Arriving in Chengdu, I was surprised to find that I wasn’t back in the same bus station I left from so I asked a taxi driver for a price to take me to my hostel. He quoted me $8 so I decided to ask in my broken Chinese how much the bus was and was told $.28. Having a map to point to a location was very helpful and I asked the driver to kick me off the bus at my designated spot. Everyone on the bus was trying to be helpful and made sure I got where I needed to go.
A mile walk with my 50 pound pack on a street with no sidewalks kept me wide awake as I struggled to find my hostel. Sorry, no Ritz Carlton for this guy as I’m trying to live the lower budget experience and see how much it differs from my Mongolia more structured hotel experience. After settling in the hostel, I decided I needed a Western meal. Referring to my list of good restaurants I brought with me, I decided to take the new Metro subway that opened a few days earlier. This is Chengdu’s first experience with subways and it showed. People were taking photos of the ticket machines, the street maps, the trains, each other, etc. One lady had clearly never been on an escalator and used a two handed death grip to hang on to the right side of the escalator. People are queued up inside the subways cars waiting to get off but sometimes are on the wrong side of the train and then race and push and shove back to where they were a minute ago to get out of the train. The system is beautiful and I used it many times during my stay since an entrance was located across the street from my hostel. After my excellent Mexican food meal (I haven’t had any Mexican food since July in Southern Cal and it’s one of my favorite foods), it was off to the central area of the city for a peak at what people do in the central square after dark. This resulted in the following photos…
It's good to know the boys are out there to protect me...
One of these I call the wonder of photography. After this little girl was finished posing and mugging for the camera so her mom could take photos, she got to see what she looked like. Very cool stuff.
Then it was back to the hostel for a nice spicy dish of local food with lots of red peppers.
The next day was a visit to the Panda Reserve and see what was going on there. I took an organized trip from the hostel which lowers the price but told them that I wasn’t interested in walking around with the group but would meet at the designated drop spot whenever the group was ready to leave. (I actually asked for permission.) I later learned that I “missed” out on watching a video of the pandas and stopping for refreshments. Good choice to not be part of the group. The pandas were mostly resting eating bamboo, not a lot of movement and little interaction with each other. They consume bamboo all day long and supposedly only get nutrition from 5% of the bamboo and the rest comes out as bamboo poo.
Panda photos are easy to take since they don’t move much but from a good photography standpoint, digital cameras struggle keeping detail when the extremes are present like here with the black and white fur mixed together. Knowing this, there are a few things you can do with your camera to adjust, so I think these came out okay.
More pandas can be found on the web by clicking on any one of these photos.
and then there are some panda videos...
The other pandas at this reserve are red pandas which look more like red raccoons than like the giant panda. They were pretty frisky and offered some nice looks and more natural images although I always struggle to get photos without the containment, man made things like pathways, retaining walls, structures, etc. Here are some of the better photos…
Another nice find in this park was at a lake near the entrance which had some ducks and black swans. Maybe Tom Manders or Edmund can tell me what the gold colored duck is…
The rest of the day was spent resting and relaxing and, of course, walking approx. 4 hours around the city.
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