China Trip - Chengdu

We're back from another trip to China!  This time we took advantage of the kids' summer break (which is a little weird when every day feels like summer) to spend two weeks touring western and central China.  Having visited Beijing and Hong Kong we felt like we wanted to get out of the big cities and see what else China had to offer.  Elizabeth worked tirelessly to arrange an incredible 12-day action-packed tour, staying mostly in hostels and traveling mostly by train.  We've broken up the posts by location, since we ended up doing a lot in each place we stayed.  Here's a map of the places we visited (not counting Beijing):

We considered this region "Central China", but it was consistently referred to as "Western China" by everyone we talked to.  Chengdu (where we started and ended our trip) is the gateway to Tibet, and although there's a lot of land if you keep going West there apparently aren't enough people to matter.

We started off on a relaxing note to lull the kids into a false sense of security, departing Singapore on a Saturday late afternoon with plenty of time to finish packing and have a snack at the airport.

OM NOM NOM NOM

That put us in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, very late at night.  Just enough time to taxi to our hostel and crash.

Chengdu is a relatively laid back city.  With a population of "only" 15 million people it is considered a "tier one-and-a-half" city.  Not big like a top tier metropolis like Beijing or Shanghai, but it has broken away from the pack of smaller cities due to population growth driven by government-sponsored "go-west" programs and a more liberal cultural scene that attracts the younger Chinese population that is fleeing the rural villages.  There is apparently an old saying in Western China: "The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away".  This part of China has always been a little against the grain, having given birth to the initial anti-imperial revolts that resulted in the formation of the Republic of China in 1911, and is now considered the queer capital of China.

We've learned by now that the first day of a trip needs to be pretty low-key, so we took the city bus down to RenMin Park ("The People's Park") and explored.  We found some pretty standard Asian park features like lovely gardens and a fish pond, but also some unusual features like a number of traditional tea houses filled with locals getting their ears professionally cleaned, and a pond with insanely rickety and dangerous electric boats for rent.  We partook of everything except the ear cleaning.

Our children make friends easily.

Those ear cleaners aren't disposable, and I never saw them get washed.

She hit way fewer other boats than her dad did.

Once again, our caucasian children are celebrities in China.

Even with 1.4 Billion people there's still room to run around.

That afternoon we went on a food-centered walking tour, where we ate local specialty sandwiches filled with noodles and beef, Sichuan spicy noodles, Chinese spring rolls, fresh in-season fruit from the nearby cherry and plum orchards, amazingly stinky tofu (it was fermented with the same bacteria that is used to make bleu cheese), all manner of homemade pickles (Sichuan makes the unsubstantiated claim to be the first place where people fermented food) and learned all about the cuisine and food history of the Sichuan province and it's signature spice: the Sichuan Peppercorn.  Neither a chili nor a peppercorn, this citrus seed is responsible for the numbing/tingling/buzzing sensation and "soapy" flavor that defines Sichuan cuisine.

We were also introduced to Baijiu, a unique class of fermented/distilled beverage that is the most-consumed liquor in the world, and Michael ate the brains of two different types of animal at dinner (not pictured, sadly).  It definitely helped set the stage for the culinary adventure we were in for on the rest of the trip.

I have no snarky comments.  This noodle shop was astoundingly good.

Danger Monkey is communing with dinner.

Actual Chinese food.  No sesame chicken in sight.

The next day we were ready for the main purpose of our Chengdu visit: Time To See The Pandas.  Chengdu is nestled into the rising foothills of the Himalayas on the western end of the Sichuan basin, and so is right on the edge of the last remaining natural habitat of the Giant Panda.  As China has opened up to more and more foreign tourism the number of Panda research and rescue centers has exploded.  There are options to spend an entire day mucking out Panda cages and options to spend hundreds of dollars for a 15-second photo-op with an actual bear, but neither option was available for kids.  How sad!  We had to settle for visiting the Panda research and breeding center, which is essentially a giant modern zoo for Giant Pandas, Red Pandas (no relation), and a few wandering peacocks.  The kids were thrilled, even with the long lines, as they had been ravenously consuming panda documentaries on Netflix for months.  The pandas were generally more active and social than the pair that resides in the Singapore zoo, and the visit was overall pretty great.  We saw a full spectrum from 10-day-old larval panda babies, all the way up to enormous lard-butt pandas that had somehow managed to climb to the top of a tree.

It is a miracle that the species has survived as long as it has.

Did I mention the long lines?

It looks kind of like a beanie baby that's gone through the wash too many times.

"Charismatic Megafauna" indeed.

If you want more pictures of pandas, let us know.  We can hook you up.

We spent some time after the Panda Research Center exploring food streets and the neighborhood around the hostel.

It turns out there are a lot of people in China!  Also it was a holiday weekend.

Danger Monkey is communing with the pearl polisher.

The next day we roused early and caught a cab to the train station to take the bullet train to Xi'an, former imperial capital and site of the Terracotta Warriors!

A chance to take a high speed train?  Don't mind if we do!  We hit 244 KPH.

The Sichuan basin is basically 100% developed, and has been for about 3,000 years.

Wind turbines and subsistence agriculture.