Chengdu

We pretty much went to Chengdu to see the pandas, and not much else. Daniel met up with us for this part. He flew in late Friday night to Chengdu and joined us for Saturday.

Daniel had done some research about the Pandas and knew that they got up kind of early and had their morning exercise and feeding. So we headed out at 7:45 to be there at 8:30. It was worth getting up early for. Daniel had charge of the camera and took hundreds of pictures of the Pandas. It was pretty awesome.

Pandas are in groups by age until age 4 or 5. Then they are put in their own enclosure, or else they would fight. So the older ones are by themselves, and the children, juveniles, are in groups. We only saw 2 year olds and 1 year olds. And then a few adults. 

 This was our first panda of the day. She is 5 years old.

 munching on yummy bamboo.

 This is a group of 21 month olds. There were eight of them. They sat there and ate. And ate. And ate. It was actually kind of amusing.

 This one was one of my favorites. Lazy panda. Laying on it's back covered in it's breakfast.

 You know eating 40 kg of bamboo a day is just a normal thing around here. Why get excited?

 Yum.

 Nom, nom, nom.

 Just got a little lazier.

 We just couldn't get enough of them.

 We were there, I promise.

 This one was over by himself, just chilling and munching.

 A small battle ensued here.

Here is clip of them eating followed by the one year olds we saw. The one climbed up the tree, tried to sit on his buddy, then climbed up further. It took him a very long time to get settled. He just wanted to take a nap. I really thought he'd fall. It was pretty cute and funny.

 This is one position.

 Didn't work. How about this position?

Oh. My. Gosh. Why can't I sleep? I love this picture. At this point we left to go see other pandas.

This particular panda is the one that the olympic mascot was based on. This is my favorite picture of the trip.

Daniel's new tag for things - his new username on things, if you will, is "angry_panda." I love it. Just wants to eat and be left alone.

Then they had Red Pandas, which are also endangered. But they are not pandas, actually, they are more like a raccoon. But they look like pandas. There were quite a few of these little guys. They were in large groups, because they don't fight like the Giant Pandas do.

This guys just walked down the tree.

 Their red color is very pretty.

 You can definitely see the raccoon thing.

 This guy walked down the stairs of his enclosure, to the wall, stood up and looked and waved at us, then turned and walked off.

And one last panda picture. This is a 6 year old. 

I think eating is all they care about.

It was an awesome Saturday. It was an early birthday present for Daniel. He really enjoyed it and was glad to have a break. He won't get another real break until mid August, then a week in October. The man works hard.