Endless Summer Tiny World

I do not recommend taking an overnight train in a hard seat in china. We had a sixteen hour train ride to get to Chengdu where the giant panda research base is. We couldn’t get a sleeper like w wanted so instead just took a hard seat which was hard!! Haha! In china people aren’t exactly good at lining up but they are very good at pushing and cramming the whole way, it’s like standing outside walmart at 3 am on black Friday and when they finally open the doors everyone just starts shoving ther way in. Im just happy no one got trampled to death! The next challenge is finding. Space to put our bags, since Chelsy and I are not as skillful at shoving and are used to the western way of a line or some kind of order and all Chinese have some at least four different bags per person (god knows what they’re bringing home, almost everything) we had to improvise to get our bags on a rack. And then there was 16 hours facing another person and trying to get some kind of sleep while the neighboring chinese lady screamed into her phone (yes they do talk on their phones louder than me, and we all know that’s a challenge!) so I definitely don’t recommend taking a hard seat on a long trip!

We finally made it to Chengdu and spent the remainder of the afternoon looking for food and wandering the city a little. The next morning we woke up early to take the city bus to the giant panda research base. This bus had the air conditioning on instead of heat I think and we now call it the meat locker bus. It was an hour ride to the pandas and we were both frozen icicles by the time we got to the park. So we were mistaken in thinking we were going to warmer weather and now of course a cold front is coming in so it’s cold everywhere, even hong kong, I feel mother nature justwants to make sure we appreciate it when were so hot and sweaty in southeast Asia.

The pandas were so cute and amazing. I never realized that there were only 27 pandas outside of china, and all in captivity. We saw pandas that were one to two years old that were very active, eating, playing and wrestling, we saw some only about 8 months old sleeping and we saw older pandas eating and sleeping. They have some red pandas too which look like little foxes. We now have tons of pictures of pandas and it was very good to see so many pandas thriving, though only in captivity, I guess you have to start somewhere.
Our ride back was in the meat locker bus again and after riding in this bus you feel you can never get warm again so we just picked up some snacks on the way back to our hostel where we crawled into our beds that had electric heater blankets and we stayed! We ended up falling asleep and not getting up til morning. I guess we needed the sleep as we slept for 12 hours! Today we are off to Guilin and Yangzhou, where we hoped it would be nicer weather but the cold front is calling for rain and cold weather. The train ride is 26 hours, but this time we have a sleeper train and were a little more prepared!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2012 at 8:10 pm and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.