Our last stop in China was Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province. We decided to take a few extra days here to rest up before moving along to India, so we found a cheap but relatively comfortable private room at Mix hostel to recharge. We arrived late in the evening after a very long bus ride from Kangding, so the first night we just ate the crappy hostel food and had an early night. 

The next morning, we joined the hostel’s free walking tour to explore the area around the hostel. We walked through a veggie market, with veggies we still have yet to identify, then wandered the streets around the Wenshu monestary. 

The monestary itself had lots of pretty religious relics, but we weren’t allowed to take pictures of those, only the outside.

There was a beautiful, peaceful park behind the monestary with nice walking paths.

And a pond full of turtles! There were seriously so many turtles here. 

This building held the ashes of monks that have passed away.

After the tour, our tour guide Damon took us to a place nearby for Sichuan lunch. We had mung bean jelly with spicy sauce, and noodles with meat and spicy sauce. They were both delicious, especially the mung bean jelly, and not quite as spicy as they look! 

For dinner, we tried the Sichuan hot pot. O boy, was this an experience. It was a busy restaurant with one handwritten menu in English, so luckily we were able to order relatively easily. We got the two part hot pot with spicy Sichuan “broth” on the outside and a non-spicy broth on the inside. I say Sichuan “broth” because we are pretty sure it was mostly oil, with a massive amount of hot and Sichuan peppers in it. 

We also got some veggies – Chinese cabbage, winter melon, mushrooms, and potato, as well as beef strips and chicken wings. As for the dipping sauce, we were given a bowl with a cup of sesame oil in it, and the waitress pointed to the other ingredients on the table and guestured to us that we would mix it to make a sauce. Not too weird as we had done this before, but we didn’t have an empty bowl – we were supposed to make our sauce with a whole cup of oil as the base, and add in oyster sauce, vinegar, cilantro, and garlic. 

So we made our dipping sauce and set off cooking our food. We ended up on cooking the things that take a longer time to cook, like the potatoes, in the non-spicy broth, then dipped them in the spicy oil before dipping them in our own dipping sauce before eating. The short-cooking things, like the beef, we cooked only in the oil and dipped in our sauce. It was good, and unique, but as you can imagine, it was very oily. Veggies and meat cooked in oil and dipped in more oil before eating. Another example of the way too oily Chinese food, I guess. 

We spent one of our Chengdu days going our to the Panda breeding center just outside of town. This area of China is home to a large percentage of the worlds panda population, and the breeding center is a nice park that also gives the pandas a home since their native environment is being demolished.

There are both giant pandas and red pandas here. The red pandas are much smaller than the giant pandas, perhaps 2ft tall.

The giant pandas are SO LAZY! We were told to get there early in the morning because they are fed in the morning and then they spend the rest of the day sleeping. After seeing them in action, I am not the least bit surprised that they would be boring to see in the afternoon. Luckily we did get there fairly early, so we got to see them eating their bamboo breakfast.

We saw a few panda cubs but these guys were done eating and had already moved on to napping.

Can’t be bothered to lift its head.

The one below is my favorite – can’t be bothered to get up to eat. So lazy!

The red pandas were much more mobile and even walked right next to us on the path on their way to get their food. 

We spent the rest of our time in Chengdu shopping for a recipe book in English that we never found, walking around an antique market, eating more spicy/oily food and planning for our last country of our trip – India!