Giant Panda

Our next port of call as we move North into the bitter cold was Chengdu in Sichaun Province. Most know Sichaun as the home of extremely spicy Chinese food. However, our main reason for coming to this hunk of a city is that it hosts the Giant Panda Breeding and Research Center. We signed up for an early morning tour out to the Center in the hope of catching feeding time. Not to dissimilar to koalas, the giant panda do precious else except sleep and eat. Mating only happens during a 2-3 day period once a year, so it's not high on the 'to do list'. We arrived at the Center and seemed to be the only ones there. Our 'guide' took us around to the first enclosure were we could spot 2 pandas in the distance. The view was what I was suspecting from notoriously shy animals. To our utter joy at the next enclosure it was feeding time and once the staff had thrown in a big stack of bamboo everyone came a slow walking to breakfast. The way they eat the bamboo is very human like. They have an 6th finger, which allows them to grip the bamboo and eat with one hand, in much the same way we do. Eating seemed very much to be the highlight of the day, as they all got very comfortable before starting to shovel large amounts of bamboo into their mouths. We next visited the Panda Nursery where some 3 month old cubs were resting in their cots. Almost half the time pandas are born as twins, but the mother can only take care of one and usually kills the other twin early on. The nursery takes care of the orphaned twin. Pandas are born very under-developed and it takes about 150 days before they really can do much of anything. The little balls of black and white fur we saw were out cold and only occasionally moved, seemingly acting out a dream. They were adorable and made everyone smile once they saw them. The whole visit to the Center was suprisingly good, I was expecting the worse. Maybe my prejudices convinced me that it would be some huge concrete monstrosity with dipilated pandas wandering around. I'm happy to saw it was very professionally run and all the enclosure very nature like.
We leave Chengdu tomorrow to start our 4-day cruise down the Yangzi River towards the famous Three-Gorges and Dam. Seeing as though the entire area will be flooded under 200m of water in 3 years, its worth seeing now. As mentioned before, the language barrier in China can be slightly troubling, the above picture is a visual example.