Kung-fu Panda

'Love yourself from breakfast' can you think of a better message to read first thing in the morning?
 
We have headed South from Xi'an and its Terracotta Warriors to Chengdu; Panda country.
 
We had a three day ride before arriving in Chengdu, followed by a well deserved day off. The ride took us from Xi'an to Fo Ping, Guang Yuan and finally Chengdu. The scenery has been fantastic once again: mountain sub-tropical greenery with lots of twisty mountain roads. We have passed many rice fields, corn, mushrooms, peaches, beehives and cows being led by hand on a piece of rope. Stunning!

 

 The roads have been decent. Occasionally though we have a non-road where construction is taking place and that is not decent The second day turned into a memorable ride. We pushed our boundaries as to what we thought was possible. We had also gone from grey to black and now yellow dust. But all that is behind us now, until we hit the next challenge...
 

China's construction is booming. Someone quoted a statistic the other day of China having poured more concrete in the last twelve months than the USA in the last century. Even if it is not wholly true, and it might be, the scale is enormous whether it is roads, high speed trains or apartment blocks. And yet there does not seem to be that many people about. Even in the big cities such as Chengdu the traffic flows; many roads we have been on outside of the cities have been close to empty. We even passed through a near empty town where they were still building new blocks of flats.
 

The road to Fo Ping had a Panda reserve but Fo Ping itself was a town that had been left behind, once the motorway had been constructed. Some of these towns are 'interesting', especially from our safety perspective. Things are just very different here.
 
Health and safety regulations? Never heard of it! Riding on Chinese roads is a real eye opener. You can almost get away with anything here: speeding, burning traffic lights, driving on the wrong side of the road; there is no end to the list but it all seems to work. How about those tiny toddlers sitting on scooters with their backs to their mum and nothing to hold onto?

Chengdu is an enormous city, probably 15 millions plus. So far we have survived it. As a petrol engined bike, we are not allowed into the centre of town. We guess that the centre means inside the second ring road (four in total), though we did stray slightly inside today. We visited a Chinese 'show' to at least say we had done it. It was laid on for the tourists, mostly Chinese and we weren't quite sure what we were watching but glad that it only lasted one and a half hours. The memorable phrase was the estranged lover swearing by the red plum in the window his undying love. The Pandas however were worth visiting. As it was relatively cool and wet they were active, though only slightly.  Everyone crowded around an incubator where a brand new Panda less than 24 hours old was being looked after having been born by artificial insemination, as they are just too lazy to look after things by themselves it seems. Evolution to extinction? Pandas were meat eating bears once but as the food supply got a bit difficult they moved onto bamboo. But you have to eat an awful lot of bamboo to get by and even then it doesn't give you much get up and go. So you end up not doing much and as far as keeping the species going well thats far too much effort. Baby Pandas are minuscule, round about 100g for a mother that weighs about 120kg. Edinburgh Zoo's dream...

 The climate has definitely changed now that we are heading south with more humidity in the air, leaving very little chance for our daily wash to dry overnight- even  resulted to using a hair dryer today. Though Paul does have an extra T-shirt now, after visiting the Chengdu Harley shop this afternoon... We were welcomed in style.

Paul & Francoise