The City of Pandas

Chengdu – the city of pandas. We arrived after a long drive in the pouring rain and headed out to the star attraction of this otherwise standard Chinese city to visit the Chengdu Panda sanctuary. Of course as soon as we saw the pandas the rain stopped and the sun came out – hooray! The pandas were ever bit as cute, fluffy and cool as I’d expected and far lazier than I’d imagined!

A panda’s day consists of eating as many bamboo shoots and leaves as possible – around 20kg of the stuff – and then spending the rest of the day sleeping off its all day dinner! What a life!

The sanctuary helpers had optimistically positioned all manner of panda activity devices such as swings and climbing frames etc presumably in an effort to get the b*ggers to do something. As far as we could tell, however, they point blank refuse and instead eat and sleep their way through life! No wonder they’re endangered if they’re so blinkin’ lazy!

I was a little disappointed that they hadn’t fully seized on the obvious sales opportunities available within house of pandas such as theirs. Everyone remembers Panda Pop and those liquorice panda chew bars, even Fiat pandas yet none of those on sale there. Tsk. Anyway, enough nonsense – here are some pictures of the silly, fluffy, lazy critters.