Chinese New Year is one of the few public holidays where the length of time off work makes it worth traveling. That, combined with tradition of spending it with your family, means that around 1 billion people hit the roads, rail and airports to get home to lived ones at the same time. With this in mind we were apprehensive about traveling to Sichaun Province (south west China) before escaping the country but other than being manically busy, travel plans went smoothly.
We flew from Beijing to Cheng Du and checked into our first Chinese hostel. Think outdoor stairways, bathrooms & wiring fitted by an optimist rather than an electrician.
Cheng Du is considered far enough south to not require heating so while the outside temperatures are a lot kinder than Beijing's, turns out they're the same as the indoor temperatures. It's climate is damp and drizzly most the year round so we put on everything we'd bought with us and headed out to explore.
All decent Chinese cities have a people's park (Renmin Park) and Cheng Du didn't disappoint. Despite its modest size it had a flower garden, several tea houses, a children's fun fair, a war memorial and best of all several performance areas for amateurs, professionals and nut jobs. In China all comrades are equal and provided their art of choice stays within the limits of the decibel counter (one per performance area) all are welcome. We spent much time enjoying the modern dance classes, the aerobics that looked closer to living statues than athletes, and the opera. Especially the opera performed by 2 people miming to a woolly soundtrack but with a lot of dedication to the air-grab.
On then to the fish pond where you could hire a baby's bottle on a stick to 'feed' the fish pond-water. Very popular with humans & fish alike.
Pandas are the main reason for anyone coming here of course so day 2 we got to the reserve at opening time and headed to the furthest point with the aim of keeping crowd free for as long as possible. Panda's are great fun to watch as they look like people in bear costumes. They're lazy, slow, lethargic creatures that require a small sleep after climbing a 4ft tree, will sit very close to a human audience while they strip a bamboo shoot skillfully and noisily, and slump onto other pandas like they're big pillows.
Red pandas are much smaller, quicker and look like ewoks. All very engaging to observe.
Still it's with mixed feelings that we visited. Their ineptness at survival means they only exist in captivity now, promoting a lengthy debate as to why we treat them as the poster-bear for animal welfare, and whether this really serves any higher purpose than a well run zoo. Probably not is the conclusion we reached. Good job they're pretty!
Back to town & a trip to the Sichuan Opera. Not Opera as we know it in the west, more a variety show aiming to please an audience of all ages. Which normally means actually pleasing no-one. Not so in this case however while we drank green tea we marveled at the audience's marvel at such rare talents as pouring tea from a moderate height while doing some martial arts leg stuff, some hand/shadow puppetry which led us to conclude that they have very different shaped animals in Sichuan, and the grand finale, the face-swapping mask dance surely subtitled 'You're my wife now'.
High brow culture done for the night we ventured into one of the only food joints navigable to us where we purchased two defrosted mains and a side portion of food poisoning.
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