The Tortoise and the Finch: Chengdu- I’m holding a panda!

PANDAS!!!

This is the staging point for trips to Lhasa – we had two major things here: Pandas and Tibet. Alas, the Chinese government was still “celebrating the 60th anniversary of Tibet’s liberation” so no foreigners invited. Heartbreaking.

We booked the Panda trip for the first thing next morning. After the earthquake the pandas were moved from Wolong to Bifeng and are still there. We went to the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding and Research Base – this is where they make the pandas and you can hold them. It is a really beautiful center – lots of well landscaped grounds and a variety of sizeable enclosures. They are careful to put the panda chow up by the barriers so that people can spot the pandas easily. We first saw a group of 3 two year olds having breakfast. Pandas are unspeakably lazy. They loll about like emperors at a roman banquet; pulling the branches down so they don’t have to expend the energy to sit up. They are so beautiful! There was also an adult in the enclosure, but he did not associate with the whippersnappers. Like most bears, they are solitary in adulthood.

cute

grumpy

Next we moved onto the area that is home to the largest population of captive red pandas – again precious, adorable. They were much more active and apparently get on like a sack of cats – lots of them showed signs of battle and one guy had completely lost his tail. Red pandas are not really pandas but have earned the name because they are red and eat bamboo.

The next stop was an indoor enclosure (hooray for AC) where 6 three year olds were having their breakfast. Apparently the pandas are kept inside quite a bit in summer because their typical habitat is above 2500 meters and Chengdu is much lower so the weather is too hot for them. Like the others, these pandas were also shockingly adorable. At this point we were becoming antsy about holding pandas. Our tour guide Zhen Zhen had sent one of the drivers ahead to make a reservation for us. The group was led to the panda nursery but we were told to wait a minute. After sending everyone else ahead Zhen Zhen took us to the back of the building and dragged us to the head of the line to hold a panda. We had to wait a bit while other tour guides tried to cut us off. The driver who made our reservation watched over us and eventually put his foot down with the gatekeeper woman and after handing over a 3,000 RMB ($500) “donation” we were given plastic gloves, shoe covers and draped in blue hospital smocks and taken into the panda holding room.

Zada Is Holding a Panda!!!

Brad Is Holding a Panda!

Inside there was a polished wooden bench with a guy in the same hospital get up as us and a couple of helpers. There were also a couple of tourists finishing their turn. Basically it goes like this: the person before is holding the panda, you go sit next to them and the guy in hospital clothes picks the panda up and plonks it down in your lap. You then have 60 to 90 seconds to take all the pictures you can. All the while the panda is munching on a steady supply of apples that one of the helpers keeps shoving on him. Pandas are extremely furry. Their hair is rather coarser than I expected but I suppose that’s for keeping warm in the mist cloud forest that they are supposed to be living in. We all agree, holding a panda is perhaps the best thing ever.

Kimberly Is Holding a Panda!

The rest of our time at the panda base was less exciting. We watched a video about the work they do making pandas and toured a sad museum the signs told us was being renovated. Then there was a gift shop and the ride back to the hostel. We showered (Chengdu has Houston weather in the summer) and then ate. Flush with our success with the pandas we booked the Sichuan Opera teahouse performance for that evening.

The performance was excellent as was the theater (though it was open air so it was a bit steamy). When we sat down we were served cups of jasmine tea which were constantly refreshed throughout the performance. This was not just a Sichuan opera performance as it also featured other forms of performance from the region. There was a puppet show in which the puppeteer made the puppet throw and catch things. There was something called “rolling light” in which a man prances and crawls around the stage with a lit lamp on his head. Most exciting to Zada was the hand shadow display. Ever since, where ever a shadow is cast, she is trying to recreate the flapping birds or the owl or the dog. Then of course there was the actual opera. It seems to me a little less shrill than the Beijing version. The costumes were spectacular and the traditional instruments sounded great. One of the best things was the face changing. Dancers wearing masks twirl around the stage and every so often the will change masks faster than blinking. It was amazing to watch, especially when they would put masks back on then off and then on again. That part also included a guy breathing fire which is obviously the coolest.

Sadly, we discovered that our ugliness about mainland Chinese being the most obnoxious audiences in the world wasn’t just shrill spitefulness because Beijing was so disappointing. Here again, no one shut up for a second – the people in the row behind us going so far as to “sing” along. Kimberly had a flashback to her worst ever experience at HGO when in the middle of Mimi and Rodolfo’s first duet she became aware of some bizarre sound and whipped around to discover an elderly Chinese man singing along with Mimi. Flames and venom shot from her eyes and if a single one of her prayers were answered he is now living in a leper colony somewhere. It was like that, but as it was the whole audience, there wasn’t anyone to look daggers at. Ah well. This is doubtless why both performances were just about loud enough to make you bleed from the ears.

When planning this trip we allotted time to make the journey to Tibet. We knew it wasn’t looking good even before we left home but we held out hope that the mercurial powers that be who decide when Tibet is and is not open would open it up in time for us to go. We arrived and found that we were doomed to disappointment. So our thoughts turned to what to do with the surplus time we found ourselves with. We decided to take an extra day in Chengdu to sort it out. We investigated the trains again and found that trains going to places we wanted to go had only hard seats available for at least a week. So again we took to the skies booking passage to Guilin and a few days in the Flowers Hostel. Just a plug here for the hostel in Chengdu – Sim’s Cozy Garden Hostel was fantastic. The staff was incredibly well informed, competent and genuinely helpful with everything.