Chengdu

We were picked up at the station and taken to our pre-booked hostel, where it was no surprise to learn that they couldn't offer us our room yet because at 5.15, the previous people were still in it. We settled down instead to watch a DVD after a successful fight with the TV which was stuck at full volume while we tried to turn it down, probably waking up half the people staying there.

A movie and breakfast later and we were settled in our room preparing to launch ourselves into Chengdu. The town is a favourite backpacker stop because this is where people come to see the Pandas and also makes an ideal city to head onto Tibet from. We wouldn't be going to Tibet from here but the Pandas were very much on the agenda. By about day 4 we managed to get our act together and took the bus followed by taxi necessary to reach the centre.

The Panda Breeding and Research Centre is set up to increase Panda numbers rather than give the creatures a reserve to see out there days in. There is quite a lot of human contact between the staff and the Pandas and their compounds, although big, are still compounds rather than fully wild forest. It's a good set up though, and the Pandas have big pens to play in, probably close to about 1/2Km square each, not only that, their houses which they retreat into during the heat has the same air conditioning units as most of our hotels.

We arrived early because Pandas aren't the most active animals and by 10 am they tend to settle down for a snooze until late afternoon. Annoyingly though the Chinese tour groups had the same plan. We have come to the opinion that the Chinese, as individual people, and like most of the world excluding Vietnam, are all lovely and helpful. We like them very much and feel quite guilty for bracing ourselves against them before we arrived. As tour groups though, they are possibly the worst in the world. Groups of between 10 and 30 people will be led along by a guide with a megaphone, often standing beside another guide with a megaphone and competing for the most volume. The people in the group act like a badly behaved school group, shouting and shoving and causing no end of disruption by their incessant photo taking. Despite signs saying keep quiet, they would shout and yell at the first sign of a Panda, meaning that was mostly also the last sight of the Panda. Despite them, we managed to see quite a lot of the Pandas including the brand new babies in incubators behind a glass screen. As we watched the pint sized fur balls more groups arrived behind us and we soon made our exit as they banged on the windows and with much hilarity all shoosh'd each other at the top of the lungs when prompted by the panda cub guard and then continued to make as much noise as before.

We had seen everything we came to see and got a few pictures too so we headed out and found a taxi to take us to the bus station so we could get a bus back to the hostel. As we sat in the taxi, something funny was happening with the meter. It had cost us 14RMB on the outward trip but only five minutes in, when I expected us still to have been within the 3 RMB flag fall, the meter already said 9 RMB, with at least another 10 minutes to go. I sat and watched it closely, struggling with the bright sun shining on the LEDs but it seemed to be that the meter was going up very quickly and not at all at regular intervals. Then I noticed that every time the cost went up, the driver seemed to be itching his leg, and unless I was very much mistaken there was a clicking sound too. AT 25 RMB I knew I had him, and his eagerness to keep clicking the button and put up the total was so excessive that there is no way he could have expected not to get busted. I decided to remain quiet though and let him take us where we were headed rather than have an argument and get turfed out on the motorway. We reached our corner of town but we kept him rolling round the streets with the plan that we would innocently ask him to pull over close to a policeman if we saw one and then suggest that he probably didn't want to charge us for the ride. Typical though, this was the one time we couldn't find a policeman and we had got ourselves down a dead end, but still close enough to where we were headed. The man proudly pointed to the meter asking for 54 RMB at which point I reveled I knew his game, threw a couple of notes in his face and slammed the door on exit. He didn't seem interested in getting the other 34 RMB his meter said he was due and we got on the bus, concluding that this was the first con we had knowingly had attempted on us in China.

We spent the rest of our time in Chengdu soaking up the city scene but not actually doing anything in particular, we had a birthday dinner for me in a fairly posh restaurant which actually sold decent wine, unusual for China but we put that down to the fairly large expat community in Chengdu. The town was in a bit of upheaval because they are getting a new underground train network installed, resulting in the roads being all dug up and no end of diversions which meant we missed our stop at least once and had to get a taxi to find our way home, this time with our eyes very closely on the meter.

We went for a stroll in the park one evening and were treated to a cacophony of noise and activity as it seemed every old person in the city was in some part of the park either singing karaoke through a generator powered set up a pub would be proud of, or ballroom dancing or playing away together in little bands with traditional instruments while someone warbled out the classic hits close by. They were all competing for space and quiet, with the Karaoke being the worst for setting up right next to each other and cranking the volume louder and louder to be heard over each other. The irony is that it only seemed to be the high pitched shrieking women who would have a shot, the people who need a microphone and speaker the least of anyone. That said, there was one exception, a young guy who paid his money and cried through sad love song after break-up song, by the end making nothing more than a racket like a dying animal as he howled and bawled through the speaker. We watched in astonishment as, with his 3 songs finished, he got up off the ground in a perfectly composed state and popped off to buy a bottle of water before returning and waiting to see if anyone would pay him to have a shot on what turned out to be his own gear.

Chengdu astonished us once more too when a cash machine deciding it didn't want to offer me my money displayed the message "Incompatible Card, Ha Ha Ha!". It was time to leave town.