Panda Play Time in Chengdu!

Before going into any info about the joy of seeing Giant Pandas, I need to set the scene. Somebody (certainly not me) thought it would be a good idea to go out for some drinks before our early rise to meet the pandas. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I never have ‘a few’ drinks and the group soon found themselves rolling into the hostel at 5am. An hour later and still incredibly drunk I was shouted out of bed and boarded the bus in a daze, almost forgetting to put a bra on and remembering just in time.

Hopefully you are now in the same frame of mind as us, and can share the mixed feelings of sheer joy and happiness at seeing one of nature’s most wonderful and almost extinct spectacles, whilst also understand the pure pain of having an hours sleep, smelling like an ashtray in last night’s clothes and rapidly declining from drunk to hungover in the space of a few hours.

It started off well, we went to see the tiny, cute red pandas and were really happy about it. They were eating and we wanted to hug them!

Then it was time for the big pandas! They sat and munched off piles and piles of bamboo (giant pandas need to eat a lot!). They seemed dopey and chilled, which, in my state, I thoroughly enjoyed. The walk around the enclosures was long and there were lots of tourists which, in my state, I thoroughly did not enjoy.

They had baby pandas in little incubators! Aaaaah cute! This section kind of freaked me out though. Still drunk, my mind confused and fuzzy, I felt like I was in some kind of weird sci-fi film where either pandas were thought of as people or were having tests done on them, or something weird like that… You also had ‘Panda Police’ ushering you through at top speed, I didn’t like that very much.

By the end of it, we’d all seen a Panda and were happy, and were all ready to go back to bed. Brogan more than most of us.