After a short flight I arrived in Chengdu and felt immediately happier – my hotel was located on a delightful old traditional street full of tea houses and ornate buildings, the type of thing I had imagined when I first thought of visiting china, and infinitely better than the character-less hotel I had stayed at in Xi’an. Somehow I felt instantly calmed. After settling in I headed out to explore a little of Chengdu – just down the street was wenhua park, known as the culture park. I had a little stroll around the lush green park, and watched the local people engaging in the popular group dances, and old ladies playing Mahjong (a traditional tile-based game that I am yet to fathom) and sipping green tea. Exiting at the south gate, I then headed into the neighbouring Taoist temple Qingtang Temple. I have never been anywhere that felt so calm and serene. It was exactly the antidote to Xi’an that I needed. The temple was beautiful – a series of small shrines filled with golden Buddhas, nestled amongst lush green vegetation and beautiful incense burners. Definitely the best 10 rmb I have spent so far.

My afternoon became a little less calm as I started to wander the streets of Chengdu, got a little lost and finally found my way to the People’s park – officially the noisiest park I have ever been. In a large central square there were about 5 speakers competing to blast out different Chinese music – there were people dancing, singing karaoke and what appeared to be some kind of hairdressing contest. It was extremely stressful to be around, and not helped by the fact that everywhere I go I am stared at relentlessly. This was true in Xi’an too, but what there had felt like innocent curiosity at the lone white girl with a lip piercing and an electronic cigarette, here felt distinctly more hostile, although I cannot figure out why. One sign post in the park amusingly referred to a ‘poets corner’ – how a poet could possibly ever hear themselves think here, I don’t know!

Heading back out onto the streets the constant staring was starting to get to me, but I put my head down and pushed on past the city square to a shopping district where I bought myself a rather indulgent hagendaas and had a little sit down. I wandered past the distinctly western-looking shops for a bit until it started to get dark and I got on the subway home. I wanted to go out and try the traditional Sichuan hot pot tonight and needed to get an early start for the panda sanctuary the following morning. I had been recommended a hot pot restaurant just down the street from my hotel, so I went to check it out, suspecting that it might be quite pricey. It quickly became apparent that to get hotpot for one person would be very expensive and I would end up with way more food than I could eat, so I opted to buy some of their ‘snack foods’ – spicy beef noodles and pork dumplings. The waitress checked repeatedly whether I could handle spicy food – knowing that Sichuan food is notoriously spicy, I told her just a little bit. Moments later the dumplings arrived and thankfully most of the spiciness was in the form of a dipping sauce, which I used with caution. They were delicious! The noodles were really tasty as well, although the ‘just a little spicy’ was still at my upper limit! The good thing about Sichuan spiciness though, is that it isn’t the kind of spicy that seems to build and build – it’s just instantly spicy and then plateaus. I was determined to finish, and I did, only slightly red in the face. I headed straight back to my room and went to bed – 6am start for the panda tour tomorrow!

I awoke what seemed like only minutes later, bleary-eyed and confused. Slowly I realised that my alarm was waking me up for an excellent reason – to go and see the Giant Pandas! I got up and dressed ready to leave at 7:40 am. Apparently the pandas are most active in the morning so this is the best time to go. Half an hour’s drive later, I arrived at the Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Center. Walking down small winding paths, overshadowed by tall bamboo plants, the sanctuary was beautiful and a real contrast to the cities I’ve been residing in so far. Seeing the Giant Pandas was magical.

First we saw an enclosure with some juveniles, who were lazily eating bamboo, and most adorable of all, fighting over it. They would make little squeaks at each other, and some vague gestures of slaps – it was the least energetic argument I’ve ever seen, and usually quickly resolved when one of the pair got distracted by another piece of the extremely plentiful bamboo. I could have stayed and watched them for hours, but there was still much more to see. We went past the baby panda nursery, where there was a pile of sleeping baby pandas in a large cot, then we passed some slightly older babies who were idling about in an enormous enclosure. Three of them were play fighting and rolling about on the grass – adorable! There were some older pandas who had clearly been upgraded to the penthouse apartments, each had their own large enclosure to enjoy. Some of them were climbing up into the trees, which was very sweet to watch – they aren’t particularly nimble and when they got into one of the lower branches, they seemed to be in need of a good sit down. We were offered the opportunity to hug a baby panda for 2000 rmb (200 pounds), but I decided this was simply too dear for me, and I wasn’t sure if the panda would want to be hugged! Turns out they seemed pretty OK with it, but I still think I made the right decision, financially!

At the sanctuary they also have some red pandas (no relation), and the first one we encountered was asleep right in the middle of the path. I respectfully took some photos and tried not to disturb it, but the guides started poking the poor little thing and I felt a deep empathy for it as it awoke looking confused and grumpy at the crowd of people all taking photos of it, and then promptly tried to go back to sleep again. The red pandas were much more active, and seemed to be more territorial (I can’t really imagine the giant pandas having the energy to be territorial) – you could see them paying a great deal of attention to where the others were and if two individuals got too close there was often a disagreement. They were a lot more at home in the trees and the more I looked the more I kept seeing up in the trees, or climbing up and down.

At the end of the trip, we stopped at the cafe to watch a film about the giant panda breeding program, and had some breakfast. At the center they have such a hard time getting the pandas to breed that they often have to resort to artificial insemination. On top of that, baby pandas are born extremely premature – they are basically just tiny pink sausages when they are born, and in the wild this makes them very vulnerable. It really is remarkable that the giant pandas have survived as long as they have!

I also made some new friends on the panda sanctuary tour, and I made plans with two British guys to go to the traditional Sichuan Opera that evening. After we got back into Chengdu they came and found my hotel where we booked out opera tickets and then headed out together to visit a Buddist temple in the north of the city called Wenshu Temple. It was just a short subway ride away. The temple was gorgeous, and the gardens surrounding it were serene, but also slightly odd. It seemed most things there, upon close inspection, had some second element to them that I hadn’t noticed on first glance. One ornamental rock garden turned out to be full of tiny bridges and step ladders – I imagine it to be the greatest hamster run of all time. We also stumbled across some turtles, randomly wandering around, and then realised there was a pond specifically there for them. It wasn’t clear though whether they would end up being food later. We still had several hours before the opera, and knowing that it would only come with green tea and no food, we decided to try and track down a street I’d been told was great for street food. It was south west of where we were, and unfortunately, not directly served by either of the two metro lines that cross the city. This was dangerous territory, navigationally-speaking. The maps we had were pretty crap and seemed to bare little resemblance to the reality of the streets. They also lacked road names for all but the largest of streets. Optimistically we headed out, but ended up wandering for hours to no avail. Every so often we would find a street that we could place on the map, and it seemed as though we were very close on several occasions, but we were never able to find the street.

Eventually we started to get a little nervous about finding our way back to the opera in time, so we started to try and head back. We wandered through the Tibetan area of Chengdu, which was fascinating to see. Shop after shop of Buddha statues of varying sizes. China seems to have this odd way of placing all the shops of a certain type on the same street. How they are able to make enough money to stay open, I haven’t the faintest idea!

Getting back to the hotel around 7, we had still failed to find anything for dinner, so ordered a quick burger at the hotel bar and scoffed it down before the opera at 8. The opera was held in a traditional partly open-air tea house in the wenhua park. It was the most entertaining show I have ever seen, despite the fact that 99% of it was in Chinese. The costumes were elaborate, and there were people playing various different instruments, making shadow puppets and dancing puppets on sticks with incredible skill. The final part of the show was the most famous – the changing masks and fire breathing. The mask-changing was truly impressive – they would swipe a fan past their faces, obscuring them from view for no more than a couple of seconds, and their mask had changed. Each person must have had 10 – 20 different masks which they switched between seamlessly.

When the show ended we wandered over to a hostel bar for a few drinks and had a lovely evening chatting to some fellow travellers, including one girl who turned out to be taking the same yangtze river cruise that I was taking (which I’d found out earlier in the evening was being upgraded) – I felt I may have inadvertently met my new room-mate to be. I didn’t get back to my hotel until 2am, when I had to wake up the sleeping security guard to get in, and fell asleep almost immediately. Looong day! Tomorrow I would catch a train at 2pm to Chonquing where I would board my yangtze river cruise.