Vanessa and I had mentioned to our Chinese Culture professor, a cheerful travel-enthusiast and avid mountain climber (you wouldn’t believe that she took her own Everest pictures if she wasn’t in some of them!), that we would feel that our entire trip to China was unfulfilling if we didn’t get to see any pandas, and she said that it is a goal of hers to travel to the Giant Panda Research Base in Chengdu, a two-hour flight west of Shanghai, to see (and hold!) pandas.
In addition to the research base, an hour outside of Chengdu is Leshan, home of the “Giant Buddha,” carved into the side of a mountain. We had learned all about this Buddha during Chinese Culture class, so going to see both of these made the flight seem quite worth it. For about $300 USD round-trip, we flew to Chengdu (somehow finagling first-class on the way back!) and stayed in a hotel for about $75/double room for two nights. The costs of travel certainly make the trips so much easier to go on!
We took a bus to Leshan for 20Y ($3 for a one hour ride? No problem), and paid an additional 100Y to get into the viewing area. If you were wondering, having a “student-visa” sticker in your passport does not go toward a 50% student discount, so while some of us had our MMA IDs, the rest of us suffered the $15 blow to our wallets.
We walked around the viewing area, up and down incredible sets of stairs, stopping to take pictures with Chinese girls when we caught them taking pictures of the boys, and taking in the breathtaking views of the water and the mountains. We thought that we’d save the Buddha for last, leaving plenty of time to take a 30 minute cab to the Leshan Bus Station for our 7 pm bus to Chengdu. We got into line around 3, really wanting to leave time to enjoy the view from below. The line starts fairly high up on the mountain, so after the first 30 minutes in line, we were excited to be moved with a large group to the actual line, as it turns out we were in the line-before-the-line. Standing behind the Buddha’s head, we couldn’t wait to see how amazing the whole thing must be, if the painted eye-brow is as long as my body, at least. The line snakes back and forth about 100 people deep in each section through narrow barriers, which was extra fun when it started sprinkling and the umbrellas went up. By 5:15, we started to get nervous that we wouldn’t even get to glimpse the Buddha, being in the section of the line furthest from the edge, but finally made it to the top of the stairs by 5:30. While we read the signs warning that the stairs were too slippery-when-wet to allow visitors to navigate during the rain, it started to rain a little harder and we started to get more nervous. After much debate, we figured there was no way we were going to make it backwards through the line to go look for a cab by 6:15, not to mention we were probably never going to have a chance to see the largest Buddha in China ever again, so we decided to worry about missing the bus when the time came, even though there are no hotels or anywhere to stay in Leshan.
The stairs got narrower and even steeper, flat against the side of the mountain, and we made it down to the base by 6, surprisingly. We had a quick and casual four minute photo shoot, before making it back to the entrance (by climbing, no running, stairs BACK UP the mountain and down the other side) and started looking for a cab around 6:20. Little did we realize that everyone else in Leshan was also looking for a cab and there were none to be found. Long story short, we were on the bus to Chengdu, relieved albeit a bit sweaty, at 6:55 on the dot. Now, for the pandas.
The Giant Panda Research base started with something like 6 pandas, and now has over 80 in captivity. Mostly, we cared about the fact that for some number of a donation (we heard both 100Y and 1000Y), you could hold and take a picture with a baby panda. Well, this was not our luckiest weekend, and the baby panda that normally stars in these pictures was too sick and weak to accept our human germs, so we couldn’t even view her through the glass. No matter, as there were so many pandas to be seen, from the lazy adults that have their food scattered throughout their habitat by their caretakers to discourage sitting in the same spot all day long, to the lively “teenagers” racing each other up their jungle gyms and practically posing for pictures, to “Panda Kindergarten,” where the babies all teetered dangerously in different branches of the same tree, not moving once over the course of our three hour visit.
That night, we attended the Sichuan Opera. We had heard a great deal about it and seen the masks in every traditional store, so we knew we had to see it. While some of it was hard to follow, the performances were amazing, from comedies to traditional stories, intricate puppet shows and even shadow puppets. The best part was the performance where the actors changed to the colorful mask of a different warrior, probably 6 each, with the blink of an eye or snap of fingers in front of their face. I would still love to figure out the mechanics of their mask-changing!
What we learned in Chengdu? Just as we suspected: pandas are the best part about China.
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