China, Chengdu: Pandas, Pigs, Pussycats and a Puppy

Chengdu is a very famous place in China because of its large and extremely successful Giant Panda Research and Breeding Centre. The adorable bears face a risk of extinction, as there are currently only around 1500 left in the world. We spent half a day at the centre and were able to observe many different giant pandas, of varying age and size, and a few red pandas. All of the pandas were eating and playing around with each other or lazing about in the heat.

An interesting fact that we learned, on the day we visited the pandas, was that they have to eat bamboo for 16 hours a day, in order to obtain enough nutrients from the plant to survive. Most of the time that we walked around the centre's panda enclosures, we watched the animals eat, but since we arrived early in the morning, we were able to spot a few giant pandas playfully wrestling with each other. The young cubs that we watched at the end of the morning didn't seem to need to eat as much as the older bears did, and they were really active, chasing their trainer and climbing trees throughout their playground.

At People's Park, we bumped into a huge group of people doing light aerobics to some great Chinese music

As we were leaving the research centre, we were shown a video explaining what the experts at the facility are doing to improve the pandas' chances of getting off the endangered species list. There are many advances now with technology and breeding that have been allowing successful artificial insemination attempts to be made on the females. Pandas give birth to twins and, in the wild, the mothers normally leave one to die as they cannot take care of two babies on their own. However, the scientists at the research and breeding centre have successfully bred two twins that are both alive and very healthy.

Pandas are very lazy animals; they will sit and eat all day without moving around much; you can imagine that mating for them is harder work than they are willing to put in, and the lower birth rates have been a result of this behaviour. Not only are the pandas some of the least randy (for the Americans reading this, that's the same as horny) mammals on the planet, but the females are very inexperienced mothers who don't fare well when they give birth to their first set of twin cubs. The survival rate for panda cubs in the wild is a very low percentage; this, coupled with the decreased amount of wilderness left for pandas to thrive in, means that all work towards improving the success rate for giant panda births is positive.

Often, the scientists at the Giant Panda Research and Breeding Centre have observed new mother pandas batting away the cubs after the extremely quick birth process (the twin cubs pop out in a matter of a few seconds), as the mothers have been scared and not sure what to think about the event that had just occurred. On these occasions, the breeding scientists have stepped in to rescue the cubs and put them into an incubator, until they finish their post-birth development and they are old enough to start walking around. Post-birth development includes activities such as the development of eyes; newborn panda cubs cannot open their eyes in the first few weeks after birth.

The tour at the panda centre was really excellent and we are glad that we went. The only thing that didn't go right that morning was the fact that we had signed up for a tour in which a few hundred other people also signed up. What didn't go right, or at least what was not right in our minds, was when large groups of Chinese tourists started making really loud noises to attract the pandas' attentions; the racket they made actually ended up causing the pandas to shy away from the noisy masses surrounding the enclosures.

Also, in our small tour subgroup, there was a really annoying old man from Australia who just wouldn't shut up. He seemed to know everything about anything, but we weren't sure where his learning took place, as he came out with several dubious and, most likely, wrong facts during the four-hour morning at the centre. Let's not forget the enjoyable minibus ride from our guesthouse, when he spouted off his wisdom behind us for the entire journey. To top off his irritating storytelling, he had BAD body odour that seemed to linger around even when we held back to avoid walking with the group.

Free breakfast was an added "bonus" for our panda tour, or so we thought when we had booked it at our guesthouse the previous night. As the tour left early in the morning, we thought that we might be provided with eggs and juice or something else quick like that, but as soon as we paid for the tour, the travel agency staff dumped two packs of vanilla flavoured biscuits (cookies) and two small cartons of warm, disgusting UHT milk in our hands. At first, we thought that the food was given to us so we could feed the pandas, which would have been really fun, but the staff told us that it was our free breakfast - what a joke. We both ate the biscuits as they were really tasty, but Kyle thought the milk was horrible, so he threw it straight into the bin. Dan reluctantly managed to drink his entire carton but, afterwards, agreed with Kyle that he was ready to enjoy some nice pasteurised milk in Arkansas this summer!

Now that you know about our visit to the pandas, we should probably step back and talk about how we travelled to Chengdu and what we thought when we arrived in the large city of over 4 million people. We took a flight on Air China from Shanghai to Chengdu, as the train would have taken 40 hours. Saving a day and a half enabled us to add a day in our itinerary so that we could visit Xiahe, which ended up being one of our favourite places in China. Therefore, paying a little bit extra for the flight was well worth the investment. Plus, it wasn't that much more expensive than the 40-hour train journey would have been!

When we left Chengdu a few days later, we were scheduled to take another flight to Lanzhou, which would allow us to get to our next destination, Xiahe, much faster. A couple of days before we were due to leave Chengdu, we received a telephone call from Ctrip, the agency we used to book our flight on the internet. They kindly informed us that our flight leaving Chengdu was cancelled and that we would have to leave a day later. This would have put us a day behind in our travels and would have made the investment in the Shanghai to Chengdu flights worthless, so we asked if there was any way we could leave a day earlier, which would have been the day after we received Ctrip's call.

Leaving earlier was a possibility, but we had to purchase a new ticket in order to fly on a different date than they had suggested. We were reassured that the original ticket would be refunded; however, after several phone calls to the travel agency, we have still not received a refund, and we are now writing this journal entry three weeks after the issue arose. We will fill you in on the details of this drama in our future journals, but let's just say that if you book a flight through Ctrip, make sure you pick up the ticket in the location you are flying from, because the travel agencies in China's various airports are all separate companies that are not linked whatsoever.

We had picked up our Chengdu to Lanzhou flight tickets in the Xiamen airport just over a week earlier, and the Ctrip agents we dealt with were trying to tell us that they only way we could get a refund was to take the ticket back to Xiamen's ticketing counter. At the Chengdu airport, we were (surprise!) dealt with by a young woman who did not speak any English. Luckily, a Chinese student who was attending university in Michigan, approached the ticketing counter just when we needed a translator the most. At the end of the discussion, or argument, the ticketing woman agreed to send the tickets to the Xiamen office so that we could receive a refund. Of course, no one had yet been able to guarantee that an international credit card or bank account could be refunded since we paid cash for the ticket. Let's just hope that our travel insurance company will not give us the runaround if we need to claim the loss of the first ticket that we bought.

Chengdu as a city was really ugly and we were unimpressed with most of what it had to offer. There were a few nice things that we can tell you about, though. We mentioned the pandas, but we also enjoyed one of Chengdu's parks - People's Park. This was a nice breath of fresh air in the extremely polluted, ugly and dirty city. At People's Park, we bumped into a huge group of people doing light aerobics to some great Chinese music. We also passed several small gatherings of people who were watching karaoke singers give it their all. We think they were karaoke singers, and hope that they weren't professional acts performing, as they weren't very talented.

The most memorable thing we did in People's Park was to check out the "funhouse" that was mentioned in our Lonely Planet China guide. The description in our guide said "you can take a ride on a rickety shuttle train through bizarre scenes from the Wild West, space, the dinosaur age, Christmas and straight into the mouth of a shark". When we got there, we realised how wrong our book was, once again, unless we just found the wrong place in the park.

We walked, we didn't ride any sort of train, through some decrepit tunnels that reminded us of a disused army bunker, and as we turned the corner at the end of the first tunnel, we were submerged in nearly complete darkness. We grew wary of what was around the corner, since we seemed to be the only people in the funhouse, and there were no signs or anything pointing the way from what we could see. The small red light of a digital camera gave us just enough light to see by, to check out paths leading off to either side of the tunnels that we walked through. At times, though, the light was not enough and we had to take photos to see what was behind the dark doorways leading to the even darker paths behind them.

Most of the photos we took, to find our way, revealed empty underground chambers with stairwells leading to who knows where. We avoided them and continued down the main tunnel path that we were walking along. After some time, the lights went completely out and we heard a loud banging in the distance. Our fear levels rose quite a bit at this point, as the place had started taking on the air of a typical horror film location, with two foreigners walking through a grim and grotty old tunnel in a strange place (think of the movie "Hostel" as the tunnels reminded us of the dark hallways in the warehouse used in that film).

We finally got to the supposed "highlight" of the funhouse, which was a series of rooms displaying freaky stuffed human-sized puppets, which were painted many different colours and represented different scary Chinese monsters. Some of them were moving, some were gruesomely mutilated and some were making noises or causing the gruesome mutilations. Where in the world was the "Wild West" theme or the "Christmas" theme that we had anticipated to see?

When we got to the end of the funhouse tunnels, there was a stairwell leading up to nowhere, and we had to walk back through the scary bit at the end to get out of the place. This was not pleasant because we still expected someone with a machete to jump out and attack us, but we made it back to the entrance with all of our limbs intact. Just as we were about to exit the funhouse, a small group of Chinese students passed by us to start their trip through the not-so-fun tunnels, and we decided to share a bit of our fear with them.

The group had just walked around the corner where the scary parts of the tunnel were positioned, when we had quietly caught up to them to give them the fright of their lives. As they rounded the first corner and saw some of the frightening Chinese puppet-people, we snuck up on the last two people in the group and gave them our best "boo". They screamed really loudly and when the people in front turned around to see what the matter was, they didn't spot us before we scared them, too. At that point, one girl was so frightened that she fell to the floor, grabbing her knees, not wanting to move any further forwards, and the guy she was with jumped about three feet into the air, whilst screaming in an octave higher than the girls in the group.

The students made us walk back through the funhouse with them and it wasn't as scary the second time; having a large group helped as well. When we left the funhouse, we continued walking around the park, and saw many people enjoying the gorgeous weather outside. This was the only day in Chengdu that the sun beat out the polluted sky and was visible, so it was one of the best afternoons we had there. Inside the park, we passed some of Chengdu's many teahouses, which we also saw earlier that day inside the temple grounds that we visited.

Despite Chengdu being one of our least favourite cities in China, the people were some of the friendliest. They stared at us more than ever, and we reckon this was because the city has not gotten that many tourists. This is all due to change, though, as a lot of foreign investment is being made in the large city. One afternoon, we popped into a Starbucks to buy a couple of java chip frappucinos and to enjoy some air conditioning, and we spoke to the manager there, who was from the US. He explained to us that so much business was moving into Chengdu, that Starbucks had a large plan for the city over the next few years, to increase their presence significantly.

The colds that we had in Shanghai were still hanging on, so we went to a local Chinese pharmacy, nearby our guesthouse, to buy some medicine. The pharmacy sold all kinds of Chinese herbal medicines including dried seahorses! We didn't need those for our cold, so we bought some tablets instead. They seemed to help, but we wonder if the colds actually just ran their course.

We have mentioned our guesthouse a few times in this journal entry, but we haven't actually told you about it. The places that we have chosen on our trip, since the beginning of January, have been varied and each one has had something unique or enjoyable, which means that we have been very satisfied with pretty much all of the places where we have stayed. Sim's Cosy Guesthouse was definitely one to add to our top list of places in Asia, for many reasons.

The rooms in the guesthouse were really cheap and comfortable; we opted for a shared bathroom at Sim's in order to save some money. There was a nice courtyard area and bar in the guesthouse, and they had a small pond in the back with a ping pong table next to it. On a couple of occasions we played ping pong for many hours, but we still couldn't figure out why we were so sore a couple days that we were in Chengdu. Go figure...

The layout of Sim's was much like an old Chinese house, with a courtyard area in the middle of the place. There was also a small, comfortable bar and a couple of glassed-in wireless internet areas. Walking around the guesthouse, we constantly had to avoid stepping on animals, as Sim and his wife had many pets living there. They had a couple of little pigs, two pussycats and an adorable black puppy that looked like an Asiatic bear.

The pigs were the most interesting to watch as neither of us had been in such close contact with that type of animal for a prolonged period of time. Did you know that pigs like to have the backs of their ears scratched? The ones at the guesthouse rolled over onto their sides as soon as we scratched their ears, clearly wanting us to rub their bellies. It was strange but very cute.

Whenever we were eating or hanging out in the courtyard, we had to watch out for the pigs and the puppy, as they all loved to chew things, such as our shoes or flip flops. One of Kyle's shoes has a section missing off the ankle to prove it. We also had to be careful where we walked, as the pigs loved weeing wherever they happened to be at the moment they were hit with a call of nature.

One evening, when we were talking to a guy from Singapore, he told us that if the pigs get too big, they would be killed and served up in one of the weekly barbeques that are held at the guesthouse. Apparently, the last pig got too big and started to annoy some guests, so Sim took care of the problem in the same way you would expect a member of the Mafia to deal with a "situation". Hopefully, the same thing won't happen to the two pigs that we saw there, but since it probably will, we're glad that we won't be around to see it.

Sim's Guesthouse was right next to the Ancient Street in Chengdu, where Wenshu Temple was located. One day in the city, we walked along the Ancient Street to visit the temple, and then we headed towards Tianfu Square to check out the large Chairman Mao statue there. Speaking of Chairman Mao, we also visited Wang's Tiny Museum, which was a mini-shrine of sorts to the ex-leader of China, displayed within a very small house on a narrow lane. Wang, his wife and his mother were very accommodating but, comedically, a bit forceful at times, when they pulled us next to them to have our photos taken.

One evening, we decided to get a taste of culture by watching a Sichuan Opera performance. That style of opera has a 200 year history and it was a great experience watching one. The opera was a bit like a variety show with a mixture of slapstick comedy, beautiful Chinese music and songs, acrobatics and other interesting acts. One of the coolest acts we saw was from a group of people who were face/mask changers; they changed their faces to music as it built up, and it looked as if they were doing it by magic.

We don't have much to say about food in Chengdu outside Sim's, but we did manage to venture out a few times. At the guesthouse, we tried sweet and sour pork on our first night there, and we felt really bad when we fed some of the pork to Sim's two pigs (they loved it, by the way, those little cannibals); after that, we didn't have the dish any more as we felt too guilty. Also at the guesthouse, we tried Japanese omelets for the first time; the omelets were thin and stuffed full of sauteed vegetables, and the whole yummy thing was covered in ketchup.

Outside of Sim's, we ate at "Liang-fen Agar Jelly Restaurant". The signature agar jelly noodles were like thick glass noodles and were covered in a spicy chili, soy and peanut sauce with a little salt and sugar mixed in. The noodles were very tasty and extremely cheap! We also had egg noodle soup that tasted like chicken noodle soup without the chicken, but with a fried egg added inside as an extra treat. Chinese fried rice had yet to impress us, as the rice never seemed cooked enough and was rather bland; the rice at Sim's was no exception and we avoided it after trying a couple of plates one day. Something that Sim's did very right was a toasted tuna mayonnaise sandwich that we both couldn't get enough of during our stay.

During our time in Chengdu, we met many other travellers, mostly while hanging out at Sim's, as it was such a great place to meet people from all over the world. We mentioned the Singaporean we talked to one evening; he was a photographer who was currently on a year-long assignment snapping pictures of Tibetans in China. We enjoyed several beers with him and also taught him how to play the card game "Kings in the Corner", which we played into the wee hours of the evening.

On a couple of day trips from Chengdu to nearby sights, we met a friendly Dutch couple who always wore matching orange t-shirts, and a couple of Canadians who were taking a year off from their government positions to travel the world (seriously, they are pretty much hitting every continent!). In addition, we met an American family with two young boys and a very dramatic, but enthusiastic, Polish-Argentinian mother. Lastly, there was a chilled-out French guy who looked like what we thought a young Jesus would look like.

Sim's Cosy Guesthouse had its own travel agency and, in addition to booking the Sichuan Opera and Panda Tour, they helped us with our travel plans to visit the town Leshan, where we would see the world's largest Buddha, and to E'mei Shan, one of China's sacred mountains. We visited both of these places as a day trip from Chengdu on our last day there, but they warranted a separate journal entry so you will need to click the "Next journal entry" link to find out more about these two places.

Above, we have told you about the hassle with our flights from Chengdu to Lanzhou. Let's just say that the language difficulty didn't help the situation. However, the bulk of the problem was the fact that the person who was dealing with the change to our flight itinerary was pretty incompetent and kept saying one thing, before calling us back a few minutes later to change what he previously said to another thing. Argh!