I don't think I've ever seen or ever will see so many Pandas in the same place - we were really lucky as most of them were being active either eating bamboo and playing with each other and I took some really nice photos. It's well worth a visit to see the baby Pandas learning how to climb with zoo-keepers supervising them. The only problem was getting there as buses only ran every half hour and the trip takes 45 mins from outside our hostel - bus 902 is the 'Panda' bus if you ever go to Chengdu.
Afterwards we decided to walk the streets of Chengdu city to take a closer look as we're leaving tomorrow. The peoples square in the centre of the city is interesting with the biggest Mao statue I'd ever seen. On the western side of the statue there are very austere and imposing Communist style buildings that look about 30-40 years old. They're usually museums or Communist party offices, but if you look the other way down the road on the eastern side you'll see high rise buildings with Versace, Hugo Boss, Bally etc shops lining the bottom of the high rise buildings in a gross display of capitalism. It's pre- and post-Deng China all within one panorama, fantastic stuff. I couldn't ignore my need for a Starbucks coffee anymore so we spent an afternoon sipping cappucinos, eating chocolate eclairs all in the comfort of Starbucks lounges - I haven't been so indulgent for such a long time and it felt good! We were treating it as some sort of last capitalist hurrah before we head over to Tibet.
Speaking of Tibet, whey the bloody hell is it so hard to organise travel there. Air tickets are 1800rmb and train tickets from Chengdu are sold out for the rest of the month. I feel really frustrated at no being able to plan my trip properly as I've only go 26 days left in China and I've learnt backpacking needs patience and time. My solution is to head up to Lanzhou or Xining in the far north west to try our luck there and we're heading north tomorrow.
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