A city. A real life city. Not a collection of yurts or a petrol station with a fruit stall next to it, a real smog-filled, sky-scraping city with real shops and everything.
Our first port of call was some food that we knew what it was - pizza hut! Alex had a meat abundant (with 6 different types of meat on it!) and Gill had a delicious ham (and it was delicious too!). It was amazing. And after a nights sleep in a proper bed and a hot shower we felt like new people.
So the next morning we went to visit the main attraction in Chengdu, the pandas.
What we learnt from our trip to the breeding sanctuary is that it is amazing how they are still alive. Apparently they should have died out about 3 million years ago. They are carnivores and have the digestive tract of a carnivore. But, they can't be bothered to chase after their food so they eat bamboo. Because their stomachs aren't meant to be digesting this amount of green stuff, it can only absorb about 20% of the nutrients from it. And this in turn means that they have to be as lazy as possible to conserve energy and eat more or less constantly throughout the day. That and they only have 2 days a year when the females are ready to mate and generally the males can't be bothered to summon up the energy so the keepers have to intervene with 'electrical stimulation and massage'. And even then, a pregnant mother ejects the baby so prematurely that, as a blind 50 gram rat-type-thing, their chances of survival are slim. If they make it this far, there is also a fair old chance that the mother will accidentally crush it to death. Essentially, they are only still about because they have no predators and they are cute. If only dodos were better looking...
Other than pandas, Chengdu has on offer the worlds largest Buddha statue rocking in at 71 metres tall. That and the gardens surrounding it were pretty nice so we spent a day there and then headed for some food. We had had a good day so were feeling adventurous. So we had a hot pot (made with pigs blood) and in it we cooked a red shark freshly chosen from a tank and pigs brain. No word of a lie, the outer part of the brain tasted like delicious pork strips whereas the cerebellum tasted a bit like SPAM. The shark was so tender and delicious too! How exciting!
More bush camps await on the road to Laos and Luang Prabang but it should be good!
Our first port of call was some food that we knew what it was - pizza hut! Alex had a meat abundant (with 6 different types of meat on it!) and Gill had a delicious ham (and it was delicious too!). It was amazing. And after a nights sleep in a proper bed and a hot shower we felt like new people.
So the next morning we went to visit the main attraction in Chengdu, the pandas.
What we learnt from our trip to the breeding sanctuary is that it is amazing how they are still alive. Apparently they should have died out about 3 million years ago. They are carnivores and have the digestive tract of a carnivore. But, they can't be bothered to chase after their food so they eat bamboo. Because their stomachs aren't meant to be digesting this amount of green stuff, it can only absorb about 20% of the nutrients from it. And this in turn means that they have to be as lazy as possible to conserve energy and eat more or less constantly throughout the day. That and they only have 2 days a year when the females are ready to mate and generally the males can't be bothered to summon up the energy so the keepers have to intervene with 'electrical stimulation and massage'. And even then, a pregnant mother ejects the baby so prematurely that, as a blind 50 gram rat-type-thing, their chances of survival are slim. If they make it this far, there is also a fair old chance that the mother will accidentally crush it to death. Essentially, they are only still about because they have no predators and they are cute. If only dodos were better looking...
Other than pandas, Chengdu has on offer the worlds largest Buddha statue rocking in at 71 metres tall. That and the gardens surrounding it were pretty nice so we spent a day there and then headed for some food. We had had a good day so were feeling adventurous. So we had a hot pot (made with pigs blood) and in it we cooked a red shark freshly chosen from a tank and pigs brain. No word of a lie, the outer part of the brain tasted like delicious pork strips whereas the cerebellum tasted a bit like SPAM. The shark was so tender and delicious too! How exciting!
More bush camps await on the road to Laos and Luang Prabang but it should be good!
No comments:
Post a Comment