bicrom abroad

it's not the size that matters...

after the slight disappointment of our flying visit to x'ian there was some concern that our corresponding twenty four sprint in and out of chengdu would be similarly anticlimactic. chengdu is the capital of the sichuan province, gateway to tibet and home to the eponymous spicy cuisine. the draw for the timepoor, however, was the giant panda breeding and research centre a few kilometres outside the ringroads which encircle the city.
after yet another early start we found ourselves amongst a largish group of fellow travellers trudging up a neatly arranged grey path in the morning mist. the compact, well organised nature of the walkways together with the gaggles of camera toting travellers (including, as always, incredibly noisy chinese) made me slightly concerned that we were going to get another antiseptic, disneyfied chinese experience. fortunately, my fears were waylaid the instant we got our first glimpse of the pandas. these magnificent beasties really do not disappoint; from an evolutionary point of view they should have died out centuries ago, with their ludicrously poorly thought out diet creating hulking lethargic behemoths with little energy to do much beyond stuffing their faces with bamboo to maintain enough momentum to eat yet more bamboo; that they are notoriously poor at reproducing is as much to do with them being to lazy to get it on as with an absence of potential partners. the centre is actually both well set out and apparently well run, with lots of adult pandas sleepily chomping bamboo and dozing whilst the cubs, full of an energy which is soon to dissipate gambol around wrestling each other. we even saw a couple of tiny two month old babies mewling in their incubators looking quite ridiculously cute. this really was a must see and frankly an entirely more worthwhile dropping in then the terracotta warriors.
a particular mention should go for the panda centre's information film which depicts the work which the centre does whilst all the time trying to anthropomorphise pandas and the significant events in their lives; for all the talk of falling in love and marriages the best line had to be where the narrator informed us that the post natal mother panda often stays within her cage, much like a chinese mother. nice: still the ladies of china seem to get out enough to try and run me over on scooters so their cages can't be that restrictive. imprisoned chinese matriarchs aside, some sympathy must also be reserved for the male pandas given that the little onsite museum (ostensibly in their honour) baldly and unapologetically informed us that another of the reasons pandas struggled to reproduce is because their johnsons are just too small to get the job done in the apparently cavernous lady parts of the female pandas. this seems a little harsh to emblazon over the walls of a museum as scientific fact; maybe, surrounded by notebook wielding scientists, they were just nervous.
waiting for our flight to guilin tonight before the start of a hopefully more sedate second week encompassing just yangshuo and hong kong. we set ourselves quite steep targets in terms of what we wanted to see and do in our two weeks in china and whilst, inevitably in such a vast country, there are lots of side avenues which we would have liked to meander down (not least down the sichuan highway to tibet) it looks like we will have ticked a lot of the right boxes. hopefully we can recharge a bit now in preparation for a return to offices which suddenly seem to have started looming impatiently over our shoulders.

posted by bicrom @ 8:00 pm