My sister’s been telling me that people want to see Pandas!

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, our main reason for going to China was to attend a wedding in Chongqing. Chongqing, which deserves its own post, used to be part of Sichuan province. If you are like me, your main association with Sichuan is spicy food.

The northern and western parts of Sichuan are mountainous and the forests there are the home to the Giant Panda. The capital, Chengdu, region 9 on the map above, is significantly lower, and consequently warmer. However, it is in this city that the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding is located.

We were told to go early, since pandas sleep much of the day.

There were six ten month old cubs when we were there.

Several times the cubs had disagreements about who would get to climb the tree.

They can climb surprisingly well.

This situation looked precarious.

But he manages to scramble out of it.

Three pandas wrestling.

This guy spent so much time at the fountain, I began to think of him as Narcissus Panda.

And this one put me in mind of Walt Whitman.

More panda wrestling.

It looks like this fellow is well on his way to developing the important adult skills of lying around and ignoring other pandas.

Here’s another situation that doesn’t look good.

This time, the panda fell, but he got up and appeared unperturbed.

A couple of people in the crowd moved away and I got a chance to get right up to the fence.

Consequently, I got a lot of close-up pictures of this youngster.

If you get to the park too late, this is what you will see.

Here is a two year old.