Sichuan Trip, Day Five

Day 5: We spent most of the day heading to the giant panda reserve park and back before making our way to Chongqing.  After stopping at a fruit stand for breakfast, we took a couple buses to the park.  I had my first experience eating sugar cane along the way; it was less sweet than I thought it would be, but definitely worth the three kuai I spent on it.  The second bus to the park was a small wooden one, crammed with people.  We forced our way on, though, and I stood in a corner, leaning against the driver's seat with room on the floor for only one foot.

The park was a good experience.  It sits on a beautiful piece of property, with a large lake and well-maintained flower beds and bamboo groves.  We went to the research station, the veterinary hospital, and the panda kitchen and learned about how the pandas are bred in captivity and what they eat.  The enclosures for the pandas were fairly large, and we watched as the handlers gave them bamboo to eat.  They sit back on their haunches and grab the branches with amazing dexterity, looking for all the world like a guy on a recliner reaching for the chips.  Apparently they eat different parts of the bamboo during different seasons; when we were there they stripped the leaves off and ate those.

Next, we went to the nursery and saw the infant pandas.  They were really cute!  After that, on our way around the park to where the red panda enclosures were, we stopped to ask a lady sweeping the path which way we should go.  She pointed us in the right direction and then told us to follow her.  We followed her through a restricted employee area and then took a dirt path through the bamboo directly to the red pandas!  People have been so nice to us on this trip.  The red pandas were smaller than I expected, more like foxes than bears.

After the park, we went to the main train station to buy tickets to Chongqing.  It was the most crowded I've seen any place, completely different from a few days before when we left for Emei.  We got in line only to find out that there were no seats on any train until the next night! At this point, we were completely fed up with our plans going awry, but we looked for another way to Chongqing.  A private bus driver offered us tickets for 120 each, but we ended up sending Joel to the bus station to ask about tickets.  Meanwhile, we got dinner, not having eaten all day long, and then headed over to catch our bus.  It didn't leave until 7:20, and we got to Chongqing after 11, taking a taxi to the Sheraton.

The Sheraton is incredible!  It really serves as an example of Chinese opulence - nearly everything is gilded, and the furniture is very ornate.  The lobby is huge, and the hotel takes up a whole skyscraper. There we two good-sized double beds in the room, so the guys took the beds and Nicole gets the floor (with our extra pillows and comforters, of course).