Chengdu – City of the Panda Bears

On my arrival in Chengdu I had almost the same temperatures as when I arrived in Beijing. Almost 40° and a very high humidity. Hooray!

Nevertheless after checking in at the hostel, I walked into the city center. There was not too much to see, but visiting the People’s Park was great fun. It was THE green resort in the big city. Lots of tea houses, an orchid garden, which was unfortunately closed, and lots of people playing cards, sitting around and practicing outdoor Karaoke. Was great fun watching them. 😀

As evening was getting close, I was looking for a decent option for dinner. In the lonely planet I found a tibetan restaurant in the tibetan district. I was passing a monastery with some crowded souvenir streets, where I had already enough of after 15 minutes walking around. Then I went to the restaurant and was quite surprised, that the menu was almost the same, which I saw already some weeks before in the mongolian restaurants. I had milk tea and some dumplings filled with yak meet. Delicious…

With a full stomach I went back to the hostel and was spending the evening with organizing some stuff and updating my blog.

The next day it was time to get up quite early, because I wanted to go to the Panda Bear Breeding Base, which is located in the suburbs of Chengdu. After a one hour ride with the bus I arrived there around 9am. I was surprised that the area was really big. Everywhere forests of bamboo and some other plants and flowers. In the first part I saw some giant pandas playing around. After that I visited the red pandas, the smaller relatives of the giant pandas.,

It was already getting hotter and hotter and so most of the pandas I saw where quite lazy lying around… Around 11am the masses of chinese tourists got more and more and so I decided to go back to the hostel as I still had a three hour bus ride to Emei awaiting me. At the hostel I had some very cheap and good lunch (chicken with vegetables and rice for 2€) and then I packed my stuff and went to the bus station, where I found the bus to my residence for the next four days.