after Shanghai, Beijing and Chongqing. It has lots of traffic and a fair share of pollution. There are tons of bicycles here, each time the lights turn red at an intersection you will see dozens of bikes pile up at the front of the line. There are all the modern amenities, lots of shopping malls, McDonalds and even a Starbucks! It was really hot and humid here. One time we were walking back from the main hostel building to our hotel at midnight. We couldn't believe how warm it was outside. This is well beyond anything you experience on one of those warm summer nights at home. We had a considerable amount of sweat on us just from walking across the street! People were out on the sidewalks sitting in chairs, I guess it was cooler than inside their residences.
On a main road in Chengdu there is one of the largest statues we have ever seen. It is a great big Chairman Mao with his arm in the air. We wonder how many people in China still admire him and his beliefs?
Chengdu is in Sichuan province. Sichuan is most famous for SPICY food! You have to be very careful ordering anything here. They will spice up everything. Pizza, spaghetti, even McDonalds has Sichaun chili powder to shake onto all your food. People's opinion of what is mildly spicy can vary greatly. Your tongue and throat might still very well be numb after ordering a mild dish! The Sichuan Hot Pot and Kung Pao Chicken are among the most popular dishes. The Sichaun hot pot is a bubbling cauldron of extremely hot oil and water. You dip skewers of all kinds of things into it. Meats, vegetables and tofu. Sometimes a whole bunch of food is just dumped into it and you fish it out with chopsticks. It's a very social meal, everyone sits around to enjoy it and makes a long evening out of it. In many places the empty skewers are thrown onto the floor.
One of the major attractions in Chengdu is the Giant Panda Breeding Research Center. Unfortunately it was quite disappointing when we went there. The climate of Chengdu is not like the natural area where the pandas live, at least not in the summer time. Their usual habitat is further north in China, high in the mountains where it would be cooler. It is too hot for them at this time of year so they keep them inside. There was only one big panda outside sleeping on a bamboo platform. He woke up and started to move, so we got excited to be able to see him. He did a big yawn and then climbed down from the bamboo platform. We saw him for about 30 seconds while he walked across the area and went inside a building.
Pandas live at high altitudes in mountainous regions, wild sightings of them are very rare. Little is known about them still. Sources claim they have existed for at least 600,000 years. Some researchers believe they date back as far as the ice age between 1 to 3 million years ago. Scientists still debate whether they belong to the bear or the raccoon family, or a family all of their own.
They eat enormous amounts of food, up to 20kg a day. They have a very undeveloped digestive system. Bamboo accounts for 95% of their diet and they spend 10 to 16 hours a day munching on it. They will only eat about 20 of China's 300 species of bamboo. The encroachment of humans into their territory and the following reasons are why they remain an endangered animal. They have a very slow reproductive rate. They have a very difficult time finding each other in the wild and are very particular about who they will mate with. Females usually only give birth to one cub. If they have twins they will tend to abandon one.
We were told to go early in the morning to the breeding center so we could see the pandas being fed. It was really crowded, you had to wait your turn to squeeze into a skinny hallway to view them. They are behind bars munching on the bamboo.There were so many people crammed in there it was really hard to see anything. There were many rooms marked nursery with closed curtains. We got to see a few younger pandas indoors, but they were quite large and far from being babies still. There was an enclosure with red pandas, but they were really hot too and sprawled out on the ground trying to keep cool. We wonder how accurate their breeding research can be if so many variables are affecting the Pandas, like the heat, and the pollution they are living in. Overall it was not worth going to unless you have never seen a panda before, or try going at a different time of year. We were told the Wolong Panda Center further up north is much better. You can see lots of pandas outside in a more natural type of an environment.
The other attraction in Chendgu is the Sichaun Opera, especially to see the famous face changing. We were told to go on the weekend when there is the most variety of performances. We saw many different kinds of entertainment. There was a young girl with amazing juggling skills. She layed on her back and juggled a table with her feet as well as a large clay urn. There was a humorous Chinese Opera play where a wife punishes her husband. He keeps sneaking off to gamble. She makes him to stupid tricks with a lit oil lamp. He has to balance it on his head and do different tasks. There was an Opera performance with sword fighting and flame blowing. The best was the face changing. Dressed up Chinese dancers come out and perform while continuously changing their face masks. We really don't know how they do it, it happens so fast. Each mask has a different colour, which represents different emotions. It is considered quite an art in China that takes a great deal of effort to learn and perfect. On the side of the stage was a reader board. When ever someone was talking it would translate into English, or should we say Chinglish. We were getting almost as much entertainment out of trying to read the sign as the performances themselves.
We really didn't do much else in Chengdu, there's not a lot of attractions for tourists. It just happened to be where the train took us from Lhasa.
We had a thought. We have been traveling in Hong Kong and China for over 3 months now and not even once have we seen or been given a fortune cookie with our food. Is this only a North America thing?
Next stop Xian.
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