Chengdu is an odd mix of old and new. The old China is a decaying arrey of modest brick and wooden structures, now dominated by modernist sky scrapers spectacularly built from more languid materials of steel and tempered glass. There are crains on the horizon and a bulldozer parked at every block. Towering buildings are decorated with a mosaic of symbols, some flashing or painted, others woven or carved. Amidst the city bustle and cloudy exhaust fumes, fatigued looking woman, and men in dirty overalls, queue at a bus stop. Groups of elderly ladies harangue each other, cackling loudely from their collonised piece of pavement across the street. Young ladies walk around arm-in-arm, gesturing and giggling as they share their gossip. Their faces are blush with expensive makeup, their wrists laden with bangles and flashy bags from upmarket designer stores. They make their way into a glass cafe, where I sit by the window writing to my future self.
Sweeping northwest of Chengdu, we fixadly climb the highways through intenstively cultivated land, once covered by evergreen forest, now housing wheat, rice and vegatable crops to feed an ever expanding human community. Ascending higher through the haze, the mountains appear faintly on the horizon ahead. The contors evolve into a solid parapet, defining the eastern edge of the Tibeten highlands againt the sky. We pause beyond the dusty town of Guanxian, where we tuck into a delicious meal of steamed white rice and searing slices of ox meat, fried with, garlic, bamboo, salted beans and green onions, with green tea. Back on the ever steeping road, we pass an enourmous hydroelectric system towering as high as the surrounding peaks themselves. It’s a silent gatekeeper ushering through trunks of spruice and fur caught up in the downward torrent of the Min River rushing noisily by amongst the boulders. For some time the road zigzags from each side of one dam to the other. Techtonic errosion has created deep V-shaped valleys, flanked either side by cliffs or steep riverbanks. Ahead, the mountain flanks grow steeper, their gradiants alive with autumnal forest, their peaks are obscured by rainclouds. We turn up a narrow valley, tracing the banks of the river Utze and then of its tributaries. The rivers appear ever more beautiful, sparking and turquoise as we ascend amongst the sharp-crested Balang mountains into Wolong. We are assigned a panda-keeper to mentor and teach us. My keeper is called Cho. His two female pandas are named Ursua and Xie-xie. Now, giving a panda her breakfast is quite a daunting task. Fresh bamboo is brought in daily by truckload and then siphoned onto our wheelbarrows, stuffed and stacked so high above our heads that you would be forgiven for thinking all the trees had come to life at sunrise. Once the bamboo is delivered, I stand with Cho as watch Xie Xie eat. She hooks in a suitable stem of bamboo, and with the curved claws of a forepaw, holds it, bends it sideways, and bites it near the base. Then, slouching and half lying on her back, she pushes the stem at right angles into the corner of her mouth taking rapid bites from it. With each bite, she jerks her forepaw up and down and lifts her head slightly, then chews for a while. She eats the stems up to the branches and discards the leafy tops. She glances around for another suitable branch, rolling and stretching to two metres away. All without leaving her seat. When she comes to eating the leaves, she grabs the stems with her forepaw, bends them and bites off the leaves and branch tips until a large boquet accumulates from the corner of her mouth. She takes these leaves with a paw and bites off individual mouthfulls, rolling and pulling them rapidly from one side of her mouth to the other, perhaps ridding them of debris before chewing. A panda climbs a nearby tree. It embrasses the trunk using sharp claws and the friction of its soles to pull itself up from alternating fore and hindpaws. Pandas have an enlarged wristbone which essencially functions as a thumb, and broad flat teeth, modified for crushing bamboo stems, though they have been known, and are well equipt, to catch and crunch even the bones of rodents and even monkeys when landed with the unlikely opportunity. Pandas, these days, however, are rather lazy and careless creatures. We’re told it’s common they often roll over and crush their young in their sleep. The panda in the tree sleeps, bent flabbilly in two over branch no thicker than your wrist. With the flexibility of a gymnast he descends, rump first, careless, fearless. Unknowingly down below a supple female lies on her belly, extending a twisted hind leg forward to use as a pillow. Her pupils are wonderous catlike vertical slits. The panda rolls out of the tree, missing her by the width of a tail and playfully trots off diagnally after two others. She blinks an eyelid, and falls asleep. Panda’s postures, gestures and facial expressions are spectacular. When threatening, one panda faces another and lowers its neck, sometimes bobbing its head up and down. The two growl and then circle eachother, stiff legged, then lunge and swat and grab their opponents with their forepaws. It is unusual to hear pandas communicate with sound, though they are capable of moaning, barking, roaring, squealing, honking, bleeting, chirping and more.
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