China, the Chengdu Post

[przed]

After Xi'an, our next city was Chengdu, in Sichuan province. We were only there for a day, primarily to visit the panda preserve, but it was a lovely city and we'd love to go back.

Here we are inside the panda preserve park. The park has extensive and quite lovely grounds, and houses over a hundred pandas, both giant pandas and red pandas.


This guy was the first panda we saw. Like most of the pandas at the preserve, he was mostly just hanging out and eating bamboo. Giant pandas are totally the couch potatoes of the animal world.


This is a group of juveniles pandas. Once they're adults, the pandas are solitary, but the younger ones like hanging out in groups. And eating bamboo.


And here's a little guy climbing a tree.


The Sweetie and Ros posing outside the panda nursery. This was the building where they let you hold a baby panda for a mere 2,000 yuan. (That's about $340 CDN.) It's crazy expensive, but the pandas are extremely expensive to keep, since they only like to eat bamboo that grows on mountains that need to be shipped in for them in mass quantities. Our guide told us it cost 50,000 yuan to keep one panda at the preserve for a year, so I reckon they need to get as many tourists to hold pandas as possible.


More pics of Ros with Oreo, just because.




Ros and the Sweetie posing in the restaurant in the panda preserve. (Ros stole the Sweetie's glasses and gave him her headband, for his SciFi look.)


One of Ros' favourite things on the trip was feeding fish in the many koi ponds we encountered. This was the first one, and the most densely populated by fish. (Pretty much every park and garden had someone selling ziploc bags of fish food for 2 yuan.)


A close up of the fish.


This is the JinLi district in Chengdu, and dates back as far as the Qin dynasty. It's very much like walking into a Shaw Brothers movie set, with lots of teahouses and restaurants and souvenir shops. A lot of the teahouses had blokes with guitars singing the Mandarin version of folk music.


People tied ribbons on this tree in the JinLi district to ask for good fortune.


One of the teahouses.


The three of us in front of a funky sculpture in the area. (Our guide wasn't the only one taking pictures of us when we posed here. Throughout the trip there would be people surreptitiously, and not so surreptitiously, taking pictures of us, and particularly the Sweetie. Though this time we didn't attract quite so much attention as the last time we were in China. The Sweetie once got surrounded by a crowd of people four or five deep when he had Ros in a baby carrier at the Summer Palace.

Comments

[asilia.livejournal.com]

OMG I love those pics of the pandas, sooo adorable!!! I can imagine Ros would have liked to keep the little fluffy one she got to cuddle with, aww.

[just-ann-now.livejournal.com]

Feeding koi in a fish pond is one of my favorite things to do, too! Though pictures of me doing it aren't quite as cute. These are great!

[moth2fic.livejournal.com]

Lovely, lovely pics, both of humans and animals!! I bet Ros will always remember the baby panda as well as the hungry carp!

[halotolerant.livejournal.com]

Koi! So pretty. And awwww, the pandas. Now there is a species that is a total evolutionary fail (only eating one type of bamboo is not a good strategy) EXCEPT they managed to evolve also unutterable cuteness so that humans would move mountains to help them keep breeding. And sitting around eating. Nice one, pandas *g*

[nakeisha.livejournal.com]

More lovely pictures - you really are such a happy family.

And the pandas . . . So lovely.

[sc-fossil.livejournal.com]

What fun pics! Those pandas are adorable, and so is Ros. I do like this town a lot.

I had to laugh about Sweetie being photographed. When my kidlets went, the same thing happened to them. What was funny was one of the other family members would casually get into the picture behind my kids when they were taking their own pics so that they'd be in the picture too. E said after a while she'd wave them in and they started taking group pics of miscellaneous people. Her husby has a similar build and colouring to yours so they must be quite interesting. They were on their own also, not in a big group and said they didn't see many Westerners unless they were with tour groups. There was the occasional more adventurous European.

[snailbones.livejournal.com]

The pictures of Ros and the baby panda chilling out together are just too cute for words. Worth every cent!

[przed.livejournal.com]

We're going to get more panda goodness! The day we arrived back in Toronto, so did two pandas from China. They'll be spending two years at the Toronto zoo, so we'll have plenty more opportunity to see, if not hold, pandas.

[przed.livejournal.com]

There was one place where you could feed koi with modified baby bottles. Wild. We were on a tight schedule that day, so we couldn't do it, but I'm sure Ros would have loved it.

[przed.livejournal.com]

I'm sure she's always going to remember the pandas. And the fish!

[przed.livejournal.com]

I had no idea how much of an evolutionary fail pandas were until we got to the panda preserve and our guide gave us the run down. Not only do they only eat one type of bamboo (whose crop does fail every once in a while, resulting in mass panda die offs) but their gut is still that of a carnivore (short intestines) meaning they have to eat enormous amounts of bamboo to get the proper nutrition. The females are only in heat for a day, once a year, but they're solitary in the wild so the chances of them successfully mating are slim. Their babies are only 100 g at birth--they look rather like little pink hot dogs--incredibly fragile, and have only a 50% survival rate in the wild. Really, it's a miracle there are any of them left, except that they are wicked cute and have charmed humans into looking after them.

[przed.livejournal.com]

Aww, thanks, Nikki. The pandas were very cool.

[przed.livejournal.com]

Chengdu is one place I would totally go back to.

You definitely don't see many Westerners outside of tour groups, but I think there might be a few more now than even six years ago. And we weren't quite the oddities that we were before. But yeah, you still get people taking pictures, especially when you're way tall like the Sweetie.

I have to say, though, that the general population in China is getting much taller. I used to be the average height when I'd go to Hong Kong or China, and now I'm on the short end again. The younger generations are definitely getting better nutrition.

[przed.livejournal.com]

I love the panda pics with Ros. I think chilling is what pandas do best. Definitely worth every penny.

[loyseofverlaine.livejournal.com]

Wow, has the panda reserve ever spruced up since we were there! I remember it as a cluster of run-down sheds, with the staff holding it all together on a shoestring with sheer determination.

Ros is adorable with that panda (she's adorable all the time, but with the panda? Cute personified.)

And I'd swear we were at that teahouse for a performance of traditional Chinese opera.

[przed.livejournal.com]

The panda reserve is very fancy schmancy now. And they were in the midst of a big new building push while we were there. Lots of new buildings going up, and a brand new gate as well.

Ros + panda = adorable is a fact.

A number of the teahouses do Chinese opera and face changing shows, so it's entirely likely you were in that one.

[rangerke.livejournal.com]

Giant pandas are totally the couch potatoes of the animal world. Perfect description. *g* Even just looking at their pictures is relaxing ;) The JinLi district looks so pretty. The Sichuan province is high on my to-visit list, it has so much to offer! (Including the Giant Buddha of Leshan and the Jiuzhaigou NP.) My travel bug is going crazy, all your fault! *g*

[przed.livejournal.com]

I loved how the pandas would just reach over, grab a piece of bamboo, eat is so all the crumbs fell on them, then reach for the next one.

I definitely want to go back and spend more time in Sichuan province. (And Xi'an, and Guilin, and Hong Kong, and Shanghai... Oh, it's hopeless!) My travel bug sympathizes with your travel bug.

Actually, my travel bug is hoping for a Mark tour soonish, so I can indulge in a short hop over to England. *g*

[rangerke.livejournal.com]

The panda-version of eating a bag of crisps, amazing :D

Really looking forward to your reports on these other cities! It is hopeless. All these new places to discover, but so many to revisit too...

That would be the best possible excuse to visit England! Now you've mentioned Mark....I would really love some sort of announcement soon, because dear Mr. Owen is actually totally messing up my travel plans. I have this month-long South-Africa trip in the planning, but (among other doubts) Mark is the main reason why I'm hesitant about booking, because I don't think I could enjoy the trip if he'd happen to do shows in October (I'm ashamed of the luxury of this 'dilemma' ;)). Not being this passionate about an artist made life so much easier :p

[przed.livejournal.com]

I very much kept thinking they looked like they were digging into a panda bag of crisps. *g*

I know how you feel. There's all sorts of the places I'd love to go back to, and all sorts of places I'd love to visit for the first time.

You also have my sympathy on booking your South African trip. At the beginning of the year I feared that Mr. Owen would tour whilst we were in China. Now, I've got no idea when, or if, he's going to tour. But I do wish he'd announce something soon, for all our sakes. (I do hope we end up at one of the same shows!)

[rangerke.livejournal.com]

All we need is time. And money ;)

Someone who sympathises, could use that ;) Yeah, at the beginning of the year March seemed like a very possible tour month. If only you could've known, not even one bloody single out yet :p Patience.. Right ;) And I really do wonder whether he'll tour at all. If I could just put a line about Mr. Owen in the cancellation policy, problem solved. I'm sure every fan is going mad by now and wishing the same thing! (I hope so too!)

[halotolerant.livejournal.com]

Yeah I saw a documentary about them and wow, that is one poorly-planned species. In the documentary, even the ones in captivity put in a room to mate together often couldn't figure out how to do it or seem that interested...

But then, yes, cuteness has saved them. If they were a type of beetle they'd be gone! *g*

[solosundance.livejournal.com]

I saw this and thought of you. It's a short travel piece on Chengdu and the pandas (http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2013/apr/20/pandas-at-play-chengdu-china) from today's Observer magazine :)