Day 195: Pandas!

We took an early morning bus out the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding and Research Center. No animal is quite so representative of China as the giant panda, and in addition to being astonishingly cute they are also incredibly fascinating. Giant pandas are an old species (genetically speaking), but everything seems to be against them in nature. They have the bodies and digestion of a carnivore but have adapted to living off bamboo for sustenance, most of which their body can't even process so they spend all their time eating huge quantities and trying to digest it. They are by nature rather solitary creatures and in the wild, especially with dwindled numbers often have a hard time encountering available mates, and even when they do have young, the baby is typically born premature by most standards, and quite helpless. Watching some of the videos at the center of mother pandas trying to interact with newborns makes it pretty amazing they have clung on as long as they have.

Between hunting, the spread of people and the natural factors working against pandas they were pushed to near extinction, and research centers like the ones we visited have been important for breeding and raising pandas and either distributing them to other research locations or releasing them back into the wild. The center we were at was one of the largest, with around 80 giant pandas in residence, and a few other animals like the much smaller red pandas.

Next we decided to visit the Leshan Giant Buddha. The buddha is one of the largest in the world, and by far the largest ancient sculpture still in existence. Since it was still part of the national holiday the queue to see get down to the base of the statue was quite long, but the rest of the complex was much quieter and easier to explore.

We drove out into the wilderness at the base of Mt. Emei to settle into our accomodations for the next few nights in a monastary. The monastary was quite nice, aside from a few amenities we had to do without. We were warned that sometimes people woke up as early as 4:30am to monk chant sessions, but I found things quiet enough that they weren't an issue.