Chengdu and Pandas

Chengdu and Pandas

We decided to take a trip to Chengdu, Huanglong and Jiuzhaigou.
The latter two are national parks in China.
But first, Chengdu and Pandas!

We set off from Shanghai on a clear early autumn day in October.
Chengdu is probably the biggest city in Sichuan province.
This province is well known for their fiery spicy cuisine as well as Pandas and some of China's most picturesque national parks.

We got to the hotel and walked to old town Chengdu.
Chengdu has a rather small downtown and so it was very walkable.
Oldtown Chengdu(Jinli Street 锦里) looks like ancient China where kungfu warriors might be sipping tea and then break out into fights. :)

Chengdu is also famous for their tea houses.
Locals love to spend the day snacking and drinking tea in such teahouses all over the city.

The old man with the white beard really looks like someone straight out of a martial arts movie!
He is actually a fortune teller.
Some people came by and he whipped out a book, did some calculations and started telling them their life's destiny.

 The green tea is a local variety called zhuyeqing 竹叶青.
It is quite a decent green tea though I prefer longjing 龙井 (Dragon well) tea from Hangzhou.
Those yellow bean snacks were absolutely addictive.

More of oldtown Chengdu

For some reason, Chinese tourists love taking photos along long walls and narrow alleys like the one below.

Snacks galore!
Lots of street food.

 Cant escape from Bubble tea.
It is everywhere...

 Different kinds of meat for sale, mostly preserved.

 This is one of the oldest temples in the city, dating back to the Three Kingdoms period.

 

For dinner, we went to a local restaurant on the way back to the hotel.

Ordered a boiled fish 水煮鱼 and spicy fried chicken 辣子鸡.

The fish pieces were literally swimming in a bowl of oil but it was tasty.

Both dishes were very spicy and had plenty of sichuan peppercorns.

The next day, we headed off to the Chengdu Panda wildlife park

The best time to see the pandas is in the morning, before it gets hot and they have their breakfast.
They also have designated feeding times where the panda keepers give them bamboo shoots.
Visitors can also pay extra, not cheaply, to hug a panda and take photos with them.

This has to be booked in advance as there are no shortage of visitors who want to do that!



Pandas are surprisingly agile!
They were hopping between branches and climbed the trees really easily.

My fav were the cute Red Pandas who look like Raccoons.
They have the same diet as the big pandas.
Used to be able to hug them for a small fee but they stopped that.
Maybe visitors tried to bring them home...too cute!

Back to Chengdu and time for dinner.
We had fried fish, steamed dumplings, minced meat sesame noodles

That's it for this section of the trip!
We headed off next to Huanglong and Jiuzhaigou.

Hope you enjoyed reading!