A Blast of Wind in your Ear

To date our travels across China have been fantastic..we have met loads of people and the Chinese have been fantastic. The hostels as well have been excellent and nothing so far would stop us revisiting them again..that is..until we arrived in Chengdu.

We arrived at the hostel and immediately a warning bell rang in my head..i ignored it and ploughed on. The hostel was extremely open (roof, doors, windows) and it was freezing cold. The Hostelworld reviews said to watch out for rats but we crossed our fingers that we wouldn’t see them. First night down and no problems bar the bloody cold. The main reason for visiting Chengdu was to go see the Pandas..the hostel had an organised tour but after speaking to an Irish couple we discovered that it was a complete rip off. They were charging 80yuan for a trip that we did ourselves for a sum total of 42yuan each. This was the first example of barefaced overcharging. The hostel was definitely in on it..as when you asked where to get a bus from to the Pandas they claimed they didn’t know.

Anyways the Pandas were definitely a highlight. I have never seen such human like creatures..they were eating all the time, lazing about the rest and then beating the crap out of each other all the other times..their play area was raised up off the ground and they would take great pleasure is shoving each other off of 6-8 foot drops..one was hanging down from a wooden pole and another came along, grabbed his legs and dragged it to the ground..check out the photos..

Later that night we had the local hotpot. Imagine a pot on top of a gas fire bubbling away what can only be described as an inner ring of a reasonably hot spiced broth and an outer ring of raging hot, burn your mouth off, lose all feeling in your mouth spiced broth - into which you throw meat and veg and they cook in seconds.. not realising the heat of the outside ring I threw in some meat and tried to eat..i lost all feeling in my tongue for 5 mins and had steam coming out my eyeballs. I should also say that it was on Johns advice that I tried it…if I had only been more observant I would have noticed that his face was redder that a tomato with the heat of what he had just eaten..once figured out though the food was lovely but ring burningly hot.

Anyways back to the hostel and it happened. John walking out of the room had a big bloody rat run by him…telling the staff just caused them to burst out laughing. An Irish couple we had met had actually left the hostel due to the rats eating their food..so it was bad…then John spotted 2 more rats..not good at all..
In the morning we checked out and legged it to Leshan for the day…thinking…surely it cannot get any worse….boy were we wrong.

Panda Photos are on facebook
Panda Photos

hughie