Today was our second panda visit, but this time it was to the Panda Breeding Centre in Chengdu – well you can never have too much panda exposure. The centre was only a short drive away compared to the day before.
This was another great experience, and I think we saw more pandas here, especially the red ones. The young pandas were adorable and were happily playing games with their mothers.
There is a nice Visitor Centre here, too, that produced a good cup of coffee, and panda ice creams! A few more panda photos later and it was again time to move on and go for lunch. On route form the centre, we passed a long row of market stalls that sold everything panda that was a good place to buy a few souvenirs or gifts. I bought a couple of panda umbrellas here to take home as presents – no one else will have one of these in the UK, I thought, well unless they’ve been to China, of course.
The afternoon saw us take a trip to the People’s Park in Chengdu, coupled with an amusing perusal of the dating profiles at Matchmakers Corner. This is where parents go to find suitable partners for their children to ensure that traditional standards are upheld in their families. The profiles obviously weren’t in English, so Alison had to be our translator. We found one guy who apparently owned 11 apartments – one member of our group said they might marry him themselves!
We then walked around all the tea houses and finished the day off by playing a game of Mahjong, well, I watched. Mahjong is a tile-based board game that is played throughout China and is particularly prevalent in Sichuan. It looked a bit complicated to me, but then as I wasn’t playing my concentration wasn’t what it probably would have been if I had been.
Just after we arrived back at the hotel, a huge storm blew up and it absolutely poured down with rain. We had been incredibly lucky to have just got back in time, and the weather, although hotter than expected, had been dry and sunny for our entire trip.
The evening meal was in the hotel tonight, as it was the last day of the tour. We had a great evening where we commended Alison on doing such a great job of looking after us all throughout the trip. We reminisced together and laughed about some of our most memorable experiences from the tour. We all realised that we had started off our trip as strangers but had now become great friends over the week that felt a lot longer somehow. It had been more than a holiday; it was a travel journey that we all went on together and made lots of great memories that will hopefully last a lifetime…
