WANDERING IN SICHUAN & HUNAN - PANDAS, AVATAR ROCKS AND THE CHINESE VENICE
Having started with the relatively easier bits of China, where most foreigners congregate, we were ready to dial the challenge up a notch, and see if we could survive in the Western hinterlands of China. Being further from the coast doesn't mean this region has less to see - indeed we were only able to see a fraction of its sights and focused on its pandas, an amazing natural park and a riverside ancient merchant city.
THE PANDA TOWN, CHENGDU
After Beijing, the next stop on our China circuit was Chengdu, or as I call it, Panda-town. It is the capital of Sichuan province, where these adorable bears live, and with a human population of 15 million it is also the largest city in the Western part of China.
The plan was to visit the less-touristy Panda research centre in Ya’an, in order to avoid the crowds at the centre directly on the outskirts of Chengdu. However, the Labour day holiday intervened in an unpleasant way. After taking a 3-hour bus drive to Ya’an, we were unable to complete the final 10km section of our journey, since the city was at a standstill. We waited in line for an hour in the boiling sun, with hundreds of other people (who we couldn’t communicate with to ask if they were indeed going to the same place) for a bus that never came, since cars were completely unable to move on the streets due to the traffic. We tried to hail a taxi, but couldn’t even communicate our destination, so we had to resort to poking at a picture of a panda in our guidebook! Despite finding a single taxi who was willing to try, even he gave up when seeing the traffic in that direction – so we gave up and returned to Chengdu after 7 hours of travelling and no pandas...
“Luckily” we had planned 2 days in Chengdu, so we scrapped our second day itinerary to the world’s largest stone Buddha statue in Le Shan, and tried again with the pandas. This time we learned from our mistake, and went to the nearer spot on a tour organised by our hostel. We had to arrive at the research centre for its opening time at 7:30, as it got VERY crowded soon after! This way, it was manageable, and we got some amazing pictures of pandas! My favourite image was the one where the panda is sitting with his back to a tree, eating bamboo and throwing the too-dry bits into a big pile on his big stomach – looks exactly like a bum watching television spitting sunflower seeds around himself, but much cuter! They spend most of the day eating and sleeping, so it`s hard to see them doing any different activities.
Giant pandas are an endangered species, with a population of 300 living in captivity (mostly in China, or loaned out by the Chinese government to foreign zoos) and 1500 in the wild – but these are nearly impossible to spot! They live relaxed lifestyles, eating bamboo for 14-16 hours a day and sleep the remaining time. The primary danger to the pandas is habitat loss, and they also have an extremely low reproductive rate. There are only 2-3 days a year when female pandas can become pregnant, but eating more bamboo is frequently more interesting than mating, so the researchers in the panda breeding centre have their work cut out for them to drum up interest (apparently even panda-porn videos have been tried out and failed)! New-born pandas weigh 90g (or about 1/800 of the mother’s weigh) but by the end of their first year tip the scales at a hefty 45kg! They are completely furless and pink for the first month of their life, and only start developing their distinctive black and white spots afterwards.
The baby pandas born in the Autumn period, so this time of the year we saw the about 4-month old cubs. They were already furry and very similar to their parents in their look and daily activities too: eating and sleeping all day long. In the kindergarden we saw 6-7 cubs hanging on the trees, constantly adjusting their position to find the most comfortable point. Their hair looked still so soft and they were so cute that we were blown away.
It was funny to find the "teenager" section with four lazy cubs lying with dirty furs, which looked like they have had some fun earlier!
We also saw some red pandas in the same spot – actually, they are a relative of the giant pandas in name only. They’re a lot smaller and look more like red racoons, but they are also endangered, with less than 10,000 remaining. We could walk amongst them in an open-air enclosure, while they were frantically playing tag with each other – also very fun and no doubt, much more active than their white-black fellows!
After visiting the Panda Breeding Centre in the morning, we spent some time walking in Chengdu’s historic centre (picturesque but very crowded due to the long weekend holiday), trying some specialties of the province, and sitting in People’s Park sipping a cup of tea in an enormous teahouse, watching the locals go about their daily business from playing cards to taking dance lessons!
Besides pandas of all stripes, the other thing Sichuan is famous for is its cuisine, which can mainly be described with the adjective spicy! One of the interesting things we tried was their local “Mapo” tofu and the famous hotpot, where you get a bowl of boiling broth and order a bunch of raw ingredients which you cook for yourself and dip in sauces. What we also learned here in Sichuan, is that merely learning the Mandarin word for chicken is not nearly enough to get a satisfying meal, after trying once and receiving an entire pot filled with all parts of a chicken (including head, feet, skin, etc.) except for the meat, the part we actually wanted, we realised we would have to resort to picture menus to order. We gradually came to the realisation that if we order two plates of fried vegetables with spices (eggplant and string beans are our favourites) and some rice, these would taste delicious, and still contain enough meat in the form of bacon to satisfy our occasional cravings. Lucky we aren’t strict vegetarians, or we would really struggle!
AVATAR MOUNTAINS IN ZHANGJIAJIE
Waving goodbye to our furry panda friends we flew to Hunan province, specifically the Zhangjiajie National Park, more commonly known as the “place where they filmed Avatar”. We did a 2-day hike in the Park to take in the fabulous scenery – it really is almost as nice as the movie, the only difference is that the mountains unfortunately don’t actually float in the air (but it almost looks like it when it is foggy just after rain).
And in reality, we just let the pictures talk for themselves:
National Parks in China are different from what we’re used to, they have a lot of cable cars and escalators to enable people who aren’t into exercise (which seems to be the vast majority of domestic visitors) to enjoy the views too. So while the Park as a whole has a heap of people, if you take the stairs up the mountain, you can quickly find yourself alone (except obviously in the top scenic spots where the cable cars bring people). But since the 5000 viewpoints along cliffs are almost equally fabulous, this wasn’t really an issue for us. We even met large monkey families playing in the forest who were eager to get in contact with us - mainly to try to get hold of our fruit or biscuits! Since we spent the night at a hostel in the park, we could catch the famous “Avatar bridge” without a single person on it too!
It was a bit difficult to find our way at times, since the maps were quite rudimentary – we’ve noticed that map-reading (and apparently map-making) skills aren’t strong points in the local education system, don’t even think about showing a taxi driver a map of the city! This was further complicated by the few English signs that they installed all calling the same attraction by a slightly different translated version, just to make things more interesting!
For the two days in the park we only took a small backpack each to take them along the hike, and based on the nice weather on the previous days we naively did not shortlist our raincoats for the journey. As it`s expected, on our first day we got completely soaked on one of the peaks and got stuck under a small sun umbrella of a cafe until the rain calmed down to a reasonable level. This was where we first experienced the local rain that can start suddenly from the blue like you opened the shower! We lost a few hours there, but luckily the rain brought out great clouds around the mountains which looked truly magical.
During our time in Zhangjiajie we could probably quickly count the number of foreigners we met on our way, it seems more to be a popular destination with local tourists. Probably this is why locals might have taken more pictures of us and often with us than we did ourselves! Partly due to the lack of foreigners, shuttle buses that take people from the city to the national park entrance have their destination written only in Chinese (actually similarly to other places in China too if I think about it..), so we had some fun standing in the bus stop with a piece of paper and our destination written in Chinese on it, and monitoring the buses on the road to wave for the right one to stop! The bus was meant to run every 5 minutes, so after 20 minutes in the bus stop we started worrying a bit, so double checked the paper, and it turned out that we misread some of the characters and let many of the right buses pass! Long story short, it takes longer and more energy to achieve whatever you want here if you don`t speak a single word and can`t read the language.
THE ANCIENT MERCHANT CITY ON THE RIVER, FENGHUANG
After the exercise of the Avatar mountains, our final stop in Hunan province (after a surprisingly smooth 4-hour bus journey on a newly constructed highway that is still constantly being developed further) was the ancient merchant city of Fenghuang. This is another spot that mainly draws a local crowd of tourists. We saw 2 other foreigners during our whole time there! Accordingly, there is very little English knowledge either, but that gave the whole place an authentic vibe. The views from the city waterfront were amazing, even from our balcony, particularly when lit up at night!
As mentioned, practically no English is spoken here, however there were a few English signs on the streets, that are worth sharing! (Good questions who will read the English text if there`s almost no foreigners in the town.?!)
Our guidebook had warned us that we would need to pay a hefty entrance fee even to see some of the more picturesque streets, but surprisingly we didn’t run into any ticket collectors – maybe they were all on holidays? So we spent a couple of days just wandering around the town without any specific purpose and enjoyed the unique atmosphere. For us the place looked like it just jumped out from an old book about ancient China. Fenghuang means phoenix in Chinese, and it also happens to be the symbol of the city, with a huge statue on the main square.
A more shocking part was seeing that catering to local tastes also meant a very wide variety of fresh game meat and other ‘delicacies’ exhibited in front of restaurants, from turtles suspended on poles to prevent them getting away, to a flat-snouted rabbit-type mammal with a bloody mouth from trying to bite its way out of its metal cage, baby rabbits, snakes, bugs and many more, which was enough to turn anyone into a vegetarian (at least temporarily). And then there were the worms and grub which were either cooked into noodles or made into crunchy pancakes – the bottom line was that we looked twice to see what we were eating before we put it into our mouths! Here the earlier discovered tactic of asking for veggies only was the best option to stay on the safe side, especially as none of the menus were ever written in English - the best we could hope for was a picture menu.
Good luck making your order!
Also catering to the domestic tourism industry were a couple of quirky attractions: the fish-pedicure parlour (where little fish in a bowl eat the dead skin from your feet), the flower wreath sellers and the costume-photo vendors - for women it was to dress them up in traditional minority dresses, while they tried to convince men dressed up in what I can only describe as beaver-trapper / hunters with large shotguns. They were surprisingly popular, which gave the city a very interesting character, with dozens of hunters taking pictures around the city!
We didn't have much luck with the weather in the city, as it started pouring the day after we arrived. You could see the river change colour from blue/green to brown as the sediment was washed in - it seemed like a completely different river! The unusually high water level meant that the river flooded the first street on the opposite bank, and was only missing 5cm to do the same on our bank, but luckily the rain stopped before that happened. It did mean that we couldn't go cruising on the river though.
Having stepped through these unique spots in China, which are less known to and visited by foreign tourists, it was time to head to the iconic mountains of Guilin, which were the first tourist attraction that was developed in China. We braced ourselves for the crowds, but were also hoping that more development would also mean better chances at communication!