CHONGQING -- YANGSHUO

October 20, 2014

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We had reached the end of our river cruise. Our bags were packed and ready to go. We said our goodbyes to the Century Diamond crew, notably to Abby in the dining room and Rachel in our cabin. More...



We waited onboard for our time to disembark. Some of the Sinorama groups had earlier flight times than others (ours was scheduled for fairly late in the day) so those who had earlier flights left the ship earlier to be able to make an important stop... the Chuong Qing Zoo to visit the PANDAS!! I could hardly wait. As an animal lover, I'd missed my chance to see the pandas when they had visited our Winnipeg zoo due to an overload of personal commitments (I'd still been coaching, playing basketball, teaching full time, etc.). When we first got to the zoo, I was impressed by the statues and the topiary animals. The red pandas were very near the entrance to the zoo and we visited them first. We actually have had good success in Winnipeg raising these cute little guys and I always try to visit our red pandas when I go to Assiniboine Park. Next was what I'd been waiting for... and we began by visiting the (very shy) baby panda. He (or she... sex is hard to determine for the first while) was hiding at the top of a bamboo tree. You could barely see him. An interesting fact... a zookeeper was in the enclosure with him. Something that wouldn't happen with any bears in a Canadian zoo... we're talking a tasty lunch for the bear, if you catch my drift. After trying (fairly unsuccessfully) to capture a picture of the baby, we were taken to the area when the adults reside. There we saw Lan Xiang, Mangzai, and Liang Liang. Lan Xiang just coming in and out of his den but Mangzai made an impression on everyone with his determination to eat as much bamboo as possible in the shortest amount of time. On the platform he sat on, there was a log or stone (hard to see clearly) which he was leaning back on as he munched and munched. At one point, he even stopped eating for a few minutes to rub his back on that object. Next to him was Liang Liang who waited patiently until a zookeeper gave her a special treat... an apple! She made quite a show of demolishing that apple but she actually took her time doing so. All three adults were a beautiful black and white BUT I noticed that the white of their coats was tinged with red... something you wouldn't necessarily notice without seeing them in person. Others in our group continued to wander around other parts of the zoo, but I was content to stay and watch the pandas. I knew many of the other kinds of animals could be seen at other zoos (including our own) but it would be a long time before I'd get to be a fan of pandas. When it was time to meet the group, I went to the walkway where a lady was practising Tai Chi with her teacher guiding her poses.
After visiting the zoo, we went to (I assume what was) downtown Chuong Qing for lunch. There were some very lovely decorations on the various buildings and there were some interesting businesses housed in those buildings. After lunch we went to a local market. The market was full of fun and colourful things. Still being a bit "under the weather", I spent my time in the upstairs of tea house where you were able to see the people milling in the street below. From the teahouse, we left for the airport to take our flight to Guilin. Who knows now what the original time of the flight was to have been. Around 8:00 p.m., I think. The flight was delayed, however, and delayed again, and again. We ended up getting Macdonald's chicken nuggets for dinner (AWFUL!!) with taro and pineapple pie (pineapple one definitely being too sweet!). The airline then gave out water and some bread... you needed the water because the bread was so dry... because of more delays. We didn't leave until around 10 (I think) and ultimately landed in Guilin only to be taken another hour away by coach to Yangshuo where we weren't in our beds until 2 a.m. The biggest concern we all had was... are we actually going to have time to look in our suitcases before putting them out to be collected again????