PANDA'S

A sweaty 26 hour train trip from Guilin, brought us to Chengdu in Sichuan province. Panda's, drinking fragrant flower tea at the temples and attending the opera darling....that's what this interesting city offered, oh yes and incendiary food. We lost control of our mouths over a hotpot, but put out the flames with delicious walnut milk. We stayed at a wonderful hostel, 'Sims Cozy', this place really helped us get around efficiently. We saw blue sky, which was a bonus, and we visited the world's largest Buddha, it took us 90 minutes to descend from his eyebrows to his feet - admittedly, yet again there were heavy queues to see the big fella.

We did actually get the best seats in the house for the opera - and were able to watch the artists make up. The performance included shadow puppets, acrobatics, fire-eating and quite brilliant mask changing - we were 3 metres away and could not fathom out how he changed his masks - impressive sleight of hand.

The panda's were visited twice - feeding time being particularly entertaining - effortlessly stripping bamboo and chompsing whilst lying on their backs. The research station has had a fair amount of success with its breeding programme, though as yet none have been released back into their natural habitat - that's probably because there isn't any of that original habitat left, or maybe its because this is such a lucrative little business.