China – As a lifelong fan, the practicalities of going half way round the world for a “panda short break” were never questioned.
I readily travelled to the Sichuan province in south-west China, the home of the giant panda, to visit two breeding centres.
There are thought to be only 1 600 left in the wild and they exist in a few, fairly inaccessible, mountainous areas. They are reclusive animals.
But these two dedicated breeding centres give you an opportunity to watch these incredible creatures close-up – in surroundings that are as much like their natural habitat as possible.
The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base – just outside the city of Chengdu – is home to 83 adults and cubs. If you get here shortly after 8am you avoid the crowds and have ample time to watch the pandas before they get lethargic later on in the day.
They live in spacious enclosures with trees, mounds, wooden climbing frames with slides and – if there are cubs – a few plastic rocking horses.
Pandas are captivating animals, particularly the cubs which spend much of the time embroiled in playfights. These can last up to half an hour – or until they are exhausted – and involve biting, wrestling, yapping and rolling interlocked down slides and ditches.
At the panda nursery, you can look through glass to see tiny babies – one or two months old – sleeping in cots or on blankets on the floor.
Normally, they are born in either late June, July or September and weigh just 100g. They don’t grow fur until one week and open their eyes at about six weeks.
But giant panda cubs aren’t easy to produce. The females are only fertile for between one and three days a year in spring and even then the couple often don’t appear to know how to mate or get bored half way through.
For this reason, the centres commonly resort to panda in vitro fertilisation. This is similar to the human version and pandas are sedated while a sample of sperm is taken from the male and implanted into the female.
Two hours’ drive south-west from Chengdu by bus or taxi is the Bifengxia Panda Centre. Here you volunteer to be a panda keeper for a day for roughly £35 (R605).
I was handed overalls, gloves and an “all access” pass allowing us into the enclosures. I was instructed to chop bamboo and weigh out portions of panda cake – a nutritious mixture of soy, corn, bamboo and egg – before feeding them.
Stroking is strictly forbidden in case the pandas bite but when the keepers aren’t watching, it’s difficult to resist.
The volunteer programme is disorganised and even if you do it for a week, you will remain at the same enclosure. A day is plenty – however much you love pandas.
Bifengxia only started admitting tourists in 2008 and is far less developed than the centre at Chengdu, which has been open since 1993. The advantage is that it is not nearly as crowded although, by comparison, there is limited information about the individual pandas, or how the breeding programme works.
At the end of the day, it is possible to do a stunning, 4.8km walk along Bifengxia gorge back to the car park with views of waterfalls and sheer cliff faces. There are also regular shuttle buses if your legs aren’t up to it.
Both Bifengxia and Chengdu offer tourists the chance to hug a teenage panda for one minute – strictly timed – for £200. Compared with the cost of volunteering for the day this seems extortionate.
Pandas aside, Chengdu is striving to be China’s fifth most important city after Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The main Tianfu square, the People’s park, has numerous temples and street markets can easily take up a day. It is also famed for its tea houses – but beware the men brandishing metal rods offering to dewax your ears for a small fee.
I also spent a night at Mount Emei, a holy mountain two hours south-west of Chengdu which is a great spot for hiking. The Buddhist temples and summit of the mountain get very crowded, particularly during summer and public holidays.
But hiking isn’t popular in China so there are very few tourists on the scenic, and at times, strenuous, trails, in between.
I drove back past the Leshan Giant Buddha, the largest in the world that stands tall at 71m. This is one of China’s most famous attractions and is probably best visited for a few hours towards the end of the day when the crowds have thinned.
The Independent