I hand over my passport and ready money for payment. We are at the ticket office for the Panda Breeding Research Stationon the outskirts of Chengdu. My passport is handed back to me and my money waved away with some Chinese words. The woman behind us interprets and says “there is no charge because your age”. There is a mixture of happiness at being able to enter for free tinged with realisation that I am getting on in years now.
As with everything in mainland China there is a paucity of information combined with the language barrier that hampers independent travel. Signage is in Pinyin lettering, almost no people speak any English and the internet and electronic information sources such as QR codes are on their own electronic platforms that do not interact with ours. Even credit card transactions are mostly with their own financial institutions and informatics rendering our cards useless and suddenly cash is king again! How retro!
I have stressed all night about getting tickets and entry and here we are with a rugby scrum of locals heading into the panda sanctuary with a minimum of hassle. My son Chris and I were here in 2004. We stayed at the now defunct Panda Hotel and visited the, since destroyed by earthquake in 2008, Wolong Panda Sanctuary. We were rewarded by a panda sightings but it was more of a zoo experience with a handful of pandas eating supplied bamboo in sparse enclosures and concrete pits.
Twenty years later and this is a totally different experience. The grounds are massive, green forested and with well maintained gardens. Obviously the pandas are not completely unrestricted but they have generous green, natural enclosures with space aplenty, vegetation including trees to climb. Breeding here seems to be successful and panda numbers are increasing which is fortunate as, in common with other species, deforestation is proving to be the biggest threat to the species’ viability in the wild.
The day starts just after dawn and is hectic early with large numbers of locals around the early enclosures. Nonetheless they were surprisingly less touristically “aggressive” than my experience in previous years and much more orderly. Content with our early sightings we head off for a coffee expecting to then have little to see as the pandas sated sleep the rest of the day off. We settle down after an hour and a half at the cafeteria. It is 9 am and a lot of the “early birds” are leaving. We are at a counter with glass walls up against a panda enclosure. Suddenly a couple of cuddly pandas amble into view and settle down to chow down on bamboo. Here we are spending morning tea with the pandas! Amazingly the next couple of hours wandering around are the best of the day and the crowds have dissipated.
As we leave I reflect on our amazing wildlife experience with this endangered species. Interestingly Suzanne and I are the only “round eyes” (non Europeans) in evidence all day. I smile inwardly that if this is the popularity of pandas to the local population then their future here surely must be assured.
