Chengdu

Chengdu is the capital of the province Sichuan, it has a population of about 14 million people included the surrounded area, pretty big but also charming, it has some parks and old towns area. When we arrived at the hostel the atmosphere was quite relaxed and the people amused, the employee were kind and the guests enjoyed to contact with other people, you quickly get into conversations with the others. The hostel offers a guided tour to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, we directly booked a tour with them for the following day.   

At round about 8 am in the morning our tour to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding started, by car it took us about 45 minutes from our hostel, it is at the north east of Chengdu. Unfortunately the day began again with rain, but when we saw the panda bear for the first time we didn´t thought about the weather any longer. The panda bears are sooo cute, especially the little ones. The area is a beautiful huge park with lots of bamboo trees, on a shiny nice day you can spend the whole day there. We stayed there only for half a day, from the early morning until midday. Feeding time is in the morning and in the afternoon, during this time the bears are most active, the rest of the day they used to sleep. There are a lot of outdoor and indoor enclosures, breeding stations and a small cinema where they show about the work and investigations they do. Until today they have successfully breed 146 pandas and reintroduce them to the wild. If you plan to visit that place, try to go in the morning or afternoon to avoid the crowd, a lot of people are going there as well. For us it was worth to see the cute pandas once in our lifetime, we could see them so close and so many, who knows when we will again have the chance. 

In the evening our hostel made a “dumpling party”. Those guests who were interested could join for free and roll the dumplings. We joined the event with 10 other people from the hostel. It was a nice evening, we rolled the dumplings and had nice conversations with the others. 

We also went to one of the old town of Chengdu, next to our hostel. Amongst other we went to a temple to have a vegetarian buffet lunch, you could eat together with the monk who lives there. The weekend on the 24th of July was at some public places quite full of police and security people, there was a G20 meeting in Chengdu, probably that’s also the reason why the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding was closed…I guess the politicians had a private tour there…

On Monday the 25th we will travel by train to Emei Shan, round about 180km south of Chengdu. There we plan to stay for a while, round about 7 days. The area is famous for the beautiful mountains and the temples, we would like to go hiking if the weather is nice.