How to die fantastically, or Pandas in Chengdu
So, if you're planning on dying anytime soon, may I suggest a visit to Wolong Panda Reserve in Sichuan Province? The pandas won't kill you--although that, getting squashed by a hay cart and being the victim of a bicyclist's road rage are also fantastic ways to die in China--but you will have ample opportunity to go careening off of a muddy mountain road into a river rushing through a steep gorge below. It will make a fantastic story, your body will never be found and the legend will grow.
Sounds a little far-fetched, I'm sure, but it came a little too close to turning into a reality on my trip to the city of Chengdu in China's Sichuan Province. Chengdu is famous as one of the top panda breeding centers in China. Seems they don't have much of a sex drive themselves, so humans have to help them along, which is a good thing because they just really are that cute, which is not to say that conservation of an endangered species is unimportant if they're not cute. (Although an interesting debate can be had over whether it's only the "cute" animals that get saved. I mean, think about it. When was the last time you saw a snake or a spider in an ad for saving endangered species?) I honestly found myself wanting to "ooohhh" they were so adorable. But this is not the bus story. You want the bus story!
But, first there was the plane. For future reference, it is possible sneak wine onto planes in China so long as you hide it in green tea bottles. After much experimentation with different bottles--obviously the ones for water and certain soft drinks wouldn't work because they were clear--my Chinese friend Hunter decided to risk it with the green tea bottle because he is a great host and there was no way that we weren't going to drink wine out of paper "Subway Sandwich" cups on the plane. Hunter was one of the last to make it through security at the airport, and we all stood there waiting for him, trying to look nonchalant. No, we didn't look out of place. A bunch of tall white and black kids amongst a bunch of short yellow kids in the airport snickering and pretending not to watch as our friend braved the Chinese security establishment all in the name of our right to imbibe. He made it through, but not without having his bottle of mouthwash checked first. So, as we sat on our plane, ate our paper box dinners and waited almost two hours for our plane to take off, we drank wine out of glorious paper cups.
When we finally did land in Chengdu, we were each handed a red rose by our tour guide who told us this: "The morning car will be at 8:00, breakfast will be at 8:30 and the bus will leave at 9:00." What the? It took me a while to realize that, true to form, she had mispronounced "call" as "car." You would think that I knew these things by now. That movie "Lost in Translation" isn't too far off. "Lip my hose. Lip them!"
We were told by the tour guide that we would have a 3 1/2 hour drive out to the Wolong Panda Reserve where we all hoped to hike around and watch pandas play in their natural habitat. About 4 hourse later, we got onto the muddy, mountainside barely-big-enough-for-two-small-cars-much-less-two-large-trucks roads. There was rarely more than six inches between our tires and the dropoff, and sometimes it was even less than that. I know. I was staring out my window, straight down the side of a mountain. It built our confidence when we were stopped in traffic twice. Once, a truck had flipped over--let me repeat, flipped over--on top of itself the roads were so wet. The second time, the road had given way and a truck was sitting partially off the edge of the road--the road had given way--and was perilously close to finding itself at the bottom of the river below us. In between these two episodes, our bus encountered a work crew whose bulldozer was taking up most of the space we needed to pass. We were all told to move to the side of the bus nearest the mountain so the redistributed weight would keep us on the mountain. When we finally arrived at the panda reserve after about 6 hours of driving, it was nothing more than a badly-done zoo. It's lucky for the tour company that organized our group that pandas are cute. If the sight of their adorable faces hadn't been so comforting, our guide would have had a load of pissed off, impatient foreigners on her hands that didn't ascribe to Confucian ideas of paradox when those paradoxes involved time, money and our sore rear ends. After spending an hour and forty minutes outside the bus, it was time to get back in. It started to sprinkle as we loaded back onto the bus, and it was beginning to get dark. Remembering the roads we had successfully yet perilously traversed once already, we were all a little on edge. Luckily, we were a bunch of teachers who are used to entertaining kids on the spot in bizarre circumstances, so some people were able to come up with ways to keep us all entertained. And, of course, the Subway cups were handed out and there was white wine all around.
The next day was, luckily, redeeming. We headed out to a panda breeding center which actually turned out to be a breeding center as opposed to the nature reserve that turned out to be a depressing zoo. The baby pandas there were just about the cutest things ever. There's also a picture above of me with a red panda, a distant relative of both the panda and racoon, that I took there.
After we went shopping later that day, I watched as a Chinese woman deftly peeled the skins off of something that looked like either a big nut or a very small fruit and decided to buy some and see what they were. Turns out they were water chestnuts, which is hilarious to me since it's the first time I've seen them in China. Even more hilarious was Hunter's reaction--he's always lived in China and never visited the States--when I told him the water chestnuts are in all kinds of Chinese food in America. He had never even tasted water chestnuts before I gave him one!
So, I guess that's it. There's pictures of cute pandas above courtesy of my buddy Ivan.