Pandas galore! And aren't the funny creatures?! Lazy, cute, cuddlable and eating all day! They were comical creatures. I went to the Chengdu Panda Breeding base, where therey are focus on the preservation of the Red Panda and the Giant Pandas, and have successful bred and released some into to the wild. The Chengdu centre houses some 80 or so Giant Pandas.
The first picture is of a Red Panda, which are a little more active, but you can see how lazy the Giant Pandas are! Much time spent some moving about slowly, climbing things and half falling off them, and clumsily meandering around look for places to eat and sleep! They don't like the heat, so they even get brought indoors for air-conditioning when it gets to hot for their royal highesses.
You can see that the base is a fantastic environment for the Pandas. Very green with many open areas for them. Bamboo is grown on site and harvested to feed the pandas. Darren - I hope that this gives Lis a bit more of a taste as to how it is.
After this, I boarded a 24 hour seating train to Xining - the train was so jerky it was like being on bumper cars! I was lucky to have good people around me. Pictured left: Zhu jian jun - a Kung fu teacher (he gave me his card in case I was interested in learning!) and his daughter; next to me Iuo Shan, who is a "boss", what ever that means; the girl with the camera is Juan Dyan who is also going to Tibet (but before me) - she seemed very interested in taking photos from a journalistic perspective... I wonder what she will make of Tibet. The group taught me several games testing the speed and reactions of your hand, and I taught them "Scissors, Paper, Stone" and "Mind Gym". Having just been to the Panda sanctuary, I was very careful not to ask Zhu Jian Jun if he had taught the Kungfu Panda!
The was followed by a not too awful amount of sleep in my hard seat.
