China. More importantly first visit to the First Lounge

[love_the_life]

Fabulous photos. Sounds like it is an amazing place to visit.

 

[woodyren]

Great hotpot photos. Is that minced prawn and oyster meat above the "see you tomorrows"?

We had a meal of Sichuan seafood served to us on a shovel last night. Tasty.

 

[bPeteb]

Great hotpot photos. Is that minced prawn and oyster meat above the "see you tomorrows"?

We had a meal of Sichuan seafood served to us on a shovel last night. Tasty.

Definitely prawn and possibly oyster. I lost track of what was being put on the table quite early! A shovel!

 

[woodyren]

A shovel!

Yeah a shovel. (Sorry to jump your fantastic thread)

 

[bPeteb]

Yeah a shovel. (Sorry to jump your fantastic thread)

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Omg! Fantastic!!

 

[docjames]

Loving this TR covering the good and the less than perfect in an easy to read way. Thanks for sharing it.

 

[bPeteb]

About to start writing and discovered that I hadn't done any photo editing or resizing of two of our last three days. On what I'll call panda day, we took 534 photos and videos between us. Now that has been done we're in the home stretch.

Chengdu

Pick up from your hotel in Chengdu around 8:30am and drive to Chengdu Panda Base. Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Centre has been constructed and imitated the pandas' natural habitat in the hope that they could have the best possible environment for rearing and breeding. There you can see pandas almost in their natural environment as they have plenty of space around them. They are incredibly cute to watch. They spend most of their day eating bamboo.

After lunch, head to Leshan and visit Leshan Giant Buddha. It is approximately160km in the southwest of Chengdu. The drive takes about 2 hours. You are taken to Leshan Port and board a boat cruising near the highest Buddha in the world on the huge rock of the hill carved in Tang Dynasty for suppressing the flood. You are able to take some pictures in front of the huge sculpture. Then cruise back to the port.

At the end of the day tour, you are transferred back your hotel in Chengdu around 6:00pm.

Meals: Hotel breakfast, Chinese lunch

We'd been watching the weather forecast and it was forecast to rain for our day in Chengdu and the last day of our second tour. Sophia had said to us at dinner the previous night that the Panda Breeding Research Base 'was mainly indoors' so if it rained it wouldn't be a problem. That confused and concerned me. I'd done zero research so had a terrible image of concrete pens and pandas living around in their own waste. Possibly even reading the itinerary (above) might have alleviated my concerns.

Before we leave the hotel - for anyone visiting Chengdu the Holiday Inn Express Wuhou would be a good base. Five minute walk to metro. Big clean rooms with comfy beds. Very good breakfast that even had an egg station. Bank of China branch with ATM also five minute walk away.



To the pandas. We had a funny little quiz in the car on the way to the base. With prizes! Al won more little gifts but I won the best one. I little panda that I'll be able to stick to the window of our car (not)!

There's panda artwork - sculptures, murals, decorated street signs - everywhere. Chengdu seemed clean and well looked after by the local govt but the road to the panda base took that to a whole new manicure level. Beautifully maintained and landscaped median strips and verges.




We'd actually left the hotel at 8. The earlier you get to the base the smaller the crowds and the more active the pandas.





I needn't have worried about concrete enclosures and lack of space. The base is the largest park in Chengdu. It's huge. And they acknowledge that it's not big enough. There's (I think) approx 150 pandas at the base and they're running out of space to house the adults who live in single animal enclosures. To put the numbers in perspective there's four at Beijing Zoo.

From the moment you walk into the base you are enveloped in green. Paths that are lined and covered with huge bamboo. A huge lake. It's beautiful.

 

[bPeteb]

Sophia is a Chengdu local, a guide for years and has volunteered at the base so she had a very definite plan of attack. We went straight to the first enclosure pandas are released into.

Each enclosure had detail of the pandas living there. It gave their date of birth or where they were found, parents (if known), any identifying features, even their personality.



When it was empty



we went to their sleeping quarters where they were sitting at the doors waiting to go outside



and from then on it was panda mayhem. There were between one and four in each enclosure. They walked out, had a scratch and then ate, and ate and ate. They were up in trees, down in the moats, on their jungle gyms. They were totally disinterested in the people so enthralled by them. Those people were all so polite to each other. Once people had either stood and watched for long enough, or taken enough photos, the vast majority just stood back and let others in. It was quite surprising.

So to the first four pandas...

 

[bPeteb]

and some more



like I said, they eat lots



and make a lot of mess and poo lots

 

[bPeteb]

and they have babies!

 

[bPeteb]

I literally could have spent all day just watching them, even when they'd gone to sleep



a view across the park, the single adult enclosures below, the metropolis of Chengdu in the near distance



they don't just eat bamboo!

 

[bPeteb]

Vendors outside selling all things panda



even panda buses

 

[VPS]

Cuteness overload - fantastic

 

[bPeteb]

My partner has wanted to see the Leshan Buddha forever apparently. I knew nothing about it and from my perspective it was over five hours that could have been way better spent back in Chengdu, looking at pandas maybe.

It took nearly three hours to get to the horribly polluted city of Leshan with a loo break at a tea plantation/museum/them park kinda place.



Lunch was at a restaurant across the road from the river. Hotpot! Even included duck. Yum me, ugh Al. Three other groups of non-Chinese followed us in and I'd seen them all at the panda base. I wonder if they thought the afternoon was a dud like I did.



my twin reclining beside the river

 

[bPeteb]

So to the boat ride to the Leshan Buddha. It is literally a few hundred metres down the river on the opposite bank. We boarded our boat and about half an hour later headed down the river. You go past it at about 50kmh. Ok, that's a slight exaggeration but with the current, and the speed of the boat, it would be at least 10. The boat then turns around and very slowly cruises back up stream past the buddha.

It's the biggest buddha in the world. If you want to walk the steps around it in high tourist season it can take two hours. I think we were told the feet are old but the hands are new, or the other way around, or neither. It's pretty obvious this monolith did nothing for me.

Photos



what our boat looked like. Business class at the front was locked on both


happy partner, happy life

 

[bPeteb]

We could have flown back to Beijing after the end of the tour and booked two nights to finish the trip. Instead we decided to stay as close as possible to the airport to enable a quick getaway the next morning. We chose the Chengdu Airport Hotel – Book Online and booked a deluxe king. Again, I booked it and then didn't go any further with my investigations. It was a lot more than either of us expected. Sophia and Mr Liu made sure we were checked in (she'd actually called the hotel on the way back from Leshan to check our reservation) then we gave them those darn tips and waved them off. They'd been terrific and I didn't actually begrudge the tips at all.

For us pay for what we get people the room was pretty special. This place is only four star?



A couple of floors higher would have given us a great view of the runway but we could see enough.



Variations of these evacuation kits were in every room we stayed



that we would use to cover any mice we'd brought with us

 

[bPeteb]

Dinner at the hotel's buffet restaurant. An incredible spread at a crazy cheap price. Even steak cooked to order. Only extra was beer. Staff at the hotel either had great English or someone who did have it was close by.



Sophia had told us about this initiative when we were at the hotpot restaurant. What a fantastic idea. Imagine if they put this in place on cruise ships...

 

[bPeteb]

We could have had the buffet breakfast at the hotel as it started at 5:30am but chose another half hour of sleep instead. We'd planned to walk the five or so minutes across to terminal 2 but it was raining when we walked outside and the free hotel shuttle was about to leave. If we'd walked we would have ended up at the security queue closest to the hotel and it was long. The bus driver took us to the far end of the terminal where there was no security queue at all. Well, no queue to enter the terminal.

We flew Hainan Y. Self check-in was easy. Bag drop a little more confusing. You had to make sure you chose the right aisle (we didn't initially). Then once you'd dropped your bags you had to watch a monitor for three minutes in case your bag/s had failed x-ray. Only then could you go and join the REALLY long security lines. We had plenty of time but a word of warning for anyone using Chengdu - don't think you can get there and through with much less than 90 minutes before your flight, especially if your luggage fails the scan. And watch that monitor for three minutes.

Like with our Air China flight from Beijing to Dunhuang, we were on a hard standing, a long way from the gate. A332.



Not sure if it is because we booked on Hainan's Oz website but were able select seats and the selection held.

Loved the cabin crew's uniforms and they were just incredibly nice. Seat back IFE. Free takeaway earbud headphones. Movies in English.

 

[bPeteb]

Even a hot breakfast although neither would win any culinary awards!


Eye shades I get, even neck pillow I kind of get but stuffed toy dog? Nope, I don't get that


We were late into Beijing, again at a hard standing


Hainan Dreamworks Dreamliner



and it took forever for our bags to emerge. It was then a long, long walk (with many travelators) to the Airport Express station in terminal two from whatever terminal we'd arrived at.

It was 25RMB each to Dongzhimen where we transferred to the blue line and paid another 8RMB each (I think) to our destination station Xuanwumen.

 

[bPeteb]

The fate gods were with us and somehow we emerged through the right exit and it was about a 500 metre walk straight up the road to our hotel, the Grand Mercure Beijing Central Hotel in BEIJING - Grand Mercure Beijing Central

Booked at the same time as our Xi'an hotel, it was 40% off for a king room with no breakfast. We were upgraded to a club floor suite that included breakfast and evening drinks/canapes. I arranged 3pm checkout for the next day (as late as they would go) as flight home wasn't until midnight.

The suite sure wasn't on the scale of the Xi'an room but neither of us was complaining. Queen bed (again, not hugely comfortable) with only room for one bedside table. Both a design and convenience comment. Couldn't both have phones plugged in beside us. Nice bathroom but difficult to access with bed half way across doorway. A strange use of space.



Who doesn't love a scroll for a compendium