Day 24 - Friday, Nov. 8 - Chengdu & pandas

Dujiangyan Giant Panda Base

Xi Ming  born 1993

Yue Yu born 1993

The province of Sichuan (pronounced “citron”) in southwest China has 80% of the world’s pandas, and we’re off at dawn to see them at the Dujiangyan Giant Panda Base 2½ hours away by bus, into the mountains.  This facility is run by the Chinese Conservation and Research Center for Giant Pandas.
       First, a bit of history.  Chinese emperors have had pandas for millennia.  The first Westerner to see a panda was probably a certain French scientist who asked a hunter to capture a live one to take back to France, but a dead panda was delivered.  When he asked what happened, the Chinese hunter said it had become “naughty” on the way down the mountain and had to be killed (a lesson used to this day by Chinese parents on their unruly children).  The carcass of that naughty panda is still in the Natural History Museum in Paris.
       Pandas live at an altitude between 5,000 and 10,000 feet (1,500-3,000 m), according to the season.  Males weigh around 250 pounds (113 kg), females under 200 lbs (90 kg).  They only weigh 100 grams at birth, the weight of a stick of butter, and are white with long tails, much like rats.  By the time they’re one, they weigh 80 pounds (36 kg), and almost 100 pounds (45 kg) by age 1½.  They’ll live to age 25 in the wild and about 30 in captivity.  The oldest panda here at the base was born in 1991, so he/she is 28.
       The reason why pandas are disappearing is human incursion.  Man has either cut down the forests where they live or expanded into their territory.  But the panda’s own biological make-up is also a factor.  They mate sometime from late March to late May, with the female climbing a tree while males fight for her below.  The female’s estrus lasts only about two days and pregnancy lasts 3-5 months.  Only one or two babies are born, and the weaker twin will be left to die as there’s only enough mother’s milk for one.  Thus the Center’s rescue efforts.  There were 2,500 pandas in 1975 and only 1,000 in 1990, but by 2015 the population had rebounded to 1,870.  As a matter of fact, Bei Bei, the baby panda born in the Washington, D.C. Zoo, will be flown here for quarantine and later breeding.  Why?  Because all cubs born of giant pandas on loan to foreign zoos must be repatriated when they turn 4.  Tai Shan, born in 2005 in D.C., is already here.

Bing Cheng born 2014

We’ll be suited up to work as volunteers.  Some of us will be cleaning the enclosures of chewed-up bamboo and panda poop; you have to be under 65 to do that for some reason, so only five of us are eligible.  At the end of the visit, after lunch, all of us will make rice cakes to be steamed and fed to the pandas.  (The cakes, not us.  Pandas eat little meat.)

Red panda

       Our tour winds up and down past all the enclosures on the hillside.  Each has a cave-like building, with space around three sides, trees and platforms with toys - balls, tires... Some pandas are alone, others are by twos, if they’re siblings.  (As I said, in the wild, a mother panda can only nurse one cub and will let the weaker one die, so the Center rescues them both.)  We walk for at least two hours, visiting all the pandas, mostly giant pandas but also the more raccoon-looking red pandas, a distant cousin.

  After the tour, and adequate time for rambling, we’re given a chore, which we are thrilled to perform:  feeding carrot sticks to one giant panda in a cage nearby.  “As soon as he bites down on it, let go” we’re told.  But there’s no danger because there are bars between us and the panda, the carrot sticks are long, and the giant is very delicate.  He gently takes it in his teeth.  Photos are taken to immortalize this moment, and it’s truly one of the major thrills of my entire two-month trip around the world.
  Then it’s time for our lunch at the staff canteen.  (Remember, we’re volunteer employees today.)  Different raw veggies, which Stanley has told us to avoid (washed in unpurified water) so we won’t get Montezuma’s Revenge or Delhi Belly or whatever the Chinese version is called.  Plus rice and several spicy dishes.  Stanley has brought bananas and cookies... but the beers he brought along this morning have mysteriously disappeared!
  Dessert is an informative hour-long video about the work of the Center.  Then on to our final task:  shaping cakes out of the rice dough already made up.  They should be about as big as two fists and have no cracks, although some of us - me included - make dents in the form of smiley faces in ours.  From here, they go to be steamed and then fed to the pandas once they’re crunchy.

A tricycle

After that, we shed our blue overalls and board the bus for the long trip back downhill, past lots of small farms, to Chengdu.  It’s still foggy; apparently it’s foggy here two-thirds of the year.  After the mountain roads, we’re back to the toll roads.  (When I ask Stanley what surprised the Chinese most in the U.S., he says it's that there are so few toll roads; you drive for free.)  Unlike the other places we’ve been, most traffic here is trucks and especially motorcycles, many with enclosures to protect from the elements and many more turned into tricycles to carry goods, even though Stanley says most of them are illegal.  And bikes.  There are literally thousands of those rental bikes in Chengdu.  Road laws here are also different - and often ignored by drivers and pedestrians alike.  One thing that is legal is making U-turns from a special left-turn/U-turn lane.
  Safely back at the magnificence of our hotel, we rest before yet another treat:  the Bashu Dazhaimen restaurant (ba meaning 8) with its signature hotpot.  That’s the Chinese version of the Swiss fondue, except instead of oil you cook in broth (chicken and mushroom for me) and everyone has their own little pot.  You go to the counter and make your own sauces from the dozens of ingredients available, the base of which is sesame oil.  I make two:  one with soy, ground peanuts, coriander and green onion; the other with oyster sauce, sesame seed and green onion.  Back at the table, we have a choice of things that all cook for different lengths of time:  thinly-sliced beef and chicken, thicker slices of white fish, square slices of potato, semi-cooked wide noodles, veggie dumplings, pork balls, shrimp balls, all delicious and fresh.  And all washed down with bubbly (aka champagne).  Oh, I forgot:  a thimbleful of rice wine at the start to toast ganbei.  For dessert, a three-layer frosted cake with candles to celebrate Ralph’s birthday!
  We go to bed happily full, to dream of pandas.

(Here’s a link to the panda center’s informative website:  https://www.pandasinternational.org/panda-reserves/dujiangyan-panda-center/ )