This was June 2013. After the epic journey through the Yunnan there was one last province, the mighty Sichuan! My references of Sichuan were the common earthquakes (including one with a magnitude of 7 a month or so before I was there), pandas and the spicy food (particularly the hot-pot with its Sichuan peppers).
My first destination was Chengdu, the capital of this province. After an 8 hour bus ride from Shangri-La back to Kunming and then a train ride of almost 20 hours to Chengdu. I read the whole "Into the Wild" book during this journey. I have it in my memory as a very pleasant trip!
Chengdu has around 7 million people. It is a large, but very laid back city. People move at a slow pace, and in the parks and gardens lots of people spend their time practising tai-chi, playing instruments and singing on some improvised karaokes with some laptops, microphones and really bad loudspeakers. The centre has some tall and flashy buildings, which makes it feel like a large city (which it is).
A pogoda on a Chengdu Park
A lady doing tai-chi
I met Zeev, my Israeli friend for the 4rth or 5th time during our staying in China. During my trip in the Yunnan he decided to stay in Yangshuo doing a rock-climbing course. We both were there, officially, for the food, but in reality (for as hard it is for me to admit as it can be) we were there to see the pandas! The last few living pandas live mostly in Sichuan in natural reserves. The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding is a facilty/park where scientists research pandas and where they are bred! Apparently they rarely breed in captivity, and since they can rarely be found in the wild nowadays, facilities like these are extremely important for their survival.
Both me and Zeev were very excited with the idea of seeing live pandas in front of us... and weirdly enough, that excitement was completely fulfilled! It is indeed amazing to see a panda! Giant Pandas move more like humans than monkeys do! Pandas look like a guy on a panda suit! Red Pandas are quite cute, but less impressive than the Giant Pandas!
A Giant Panda eating bamboo...that's what they do...
A sleepy red panda on a tree.
And then came the food! I was warned that the spiciness of the food is epic here in this part of the world. I also knew that the Sichuan pepper creates a strange numbness in the mouth and lips. And to top that, every single toilet wall in the hostels had painful descriptions of the agonising experience of the day after having a hotpot! I actually had tried that before in the West, but nothing prepared me for how spectacular a true hotpot can be! Imagine a cauldron of boiling hot, spicy, magma-like broth with peppers floating on, imagine 30 degrees outside (higher inside of the restaurants, because of the flames under these pots). Now anything can be thrown inside this cauldron: pieces of meat, vegetables, pieces of tripe, lungs, anything edible. You choose what you want to throw into that active vulcano, let it be there for some time and... well.. eat it... then pray! It is hot and spicy! And it does numb your mouth! The heat is bearable, but it creates some weird effect in your mind! You actually get a little bit high with it! That was a truly remarkable experience! I had this hot-pot with Zeev, but after a few minutes some young locals that barely spoke a work of English helped us how to dip and eat the different ingredients while laughing and our red faces. They offered us cigarettes (as usually the Chinese that you randomly meet, and somehow bond, very often do).
After the hot-pot, with our minds flying a bit higher than normally, we joined this group of young guys and girls and went for a Karaoke night! Karaoke might be the worst situation that I can imagine myself in! But still, the highness from the hot-pot and the alcohol that these guys insisted in paying us all night, just made it fun! I sang Beatles, Frank Sinatra (of course), and I can't remember what else...
On another night I met a few other travellers from different countries that lived in Shanghai. There was going to be some friendly match between the NBA champion team and some local team. One of the guys in the hostel knew another guy who was part of the press staff that followed the NBA team. We met him in a club, where some locals paid all our drinks (just because we were foreigners), and at a certain point he asked us to, please, take him to some proper Chinese restaurant. All the NBA players and the people that went with them kept on having their fried chicken and burgers all the time. We had a fantastic beef noodle soup, something that he had so many times in the US, but this one was different from everything he had before... welcome to the monumental Chinese culinary, my friend!
Luckily there was no earthquake while I was there! Chengdu will stay in my mind precisely for the two other things I knew about... I would never think that I would admit that I loved to see a real panda in front of me, and I loved, adored, the food!
