Look at the Little Cutie

  Chengdu, China
Friday, September 24, 2004

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within
- Lillian Smith

In the mini Scheme of Things

01 Chengdu

After hanging out for a few days in the Leshan/Emei Shan area it was off to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and about 2 hours, and 170km, northeast of Emei Shan. Back to the big cities, the 5th most populous in China. This place is famous for its teahouses, its prosperity & liberalism, as the last stronghold for the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party who, in 1949, lost the Chinese Civil War and retreated to Taiwan), its fiery Sichuan cuisine, and as the first place in the world to widely use paper money (around AD960). Impressive, eh? It's also famous the world over as being the last of the stops in my little Chongqing - Sichuan Province loop (Chongqing - Leshan - Emei Shan - Chengdu - Chongqing) as later today I'll be getting the bus from here back to Chongqing. There I will attempt to get the Yangtze ferry, tickets for which I still have to source. That should be fun.

Pandas
Chengdu is a popular transit city for travellers on route to or from Tibet, just west of here. Good-for-nothing travellers come here to organise, via the many Chengdu agencies specialising in Tibetan travel, the required paperwork for their visit (visiting Tibet, which I hope to do some day, is slightly different to the rest of China and involves a bit of red tape). My reason however for coming to Chengdu was pretty straight forward; to get a glimpse at one of the symbols of China, the Giant Panda. On display for all to see at the nearby Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, they are the black-eyed logo for the WWF and have been adopted as the symbol for endangered species worldwide. Their endangered species status is as a result of human encroachment (jeesss, we're always to blame, eh?) and the vagaries of the favoured food - fountain bamboo - which periodically flowers and dies over huge areas. Today only an estimated 1000 of them survive in the wild, in pockets of high altitude forest in south-western China. Thankfully the Chinese government is taking their plight seriously and has set up various breeding centres around the country. They are odd creatures; bear like, with carnivore's teeth and a digestive tract poorly adapted to their largely vegetarian diet, very like the Australian Koala bear. But they sure are cute.

DIY Logistics
Shunning the overpriced yet convenient 'Hostel Tour,' I decided to make my own way to the Research Base. That's the way my attitude has developed during my time in China; if there is a tour on offer to the same place that I wanna go then I wanna get there myself, thank you very much. I guess it's like beating the system, if you know what I mean? It's the same with purchasing train/bus tickets. While the CITS was convenient for purchasing my first few Chinese transport tickets, at a time when I was a greenhorn, rabbit-in-headlights Chinese traveller (purchasing tickets in Guangzhou, for example... see my Didn't Like the Look of it paragraph in this past entry), I soon toughened up and took the DIY approach, and I suggest you do too. Go to the train/bus station yourself, sharpened your elbows and join the queues, have the correct pronunciation of your desired destination and the phrasebook ready with the correct phrases........ and smile. Do all that and soon enough you'll be wondering what all the fuss was about? Don't be afraid of making mistakes. This isn't India, where they turn you away and make you rejoin the queue, in a heartbeat, if your reservation slip isn't properly filled out. The Chinese will appreciate the effort you are making and help you accordingly. For me doing-it-yourself, while knowing there is an easier, path-of-less-resistance approach, makes the effort that much more rewarding. Yes, there are places like the CITS who are there to buy tickets for you, but lets be honest, they are only interested in the affluent tourist, and anyway, basically all they do is take your money and have some gofer run to the station to queue and buy the required ticket on your behalf, a ticket that, with the mark-up, invariably costs you a lot more than the price stamped on it. If that's okay with you then fine, go with the CITS. But not me. The exact scenario I just explained (the one with the gofer) happened to me when I was purchasing my first bus ticket from Guilin to Longshang on route to (Ping An minority village and I decided after seeing that little scam in action that I'd be DIY'ing it from then on. I never looked back, nor will you.

Look this way you silly creature

02 We're busy

The Research Base is a good few clicks out of the city, and having made my way there via local bus and moto pedicab, I soon found myself within feet of some of the cutest creatures I've ever seen. No wonder the girls love Pandas. Hell, everyone loves Pandas. They have the life; all they do, in no particular order, is sleep and eat, and every so often they are paired in a boy-meet-girl sort of way in the hopes that they'll 'get it on' and produce an offspring. Comon guys....

03 Hey Bill. On the left. Shes a bit of alright?

there's a zoo in the world somewhere relying on you two, not to mention the future of your race. The problem however is that Pandas aren't very good at 'getting it on', the male 'thingy' is tiny (whoops) and the survival rate for cubs that are born is low. Very low. So you can probably see why these guys are in a bit of trouble? The museum at the base does a good job at educating its visitors about the Pandas and their plight. It also

04 Not 1 but 2 black eyes

has a neat chart tracking the location of all the Pandas on loan by the Chinese government, a very lucrative business by all accounts, to various zoos around the world. And if that's not enough for you there's always the option to have your picture taken while holding a baby Panda (no chance with the big ones). At RMB400 (€40) a pop it isn't cheap, but it is certainly something that not many get to do, and the money raised helps out a lot at the base where they are constantly complaining about lack of funding. If you're wondering if I forked over RMB400 the answer would be no, nor was I even tempted. Of course, I didn't have RMB400 lining the bottom of my pockets but that's neither here nor there.

Jump!
That evening I returned to Chengdu and had my usual look around. After a few dumplings in a local restaurant, in the company of a teenage student who was keen to practice her English, I came across a slight commotion on a city street corner where it looked like there was a possible suicide in progress from the roof of a tall building overlooking the intersection. I'm not sure if it was actually a real suicide attempt but the sight of someone on the roof certainly drew a crowd of suicide suspecting onlookers. I hung around for a few minutes, just long enough to get bored, and continued on my way with whatever it was on the roof still there. That was probably as 'exciting' as it got in Chengdu, unless you class as exciting me developing a sudden and mysterious fever and almost passing out on the bus back from the Panda Research Base? I didn't. It was a weird and sudden sickness that thankfully went as quickly as it came. Even though it was brief it marked the low point of my time in China so far, even beating the realisation back in Guilin that I wasn't in possession of my money belt. Yes folks, getting sick really is the worst of all travel experiences, or certainty the worst I've experienced (getting sick in India was the definite low point of my 10-month rtw trip a few years earlier) and the main reason why it's important to take care of yourself when you're on the road, especially in places like China where it's easy to, for want of a better word, 'abuse' yourself. So Uncle Dave recommends eating well, drinking loads of water and taking multivitamins, if possible. Okay? Good. As for my state of health. Well, I have a 3-night cruise east on the Yangtze River to look forward to so I'll have plenty of time to rest and get myself in tip-top shape for what lay ahead in China after that. That's the plan at least. But I must get back to Chongqing first.