Chengdu

The following morning we were taken to the airport for the flight to Chengdu. Chengdu is the capital of the Szechuan province. Chengdu has China's largest Panda reserve, though the mountains where they live in the wild are 4 hours drive away. Chengdu is in a large bowl at around 400m above sea level surrounded by mountains, and as such it is generally wet. Sure enough, when we landed, it was drizzling and around 10 degrees. We met up with the tour guide, and she suggested that we postpone the trip to the Panda reserve until the next day, as we had plenty of time then until the next flight, and the forecast was good.

During the trip to the hotel, the guide filled us in on the ways of the Chengdu people. Apparently the people here are very lazy. They are said to take after their Panda's in that all they want to do all day is sleep and eat! A good place to come for retirement apparently, but bad for the young people as they just learn to slack off and relax! The climate here is damp, but generally warm - mid winter gets down to around 10 degrees at its coldest (and so yesterday was considered very cold), and they never get snow. The area is renowned for it's spicy food (the Kung-Po Chicken and Szechuan dishes we have in English Chinese restaurants are from here.) The city is surprisingly much larger in population than either Beijing or Xian at around 30 million people to Beijing's 22 million or Xian's 26. Hard to imagine really coming from a country with a total population of just over twice the population of Chengdu!

The schedule for the evening was another show. This included the regions famous "Changing Masks" show. In the meantime, we unpacked and checked out the city center. Chengdu's city centre is very modern compared to that of either Xian or Bejing, it is very clean, there are pedestrian bridges in many places, reducing the need to dice with death considerably, and the traffic is much much saner. The drivers still seem to consider obeying traffic lights optional, but they seem to have more respect for, and more of, the traffic control officers who stand at junctions to assist the lights in controlling the traffic!

We had a late lunch in the centre, William had a McDonalds, and I had some meat-in-a-bun meal from a street vendor, which was spicy and very tasty. We had to meet the Tour Guide at 7:45 for the show, so at 6:30, we headed out to find dinner. I thought this would be plenty of time, and we headed for the City Square in order to find a restaurant. Of course the square was surrounded by museums and acadamies, and by the time we found a restaurant, it was almost 7pm. We found a restaurant close to a McDonalds, the idea being that I eat some local cuisine, and we get a takeaway burger for William. So I ordered a beer and some food, and we waited, and waited. After half an hour, we really needed to get William fed and back to the hotel for the show, so I told them (in hand signals mainly) that I needed to go, and they gave me the bill - thankfully just for the beer. Downstairs, the McDonalds had had an influx of people, and was heaving - there was no way we'd get a burger and still make the show, so we just legged it back to the hotel.

The show was great - William thoroughly enjoyed it, particularly the Changing Masks, which were very impressive (they changed their masks in the blink of an eye - hard to see how, but presumably involving strings somehow), the Shadow Puppets, and a comedy show involving a beaten and henpecked husband! We made do on a couple of boiled sweets until the show was over, and made it back to the hotel for dinner shortly before it closed!

I let William have a lie in the next morning, as the tour guide wasn't picking us up until 11:30. We went to the old part of town first. In Chengdu the old part of the town was sort of a cheat. It was two parallel streets called Narrow Street and Wide Street, but they have been recently rebuilt in the old style - similar to Beijing's Hutong area. The streets are very popular locally and with tourists, and had various tea shops, restaurants and trinket shops. There was a nice irony in the fact that Wide Street was narrower than Narrow Street, but the tour guide didn't really get it when I tried to explain. Two things stood out here in the "old" part of town, one that Chinese people often get their ears cleaned and shoulders massaged at Tea shops, the second was that we stumbled across the filming of some soap opera or other. We saw the lead actress give one of the actors a good slap round the face before they cut the scene and collapsed into laughter!

We went to a local restaurant for lunch, where I picked some spicy double-cooked pork, William chose pigs trotters, and the tour guide ordered an aubergine dish and cold cooked rabbit. The rabbit came on-the-bone. It seems that a lot of poultry, and apparently rabbit as well, is cooked whole, and then chopped into slices before serving. With duck, the head is left on the meat, and with chicken the head and feet are typically on the plate when it is served! The rabbit was cold and served with chilli oil and satay sauce. The trotters were served in a sauce, and were reasonably tasty, but basically you are eating skin and fat - there's not a lot of meat on the feet of a pig! Apparently the Chinese really like offal, including trotters, chicken's feet and the like, and they are more expensive than ordinary meat! The other dishes were delicious, particularly the aubergine.

The Panda reserve was great. The weather was warm and dry, at around 16-18 degrees, and the pandas were active and playful. We got loads of footage of the baby and teenage panda's playing - adults are far more docile. Frankly it's amazing that Pandas have made it this far - they do not really seem geared up to survive as a species. Here are the reasons why:

1. Pandas, though once carnivores like their Bear cousins, now eat bamboo. And not just any bamboo, arrow-stalk bamboo only found in the mountains.
2. Because they have a stomach built for eating meat, their digestive system is very poorly tuned for digesting bamboo. This means that they need to eat something like 50lb of bamboo daily to maintain their weight.
3. The Panda's sexual cycle is a once per month thing - to breed they have a very small window of possibility each month.
4. Pandas are basically anti-social, and prefer their own company, so when females enter that small window of sexual activity, they spread their scent around the forests to try to attract a mate.
5. Pandas are fussy - once they have found a potential mate, the chances are they won't find them attractive enough to mate with.
6. If they do get pregnant, they have a 9-30 month pregnancy period before giving birth, and typically give birth to a single baby.
7. The babies are born helpless, and practically furless, which in the cold mountain areas pandas prefer, this is bad. They are not truly self sufficient and fully grown until they are around 2 years old.
8. Given all of the above, Pandas have a 10 year lifespan - so only really a 6 year window to possibly have babies.
9. Pandas, given their strange diet, find the need to conserve their energy for the rare occasions they may need to try to reproduce, and so spend most of the time they are not eating asleep.

It really is a wonder that these gentle, lazy, sleepy animals still exist in the wild at all. In captivity they only manage to reproduce using artificial insemination.

After the Panda Base, we headed to the airport for the flight to Guilin.