Chengdu

Arrived in Chengdu after a horrible 28-odd hours of travelling on smoke-filled buses with people spitting left right and centre and a train ride in the "hard-seat" section of the train, which wouldn't have been so bad had we not already been really tired from the sleepless bus journey, and had we not been wearing five layers of clothes because of Zhongdian's freezing cold temperatures - the heating was turned up full and it was a bit difficult taking the layers off in the squashed seats. But we arrived in Chengdu finally. Its the capital of the Sichuan province, and the Lonely Planet claims it has 4 million population, whereas a local told us there were 11 million - perhaps its not quite accurate, but the city is certainly busy and growing.

Today I visited the pandas in the research and breeding centre. I arrived just before 8am for feeding time, but for the first hour I was wandering around the grounds wondering where the hell the pandas were hiding. Then I came across the panda cub nursery and same the likkle baby pandas all sleeping!!! Awwwww. Cute. And then the older pandas woke up and came out to eat, and I got lots of photos of the big stupid animals. Its no wonder they're almost extinct. Apart from being hunted at first to near extinction, the creatures aren't really that well-clued up on survival skills. The mothers usually kill or abandon their first cub as they don't know what to do with it, then despite all the 60 or so varieties of bamboo in China, they only eat 20 of those varieties. Plus, bamboo is not really that nutritious, but it makes up the major part of their diet. Hmm, what else? The females are only 'receptive' to their male suitors about 2-3 days of the year....silly pandas.

For dinner we went for hotpot again, but I wasn't prepared for a hotpot this hot. There must have been 50 chillies in the broth, and as it was being heated at the tables, and there was an aircon system right next to me, I inhaled the fumes at every breath - it BURNED! Fortunately there was another broth in the centre of the dish with no chilli, so we just added one tiny tiny spoonfull of the chilli mixture, and that was enough to keep my face burning and my nose running, and even my eyes watering for the whole meal. Mmm it was tasty though, and I tried frog eventually! I'd been meaning to since Cambodia but never got round to it. I thought it would come all chopped up like the beef did, but no, of course, they left the head on. It was still warm. I wouldn't be surprised if the heart had still been beating in the kitchen. It was looking at us too, with it's skin spread out like wings by its sides and all its flesh and bones neatly hacked up into cubes. Poor frog. I ate it though. Its not just like chicken, I think its a bit like fish. I left the head and skin though (we subtly covered up the eyes with its own skin and turned the dish around so that it couldn't see us eating it). So much for me trying to eat less meat!

Next day we went to see the Biggest Buddha in the World...Eva. Yes, it was big, and its falling apart. Lots of other buddhas and temples etc to see in the park around it. Its amazing the size of the incense sticks they have here - we joked that the Chinese must be some big sinners compared to the Thais, who seemed just to use the regular size incense sticks.