Lihongkeng

After an early first night in Chengdu following our long day descending Emei Shan and visiting the Grand Buddha, we woke up and quickly hopped in a Taxi towards the Chengdu Giant Panda Research Base. I was initially skeptical about how much I'd enjoy the base, but any doubts vanished when we saw the first of the pandas, lazily sitting and munching on huge piles of bamboo. We spent a few hours looking at all the different Giant Panda enclosures, with the highlight being the adolescent Panda enclosure, where 3 pandas kept us and other tourists captivated by their playfighting and stealing food from each others mouths. The Panda Base seemed to provide a good environment for the pandas, with lots of space, evidenced by the rapidly growing Panda numbers in the park. The park also featured the less impressive Red Pandas, which looked similar to foxes and are also known as firefoxe, but lacked the cuteness factor of the Giant Pandas. After tearing ourselves away from the Pandas, we felt like relaxing so we caught a bus to the People's Park, an attractive green space in the town centre filled with old people dancing and famous for its teahouses. We ended up picking the 19th century He Ming Teahouse, where we enjoyed sipping Oolong and sweet Chrysanthemum tea on a riverside patio, surrounded by locals playing cards, scoffing seeds and getting their ears cleaned with alarming looking instruments. Just before we were about to leave for dinmer we were accosted by a friendly but slightly overbearing Chinese man who used to work for Diageo keen to practise his English, who told us some interesting tidbits about Chengdu and Chinese culture in general. Eventually we were able to escape to dinner, which had to be Sichuan food. I had succulent and very spicy Guizhou chicken, and we all agreed it was one of the best meals of the holiday, however it was somewhat soured as we had to have a row with the restaurant as it turned out the prices on the English menu were lower than the actual ones, so in the end we walked out after only paying the English menu price. After the stress of the restaurant, we decided to go out for the evening, ending up in a club full of foreigners, a shock to the system after a week in which we'd seen about 5.

Feeling a little worse for wear, we had to get up fairly early for our 9 hour cross country high speed train journey to Wuhan, which took up most of the day. We arrived in Wuhan in the evening, checked into a hostel and headed out for what turned out to be a delicious meal of local cuisine, including delicious salty river fish and a melt in the mouth spicy aubergine dish, before getting some sleep ahead of another day dominated by travel.

I woke up earlier than the others on Friday, keen to see a bit of Wuhan before our lunchtime train to Shanghai. I walked down the pleasant tree lined streets near our hostel, eventually arriving at a street famous for its breakfast dishes, where I purchased delicious hot and dry noodles, which were spicy with a lovely texture and plenty of peanut paste. After a filling breakfast, I visited the town's Taoist temple, which was fascinating with statues of Gods dedicated to wealth and good luck, a weird luxury hotel complex and locals doing Tai Chi. After that, I hurried back to the hostel in order to catch our train to Shanghai...Read more