Panda Time!

 

Yesterday made me start to like Chengdu a whole lot more, albeit in a superficial way: at eight in the morning we were carted out to the panda reserve outside of town to go bear-watching. Only about 1000 of these fuzzy, goofy and lazy beasts still exist in the wild, victims to city development and their own ridiculous eating habits- their diet consists of the necessity of 40kg of bamboo a day, bamboo being their sole dietary input, and they therefore spend the majority of their time just waddling around and eating... No wonder they are nearly extinct if they can only eat one thing and in such abundant amounts. We arrived just in time for the feeding hour, a completely hilarious spectacle- four chubby pandas sprawled out, hardly moving, munching away on their bamboo stalks, prostrate amongst shards of eaten shoots in a feast of gluttony and gorging. One panda held two bamboo shoots in either paw, with his mouth already full of them, his belly and bed covered in yet more bamboo. I couldn’t stop laughing, and am now the proud owner of a very fashionable panda backpack.

 

Panda gluttony

Bamboo.. Bamboo.. And more bamboo