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| Pandas! |
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| THE Steam Train railfan photo! |
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| The Leshan Buddah |
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| Steam Train excursion in Sichuan! |
In planning our month-long trip through China, I worked for several weeks via email with Seven from Absolute Panda Tours, and she helped me craft two truly excellent, full days for us in Chengdu that included most of the things that we really wanted to do! In my previous post I wrote about our "foodie" fun in Chengdu, including a professional cooking class she arranged for Chef Dan and I at the Chengdu Cuisine Museum, but the first thing we did in Chengdu was to go see the Pandas! We
(smartly) left the hotel at 7:20a.m. with our guides, traveling in a spacious and comfortable SUV, and arrived nice and early, so there were no crowds, which
was great- because by the time we left it was a total zoo (pun intended), with cell-phone-selfie-stick
Chinese tourists 3-deep at the pandas, and a line a mile long at the front gate! We were able to see the black and white pandas- which look like Hello Kitty's Big, Goofy
Friends- and the (new to us) red pandas- which look like a cross between a fox and a racoon-
at the Panda Breeding Center, home to the program that also aims to reintroduce
pandas to the wild. The black and white Pandas are enchanting- they are
naturally funny and charming, and their expressions and body language make them seem
both happy and silly, so basically everyone just wants to hang out and watch
them for hours on end as they sit around munching bunches of bamboo fronds they
clutch in their little fists, sleep on their backs or up in trees, where they
look like giant furry beach balls, and rub their butts on tree trunks! And when
the cubs wrestle with each other it's pretty dang adorable, too! (This
apparently only happens in captivity, as in the wild, if a female gives birth to
more than one cub she abandons the other- all wild pandas are "only kids"- like Elisse. LOL)
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| Panda, eating! |
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| That is NOT a beach ball- it's a panda! |
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| Pandas being cute! |
Two
workers carried 3 cubs out into one of the enclosures, and made it look both
easy and fun- and me wish we could have blown $1000 to each hold a panda for 20
seconds! The pandas at the center have great, large outdoor areas to romp in,
and the red pandas have forest, as well; as neither Dan nor I had ever seen
either kind of panda in the flesh, this was quite a big deal! I took about 100 videos of pandas being, um, pandas. LOL
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| Red Panda, up in a tree! |
Before leaving the center we
had a coffee at the Panda Cafe, and then went for a great Chengdu lunch fest at
an outdoor "wedding" banquet restaurant (right after a western-style
wedding, which had included a number of faux deer and a lot of flower bowers), that had a great, open market-kitchen where you could watch the chefs preparing many of the dishes. We had
a delicious dish of pork with thinly-sliced medium-spicy ("banana")
green peppers; delectable paper-thin "tofu skin" we watched the cooks
make in sheets and hang to dry, served with a super-hot dipping sauce
containing chili paste and scallions; thick-sliced eggplant that had been
batter-dipped and fried, and was served in a spicy chili sauce; a dish of
spicy-sauced bone-in chicken (sense a pattern here? Chengdu = Sichuan spicy!), and a vegetable
dish of Chinese yam slices (which have a lightly crunchy, water chestnut-like
texture), my fave black "tree ear" fungus, and sweet red peppers, all
served with rice, and that powerfully perfumed jasmine tea I want to bathe in!
(Our guide actually agreed with me on this one, much to Dan's amusement. She
said it's a "girl thing" to want to bathe in jasmine tea. LOL)
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| Dan in the restaurant market |
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| Making paper-thin Tofu Skin! |
After lunch we took a professional
Cooking Class at the Chengdu Cuisine Museum, and then enjoyed having our ears cleaned at the Opera Teahouse and the
Chengdu Opera and Face-Changing Show- all of which was covered in my previous blog post
here!
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| Our Lunch Feast- with that fab Tofu Skin! |
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West Virginia Coal Country
meets China!
Our second great day in
Sichuan with Absolute Panda Tours started at 7a.m., as we left on our 3 hour
(snooze-in-the-posh-SUV) drive from Chengdu to the steam train. Unfortunately
the "real" and 'rough' steam train that most of the villagers use,
and that we wanted to take, only runs twice a day- at 7am and 5pm. So we wound
up taking the rather fancier excursion steam train that the Chinese
government has set up (apparently with help from the UK, who originally helped
set up this narrow-gauge coal railroad), which runs throughout the day,
everyday. Chinese railfans are BIG business for China! Not only was EVERY seat
taken on every train, but thousands of Chinese, most dressed to the nines, and
all laden with top-shelf DSLRs and/or iPhones, lined the track all the way.
There were literally 1000s of super-cute girl railfans out there with
selfie-sticks, families with kids, older couples with hiking sticks, younger
couples on motorbikes, farmers with back-baskets, and gal-groups of middle
aged fancy-lady matrons in red dresses, waving scarves like Norma Desmond for
Cecil B. deMille, all posing for photos with the train along the tracks! The
Chinese government has created excellent new railfan stops at several of the stations along
the way, where passengers can get out (and 99% do), buy freshly-made yummy
foodie snacks from vendors, and walk up a ramp, or out on a path, to a great,
unblocked scenic lookout. Then the train backs up, and comes around the curve
with full steam, and horns a-blowing, so everyone can get The Perfect Railfan
Photo or Video! The Chinese do railfanning right! We were, again, the only
non-Chinese present, save for two young, European
photographers we saw at the station...
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| Yes, it's a real coal-fired steam train! |
As we had to wait until noon
for a seat on the train, our driver and guides took us for a drive into the
rural countryside to see a bit of "the real China", and we walked
past farms and stopped to speak (through our guide) with a local farmer lady
about what they were growing and which veggies they were drying on the stone
wall and from the eaves of their tile-roofed homes... Since many of the young people have moved to the cities, most of the elderly farmers have replaced
labor-intensive rice on the terraced hills with rapeseed, which is used to make
rapeseed oil (aka Canola Oil) for cooking; it's the bright yellow rapeseed flowers that now
cover much of springtime rural China, and, as we learned today, this early
season crop will be followed by tomatoes...
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| heading home from the market... |
One of the coolest thing we saw at the train station was a man making popcorn with a
coal-fired popcorn machine!
Yes, he really made great popcorn, and it was fabulous to hear it go "Boom!"
We returned to the station and had
a(nother) delicious lunch with our guides at one of the many restaurants at the depot...
...before
catching our Steam Train, which took us through the Chinese countryside, through several
tunnels, and around a Very tight "U" turn, and with several stops
along the way...
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| Getting ready to board our train... |
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| All aboard! |
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| Making the "U"... |
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| Railfans lining the route... |
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| One of the "railfan" stops, with stairs to a viewing area... |
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| Yummy snacks at one of the stops... |
After the excursion, we visited the Jia Yang Mining Museum, looking at exhibits very similar
to those in WV's mine museums. The big difference is that outside this museum a
dozen vendors
were renting green Mao
military uniforms and fake AKs and pistols, so men, women, and kids of
all ages (but all
way too young to recall the horror of it) could dress up as Cultural
Revolution
soldiers, and pose all over town for photos and selfies, as well as
visit the
museum in uniform, pointing fake AKs and pistols at each other. I got
one fab snap of a tiny tot, fully attired as a Mao-era soldier, sticking
his toy AK into his mommy's tunny... You truly have to see
it to believe it, and we constantly wondered what the parents and
grandparents
of these sprogs- who actually lived through that murderous hell- make of
all
this nostalgia-de-la-bouie...
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| You can't make this stuff up... |
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| Rental costumes... |
There is an exhibition coal
mine there, as well, apparently similar to the ones in West Virginia, and I wish
we'd had time to visit it; the videos of it feature lots of VERY attractive
women miners! :-)
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| The Jia Yang National Mining Park Museum |
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| We want this vehicle!! |
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| West Virginia? No, China! |
After
the museum, we
took a 7-passenger van for ride up into and through the mountains that
was JUST
like riding the mountain roads of McDowell County- and I mean 100%
EXACTLY,
down to the narrow width of the roads (although China's are in rather
better repair...), the look of the rock and tree-covered mountains and
valleys, the
guardrails and periodic lack of them, the 3000' drop on one side while
the
other side goes straight up into the clouds, the hairpin turns and
switchbacks,
etc. - but at 100mph with the the horn blaring non-stop! All I will say
is that
to state the ride was "breathtaking" would be a gross understatement!
I have to assume that our obviously
lunatic driver was trying to impress the young beauty sitting next to him with
her super-cute headband of two bobbing, yellow Peeps, and whose rather
"metrosexual" effete boyfriend was sitting behind her. IMHO the
driver wanted to show her what a Real Man was capable of, and that he did- and
she loved every second! I thought she'd be screaming in terror (or
puking into her designer handbag), but she laughed and giggled throughout the
whole insane roller-coaster trip, even playing an appropriate selection of
Chinese techno music on her iPhone to accompany the rhythm of the ride- and she
got us all laughing, because what else do you do while defying death?! The
baby, held in the arms of the couple in front of us, slept through the whole
thing, while our guide, who, like us, had never taken this ride before, held
tightly to the hand-hold through the whole trip. I kept having OMG! moments,
and "Oh, Shit!" and "Holy Cow!"outbursts, and held fast to
Dan's knee- to the point where he asked me not to squeeze so hard. LOL
Our car and driver met us at
the train station, and drove us next to Leshan, where we took the 5-minute boat
ride down the river to see the famed Leshan Buddha! The largest Buddha statue
in the world, it's one of many Chinese "wonders". Beautifully carved
into a red sandstone mountainside on the river, it again looks very different
from the photos one sees online...
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| Off to see the Leshan Buddha! |
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| Arriving at the Buddha... |
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| The Leshan Buddha |
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| Yes, we really were there! |
Seeing these things makes you badly want to
have more time- a few days at least to spend in China's "coal
country" to explore the small towns, trains, and museums, and another few
days in Leshan, to climb the staircase up to the top of the Buddha's head, and
learn more about the local culture, traditions, religions, and foods... I bought a couple of small amulets on the boat, just so we and a few friends would have a good luck charm from the Leshan Buddha to hang from our car mirrors... When the boat docked, our guide took me to use the Ladies Room at a banquet
restaurant in Leshan, and this was the first one I'd encountered on the entire trip that had a
delightful little "potty chair"- a wooden seat with a hole in the middle that you
could set over the floor "squat-a-potty" to turn it into a "real" toilet- so
you didn't have to undress or risk peeing down your leg, on your shoes, or all
over your clothes! YAY!!
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| YAY! A toilet seat!!! |
We then drove back to Chengdu for our last great Sichuan foodie experience: a truly fabulous
Hot Pot Feast, which I blogged about
here! We HIGHLY recommend Absolute Panda Tours, and we truly hope we get back to the Sichuan region, so we can spend more time exploring with them, as there are SO many great things to do and eat and drink and learn about!
Next up: Yichang, and a cruise down the Yangtze River!
There is an exhibition coal
mine there, as well, apparently similar to the ones in West Virginia, and I wish
we'd had time to visit it; the videos of it feature lots of VERY attractive
women miners! :-) 
