Day 5 – Chengdu, Sichuan Province
The big event today was visiting the Panda Park. It is one of the Chengdu area research centers where they raise Panda babies. From the 6 original pandas rescued from the wild, they now have 146 pandas at this center.
There are about 1600 pandas in the wild, and 200 in captivity. They live in the mountains of Central China, and 99% of their diet is bamboo. They eat 20-30 lbs of bamboo shoots a day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_panda
Pandas that go to zoos like San Diego and Washington DC are rented out but still belong to the Chinese government. If the rented bears give birth, the cubs also belong to China, according to the rental contracts. Zoos pay about $1 million per year per bear to host a Panda Bear.
There were plenty of babies and juvenile pandas in the park. We enjoyed the enclosures with more than one bear – Mamas and babies, and the enclosures with 4-5 yearlings. Older adults were alone in their enclosures, always busy eating piles of bamboo. We enjoyed seeing the babies climb trees, climb/roll/fall on rocks and logs. They are pretty clumsy which means they are very cute. I’ve seen Pandas in San Diego and Wash DC but I know I’ll never see so many panda bears anywhere else in this life. It was really quite an experience, and the Panda Park is set in a bamboo forest on a mountainside overlooking the high rise buildings of Chengdu.
As we arrived at Panda Park it started to snow, and all over the mountainside we could hear people yelling “woo hoo!”, laughing and celebrating the snow. It doesn’t snow often here, so the snow was a big deal. The pandas become more active in the colder weather because like Polar Bears, they have a thick fur coat and prefer colder temperatures. They also have several Red Pandas in large enclosures. They are very active, and look like a cross between a Red Fox and a Raccoon, with a cute panda-like face.
After a lunch at the Panda Park, we made our way to Jinli Street which is a recreation of Old China (Qing Dynasty) that is full of shops and meant to be a tourist and local destination. It kind of felt like Disneyland. Our local guide was unabashed in saying that they hoped we would leave our money there! We were scheduled to be there for 2 hours but we stayed less than one hour and took a taxi back to our hotel. I took photos, we stopped at a Chinese version of Starbucks, then caught a taxi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinli
Everywhere we go in Chengdu there are masses of bicycles, painted all different colors. They are part of several bike-sharing programs. They are rented with an app and it costs about 14 cents per hour, someone calculated. So whenever you need to get somewhere, you just walk out on the street and find a bike.
In the evening after dinner we went to a Chengdu Sichuan Opera and Mask-Changing Performance. I don’t know how to describe this but it was kind of a local variety show and the costumes were pretty complicated and interesting.
We have to put our luggage out at 6:30 am, and head to the train station at 7:30 am. We have a 3 hour train ride to Xian, where we will see the Terracotta Warriors. The next 4 nights in a row, we spend only one night in a hotel, changing each day, so that will be a challenge. However this includes going to Guilin and going on the River Cruise so I think it will be worth it. We are pretty exhausted tonight from the Panda Park this morning – it was a lot of hiking up and down the mountain in the freezing rain and snow.
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