MAI BIRFDEE! We had booked onto the panda tour at the hostel, to be collected at 7:40am, so by 7:30am I was ready and downstairs, feeling considerably better, but still not perfect. We were promptly directed onto the bus to the pandas, and 30 minutes later, we arrived. We had to be back at the bus by 10:30, other than that we were free to do as we pleased. So we went straight for the baby pandas (naturally), which were at the back, planning to get there before everyone else and then work our way back towards the entrance, stopping for some tat before getting on the bus.
But when we got to the baby pandas, there was nothing to see. They were all still asleep indoors. We were slightly disappointed, so we followed signs for the 'teenage' pandas, and were once again disappointed. We wandered around the various panda enclosures for a bit, seeing nothing. But then suddenly out of the blue, we saw one! A real one! An adult, asleep, but still, a real panda! We walked around the enclosure and a few others, seeing more and more pandas (clearly, they were having a lie in that day, normally they're active between 8am and 10am). After watching the babies playing for rather too long, we searched for the place to hold one. Right next to where we were.
But before I tell you about that, watch this:
We forked over vast amounts of money (1000 each) and donned sexy blue smocks, gloves and shoe covers, and waited for our panda to be brought in from outside. And it was well worth the wait:
Happier than words can express, we wandered around and saw lots more pandas, red pandas (cute, but slightly sinister - I think they're plotting something) and bought lots of tat (t-shirts, stuffed pandas, pens etc.)
From this point, I'm going to summarise everything we did, because I didn't write a travel journal for this part, and also it will bring me up to date quicker.
We went to the train station to get tickets for the next day to Chongqing, where the queues were phenomenal. You probably heard about the big snow that hit China this year - it brought down the Beijing-Guangzhou rail line completely, which is THE North-South train route in China (not the only, that is, I mean the most important). Which meant the trains were in chaos. Add to that Spring Festival (when everyone and his dog takes the train home) and you have a mess. Fortunately, the queues to get into the train station were only for non-foreign people, so we skipped through those and followed the nice people who let us past until we got to a different section of the ticket office, where we saw another white person pushing through a crowd and being let in to the hall. So we pretended to be with him, and chased him. Then we joined the queue adjacent, when he told us to join his queue. We got talking to him, and it turns out he was trying to get back to Yantai (where one of our teachers and some of our friends used to live), while his girlfriend was buying tickets for her parents back to Urumqi. Oh, and he went to our university, knows some of our teachers and lived around the corner from Nikki. Small world.
After tickets, we can't have done anything important, because I don't remember what we did. In the evening, we got all dolled up for a night out on the tiles. We went to an Irish bar that had come recommended in various places, and had a couple of drinks. However, after 2 drinks, our age started showing, and we were both just tired and needing our bed, so by midnight we were on the way back to the hostel, wondering how one goes about applying for a bus pass.
The following day, we were off to Chongqing, which was...an experience. We got there and went to buy our tickets to our next stop, and had to wait outside the ticket office for ages, the whole time the two of us thinking that this wasn't where we got the tickets we wanted (it was Chongqing's North Station, and we wanted to go North, but China's weird like that), but we hung around anyway, and made sure we got in first, where we were sent to another station to buy tickets.
The central station was chaos. People EVERYWHERE all in huge queues. We found what we assumed to be the ticket office, and noticed the people sitting on the floor waiting. We wondered why they were sitting at first, but it wasn't long until we found out. Did you hear about the riots in Chongqing at Carrefour, when Carrefour had reduced price oil? And people died? Yeah, well, Carrefour weren't to blame. After a short while of waiting, suddenly everyone got up and surged forwards, in the same way that all Chinese people do when barriers open. But the barriers hadn't opened. They were just charging forward shouting and generally war-crying. Then it turned nasty, and people started using their arms, legs, heads and little plastic stools to beat everyone else around the head. At this point, Nikki and I rather swiftly got to a safe vantage point, and watched the carnage. In the end, it took 18 guards plus police back up to control 3 queues. They had to physically drag people apart, and when they tried to make the queuers sit down again, they had to resort to hitting them with truncheons to make them comply. It was quite scary actually. Especially when you realised that no one was safe - little old ladies were coming out with blood pouring down their faces and things.
Nikki went to look at another ticket-y bit to find out if we were indeed at the right bit, as everyone around us seemed to be heading south, and as soon as she got up, a woman from another queue tried to muscle in on her spot, but she was quickly dealt with. Turns out, we were in the wrong queue, so we went to join the right queue. By this point, we were quite sure that Chongqing people were in fact worse than small children, in fact, worse than animals. Add to that the constant staring, pointing and laughing at us, and you make for a not very happy Liam and Nikki. While queueing in the correct queue (where the people didn't riot, but they did still find it necessary to stare, point and laugh (which just makes us do it back (which then makes them annoyed, but if you can do it to us...))), a man approached us and started to speak to us. Wonderful, we think, another "I can practise my English on you?" But no, he was nice, and informed us that the ticket office didn't open until 7am the next day. This was sometime around 5-6pm. So we decided we would go back to Chengdu if we could, or to anywhere there were tickets and get out of there, because it looked like we never would otherwise. So we went back to the North Station and got tickets back to Chengdu for the next day, and then went to the find the Hostelling International place.
All this led to a not so great first impression of Chongqing. We were in foul moods and craved a little western, so went to the "Liberation Monument" (complete with Rolex clocks, and surrounded by Armani, Gucci, Starbucks, Rolex shop etc. (they're SO BAD at communism in China)). We wandered around for a while, searching for some western, and managed to not find it for really quite some time. Eventually, we ended up back where we started, and realised we'd started next to Starbucks, so we went and had coffee (real) and cake (also real). Our mood slightly improved, we went home to bed.
The next day, we got the train back to Chengdu and bought tickets to Lanzhou (a breeze (relatively)), and checked back into the same hostel for a night, and dossed about a lot. It's a shame we didn't get to see much of Chongqing, but from what we saw (lots of big grey buildings, pollution and not the nicest people), we don't know how much of a shame it actually is. Anyone who has good stories about Chongqing is welcome to share them.
As if you needed more proof that China is bad at communism - here is Mao, next to a huge department store, Starbucks, McDonalds etc.
