Day 246: Panda party

We got up early this morning and after a quick breakfast at McDonald's we went up and caught a taxi on the main road to take us to the bus station, from where we would be getting a bus out to the panda park. As soon as we were on our way, the driver started trying to sell us a tour, and as he was taking us in the opposite direction to yesterday's driver we started to get a bit nervous and asked him to stop. He just laughed and kept driving and we started to get a bit hysterical, but he just smiled and indicated that all was well and indeed it was – he was just taking a different road that looped around to the same road as yesterday and we were soon at the bus station.

This ticket booth woman also sent us to stand six, but when we got there we were redirected to stand nine and were soon on a bus. Our bus dropped us right outside the entrance to the park, where there was some sort of promotion going on. There was a stand manned by a group of enthusiastic young Chinese near the ticket office - more importantly, English-speaking enthusiastic young Chinese. This was a good thing because there was - surprise, surprise - a problem with our pre-paid tickets. Kate and my tickets were there, but the girls' weren't. After a few phone calls back to the information booth lady it emerged that she had forgotten to put their details in and soon everything was sorted and we were on our way in.

Our first stop was at a line of Chinese zodiac statues, where we once again posed with our signs. We then made a tour of the park, which was smaller than we expected – and a lot more grim. It was very old-school, with the animals mostly confined to small concrete-and-wire cages. There was a tiger, some monkeys, a clouded leopard, some bears, a wolf, and some very scrawny peacocks. Many of the animals were coming over to the sides of their cages and begging – and the Chinese tourists were happy to oblige them, gleefully throwing food into the cages (sometimes still in its wrapper).

 Eventually, we made it to the panda enclosures, of which there were three. In the first, there was a platform with a panda on it – a full-sized replica panda. We walked around the bottom end of the enclosure past the covered-in 'retreat' area and there were several more inside. We were starting to worry that we had paid a lot of money to see a bunch of pretend pandas but when we got to the covered-in part of the next enclosure there was a woman inside the viewing area keeping an eye on the visitors, who were watching a real-live panda do... not very much other than lie on the floor and pant. It wasn't the most satisfying experience, but at least we had managed to see an actual live panda.

We walked outside again and went around to the top of the enclosure, where I saw some movement near the little exit of the retreat area. The panda push aside the door, but it didn't come out, so we walked away to some shaded benches and sat for a while and rehydrated – and I gave the girls a little science lesson on the evolution of the panda's 'thumb'. Suitably refreshed, both physically and intellectually, we went back over to the enclosure to check whether the panda had come out, just in time to see it emerge and amble over to a big pile of bamboo, which it plopped itself down in the middle of began to eat. The small crowd that gathered to watch eventually dispersed and we got a great spot right near the panda, and we stood and watched it until it decided it had had enough to eat and went back inside. 

We then continued out exploration of the park, soon coming across a bird show that was already under way. A fast-talking Chinese man put a series of parrots through their paces – rolling over, sliding down a slide, saying short phrases in Chinese and so on. At the end of the show, he got one of the parrots to perform the most profitable of the birds' tricks - flying onto the outstretched hand of spectators and taking small-denomination bills from their other hands.

We had pretty much exhausted he park by now, so we got a couple of ice blocks and then went back out to the main road to hail a bus. Unfortunately, it dropped us off at a different bus station in a part of the city we didn't recognise. Instead of doing the sensible thing and hailing a taxi to take us to the hotel, or the other sensible thing and asking for directions, we just picked a direction and started walking. Naturally it was the wrong direction, but a helpful fellow pedestrian pointed us the right way and off we went all over again. It was around lunchtime now, so after a while we turned off the road we were walking on and down a side street that looked as though it might have somewhere to eat. Nothing we saw really appealed to us, but we did find a big covered-in market, which of course we had to check out. It had the usual stalls selling great looking fruit and veg, some rather less appealing stalls selling raw meat and plenty of live fowl, frogs and fish – and a big bag of snakes.

Back outside, we bought some very nice chopped up savoury pancake and got more directions, which eventually brought us to a point where we found signs back to Old Street. It was still a long way, and the day was very hot, but the road was fairly well shaded and as we walked, we would slow down a little each time we passed an air conditioned store with its door open. When we finally made it back onto familiar territory we went back to yesterday's dumpling stall, near which we found a pair of shorts for Sarah among some racks of clothes that had been set up out on the street. After a few more ice blocks, we went back to the hotel, then out for some beer and cards and for dinner at our restaurant.