Panda breeding centre
Trip Start
Jul 21, 2008
1
15
23
Trip End
Ongoing
Chengdu,
China
Friday, September 19, 2008
little pandas
The next morning, I mean a few hours later, after a bit of sleep and being bitten to death by mosquitos, we decide to have half a day off so we lounged around in the hostels court yard next to a lovely rockery with huge goldfish swimming around.
Now we were in a new province, and the speciality food is spices! They eat bucket loads of chillies with their dinners! It's absolutly mad. Helen isn't having such a goodtime with the food, but Merlin is in his element! That afternoon, we meet up with Tanya who we met in mongolia and again in Beijing, and had lunch at this small cafe. We order 3 different dishes via Tanya's phrasebook and hoped for the best! One dish was deicious, it had homemade crisps with pork. Another dish had chicken, pork and crab meat (!) with rice, and finally Merlins dish was spicy chicken. This plate was absolutley loaded with about 1500 chillies all chopped up, it was so hot. They love their spicy food! so much that tanya saw some guy whos food was so hot he had tears coming out of his eyes and he was local !!
We decided to go for a quick walk around chengdu it was a very typical city, smelly and polluted with a very strange air raid siren bellowing out across the city, it was really annoying.
Panda in the tree sleeping!
We strolled through an outdoor market with people selling loads of fresh fruit, spices, meat and fish. As we walked through the fish part it was all about being in the right place at the right time, as a large fish jumped out of its tank and squirmed around on the floor, ( merlin jumped out of his skin ) we looked around to see if someone would rescue it but everybody was asleep, and before we knew it it had jumped down between the drain.... a real life 'finding nemo'.
We walked through a park that had a temple in it. It was nice enough, but after seeing temples in mongolia and the rest of China, you find yourselfalmost getting bored with seeing them! We also stumbled across a supermarket and managed to buy a REAL FRENCH STICK(bread) yummy!! so webought some jam and butter and had a picnic back at the hostel... It was so nice to have some comfort food again!
The next morning, 19th, we got up at 7am and caught a taxi half an hour later, to the panda breeding centre. We wanted to go to the large panda reserve which is about 150km from chengdu, but it's not accessible due to the earthquake
(we were told). When we arrived, we were the first people there, so we ran to the cub enclosure just in time for their feeding
puppy eyes
. It was brilliant to see 3 pandas in frnt of you, munching away on the bamboo. We went to another enclosure with older pandas in, but there were more people there so we decidedto find the nursery. When we got to the nursery, there were 2 workers behind a huge glass screen, and 6 tiny little babies of varying ages between 1 month and 5months. They were so tiny and pathetic, but still incredibly cute. The photos don't give any perspective on their size....tiny, tiny, tiny!The big pandas were asleep when we got to their enclosure, so they were borning, but very cute when you see them fast asleep balancing in a tiny tree!
we saw a sign for RED pandas so we were really curious as to what these pandas looked liked,We had both never heard of red panda before o we were really interested to see what they looked like,they were kind of like a cuddley fox, but a lot slower.
They had a research centre at this park which you got to look around, and Helen found out that there is a genetic research base here for the pandas,so she was absolutley chuffed. She now wants to move to chengdu and work in the genetic research department for the pandas!
We headed back to our hostel to pack our bags and head off to Mt Emei for another 3-5 day back breaking hike up a mountain
