Other than not being coated in radioactivity, one the nice things about Taiwan is that it’s easy and cheap to get there now that cross straight relations are cozy. There’s lots of flights from major coastal cities of the People’s Republic, direct into Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung. We chose to fly into Taipei, as it’s always a good starting point. Unlike the last time however, we flew into Songshan airport instead of Taiyuan International. Songshan is great because it’s right downtown, and it’s small. I love small downtown airports. Seriously, fuck all the big airports that take an hour to get to, then another hour to get through because they’re designed to be giant shopping malls selling shitty luxury brands.

So I’m sitting in the Taipei hotel room on the afternoon of March 11th, and I’m enjoying me some uncensored internet with my twitter feed going in one of my firefox tabs. One of the things I follow is this neat little bot (@earthquakeBot) that tweets every time there’s an earthquake somewhere at 5.0 or greater. It’s great because it reports them only about 15 minutes or so after they happen, and it links to a Google map and the USGS details for the quake. “CHIRP TWEET CHIRP” (the sound I imagine Twitter to make when it tweets), I look at my feed, and low and behold Japan is rocked by a massive Earthquake. I throw on CNN/BBC/Some crazy Taiwanese news channels to see whats going on, and next thing ya know they’re going into hysteria about tsunamis and Haiwaii being turned into Atlantis and what not. The first place the tsunami was expected to hit (after Japan) was Hualien…Taiwan. The very city we were headed to the next day! I swear my travel buddy must have gone threw about 5 pairs of underwear that day peeing himself in dread for the potential watery doom that awaited us. Me having nerves of steel, I brushed off the news anchors as sensationalists, which they turned out to be when only a mere foot of water swelled Hualien’s shores. If there was anything to be worried about it was that entire towns had been wiped out in Japan.

The next day we headed out to Hualien as planned via a local train. The train service is good because it takes you all the way around the coast, so you get to see a fair bit of the country. The train service is bad because even the fastest one makes dozens of stops that take a while, unlike the bullet trains that stop for 2mins at like 3 places. Hualien has a real small town vibe going on, nice and local. Everyone was super friendly, and there was none of those major arterial avenues that cut a city apart with screaming traffic. It’s also the perfect place to stay if you’re checking out Taroko National Park, which we did. It was quite spectacular. Especially if you like GORGES. I fucking love me some gorges.

Hualien is also famous for its wonton soup, so make sure you try some of that out. We did, and it was nomlicious and of course super cheap. The town has a brand new airport, and unlike most new airports (refer to above point), this one is close to the city and tiny. My planning is so last minute, I actually wait until I’m too late to do something, then go back in time to a few minutes before when I still could do it. My son of a bitch time machine was acting up that day, and I was unable to procure train tickets to our next stop, Kaohsiung. You can bet the airport came in real handy.

Kaohsiung was pretty neat, but we weren’t there for long. Perhaps it is a depressing, vermin infested hell-hole that would swallow your soul and leave you as nothing but a hollow shadow to fade away into the darkness if you stayed longer than 24 hours. We didn’t. To be more descriptive and less humorous, it was big like Taipei, but more laid back, and had really good weather. I shall definitely return.

Oh and here’s some pictures of it all:

Literati Night Market (Shilin Yeshi/士林夜市):

Infinite number of teenage girls waiting in like to buy tickets for SUPER JUNIOR:

Random Taipei:

Random Hualien and its beautiful beach!!:

Taroko National Park:

People standing around bust of engineer dude who designed a bridge that was eventually washed away by a typhoon:

Part of the road that was closed because of rockfall!:

View from the train:

Kaohsiung, the heart of darkness:

After getting acquainted with Nanjing, we felt we’d knock another famous city off the list that was just around the corner. So we slid by Suzhou on our way back to Shanghai. We only had one night and one full day to check’er out. As is always the case, we should have had two days in Suzhou instead of Nanjing. Suzhou is far more photogenic.

We lucked out and were staying at another really cool hotel, this one being the Pan Pacific. Surprisingly, it was built in 1999, since most buildings of that vintage are usually rotting into plague infested heaps of filth by now. Things here were ship shape, and although the room was smaller, it was still clean, modern and had a decent view. The biggest advantage was the gardens in the back that attached to a temple/pagoda complex that had free entrance for guests of the hotel.

After rising and shining like the stars we were we headed into the backyard of the hotel to see what was up. The weather was a total pile of shit, but that pile of shit was served with silver cutlery – we were virtually the only ones there. The name of this particular complex is Panmen City Gates. In my research I’ve determined that this particular site is well over a thousand years old. In my research I also found that it’s impossible to tell which buildings have been built more often than Linux and which ones are original, but I hear the main pagoda likes to keep it real. So we ponied up the 90 some odd cents for the additional entrance ticket you needed to pay to climb it, but that was fine, because come on man, 90 cents. It gave some nice views of surrounding Suzhou and the rest of the complex.

Next up we went over to another ancient site by the name of Tiger Hill Pagoda. Yes there was a Pagoda up on a hill. Sadly there were no tigers. There must have been some kind of cultural exchange going on here, because it looked like the Pagoda’s engineers had been studying in Pisa (or maybe Pisa’s engineers had been studying in Suzhou?!). Either way this one looked like the realness, it was bare to the stone, no fancy woodwork – nothing. As we wandered around the grounds, the weather actually gave the place a vibe. I kept thinking some kung fu dudes would pop out of the bushes and usher me into a long lost era of enchantment and mystique… or kick my ass and steal my wallet.

Wandering around Suzhou, they’ve done a decent job of hanging onto lots of the older white traditional style buildings, while maintaining the look for newer buildings. Rivers and creeks run throughout the town, which woulda been mighty handy back in the day if you wanted to wash your clothes or or show up at your friends house in a canoe.

For dinner, we decided to go back to the future, and headed off to the east end of the city to visit the Suzhou Industrial Park (or SIP as the locals call it), to do a little SIP’ing ourselves. This area is basically a monstrous suburban borg collective of identical looking apartment blocks, and empty endless avenues. The restaurants and bars all clustered in a modern development that reminded me of the refurbished Sanlitu’r area in Beijing. On that particular night it was completely soulless in more ways than one, but the Italian restaurant we dined at was delicious. I believe it was called Piccola.

The next day, it was absolutely gorgeous outside. It was like the Communist Party secretary said to the Sun, “let’s try and rope em in for another day to get those GDP numbers up a bit”, the Communist Party being all powerful, the Sun could only oblige. Alas, it was time to get back to Shanghai. We went down to Suzhou’s massive new airport train station and hopped a train that was so fast if I stuck my head out the window, my face would’ve melted off. We got back to Shanghai, and my face melted off anyways! The end.

The next day I awoke to find that I was still in Nanjing, and ninja spies hadn’t decapitated me while I slept. This was good because it meant I could go out and spend the day being a tourist as I had originally planned.

The first order of business was to check out an old republican district that was just down the street from the hotel. The pre-WW2 area was mostly walled off, with nice quiet tree lined streets. It reminded me of the Badaguan area in Qingdao, or perhaps an undeveloped version of the French Concession in Shanghai. From what I could tell by peeking into a few of the compounds, the houses had been chopped up to fit way more tenants than was originally designed, like most other housing was during the 60s. Regardless, the buildings looked like they were kept in reasonably good condition and if I were to live in Nanjing, I would pick here.

Next up, was the main event of our stay in Nanjing: The Memorial Hall for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Forces of Aggression. As most of you know, and some of you may not, Nanjing was the site of some horrible shit back during the early stages of Second World War. Relative to other Chinese museums and monuments, the quality of this particular complex stands out as top class, as it should in order to respectfully memorialize the events of such a tragedy.

This one quote by John Rabe caught my eye. I was surprised it was shown so prominently despite the fact it displays the Judeo-Christian concept of forgiveness, which doesn’t feature so much in Eastern Asian cultures. Just ask most Chinese people you meet what they think of Japanese people, and you will quickly see that this quote doesn’t resonate.

I only had two beefs that manifested themselves once we were at the end of the tour through the main building. After you finish the complete story of the Massacre, you go up a set of stairs to the way out. For a short distance here, there is another exhibit on China’s various losses and humiliations at the hands of foreign forces. Talk about playing the victim card. The massacre is one thing, a bunch of unrelated historical events is another, and when you add them onto the main event it comes across as a real sleazy attempt at propaganda. To my relief, it looked like most people were skipping through this section and the small gift shop near the exit door. The gift shop was my other beef. Therein lied a whole smack of Mao memorabilia that can only been one of the sickest forms of hypocrisy I’ve seen to date.

Despite these two little things, it was still a worthwhile place to check out. Just like my old history teacher always said, “If you don’t learn from History, you’re bound to repeat it… in my class next year SUCKAS!!”

With enough depression for one day, the next stop was a little more cheery, the Nanjing City Wall. And we all know, China loves it some walls. It was relatively well preserved, and you could walk around through it. There was some kind of Lantern Festival going on, which demanded a large probably not worth it entrance fee, so instead we skipped that and wandered around the peaceful old Chinese style neighborhoods that surrounded it.

With little time left in the day, we scurried off to a few more places, like the ruins of the Ming Dynasty capital, and good old Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum. Dr. Sun (commonly known as Zhongshan around these parts), lead the rebel uprising that eventually defeated Darth Vader, the Galactic Empire and the formed of the New Republic. So as you can imagine, he’s a pretty popular guy. Just as we made our way to the gates, we found out they were closed for the day. No matter, all the tourists had vanished into the ether from whence they came, so I could snap a few decent pictures without their endemic presence.

Since everything was closed and it was getting dark, we returned to the hotel post-haste so we could avoid being attacked by ghouls. After realizing that the restaurant we wanted to eat at was located in a building that was now a pile of rubble, we settled for some strange type hot pot I’ve never had before. It was good, but not too good, and certainly not appetizing enough to feast your eyes on. Actually it looked like a pile of garbage served in a big bowl. As far as I know, I didn’t contract any strange diseases from it, which was also a good thing, because the next day we were headed to Soochow, the homeless man’s Venice.

My first stop, was KALAMAZOO! Errr I mean Nanjing. Once known as Nanking, it was the capital city when the country was known as the Republic of China, before all those pesky People got involved. Regrettably it was also the site of the infamous Massacre, possibly one of the worst atrocities during WWII.

My travel comrade and I first checked in to the hotel so we could leave most of gear while we walked around town. We were in the Sofitel Galaxy, which is code for Sofitel hotel owned by some state enterprise. Usually I loathe anything that has state owned enterprise involvement, because they are large obsolete dinosaurs that do nothing but suck from the teat of the government. By some minor miracle, this hotel and everything about it was pretty solid. But what really smoked the cat’s pajamas was the room. It was bigger than my apartment in Shanghai. And at $120 only a night, it was cheaper too…if I pretended that exchange rates don’t exist.

We hopped on some random bus and headed off into the city. The first area we saw, Nanjing 1912, was a bar district. Stop laughing, it wasn’t my choice. It was supposed to be a collection of old buildings from the republican era, converted into an entertainment district. It was billed as Nanjing’s Xintiandi (egregious bar district of Shanghai). What it was, was a row of new buildings, slapped up to look old, and a bunch of older buildings, worn out and crusty. This whole area bordered along the former Presidential Palace, so we quickly shifted there.

Perhaps because it was late afternoon, perhaps because it was still the holidays or perhaps because I was planning to conquer it and turn it into my personal palace of pleasure, they didn’t let us in. We still got to take some pictures around the outside so that sufficed.

Next stop was the library. No seriously, just look at this monster. There’s gotta be reams of reading going on here. It’s a limitless land of literature. A profuse pile of prose and poetry and never-ending knowledge nimbly knit into a fortress of facts and fiction fearlessly fending off flying monkeys!

We seemed to be in some kind of business district. Since this trip was in leisure, we descended into Nanjing’s subway system to go someplace else. It looks like much of the system is fairly new, the station was all clean, they had these guard people that saluted the trains, and no one could figure out how the turnstiles worked.

All this aimless wandering was working up our appetites, so we rolled on over to Nanjing’s pedestrian area to sample the local fare. All cities in China have these areas, but Nanjing’s is exceptionally large. It’s basically a large outdoor shopping mall, with colourful lights. Lots of street food options though. We scored a few different things, the usual meat kebabs, some fried rice cakes and bunch of other things that were too bland for me to remember. I needed something more authentically Nanjing.

So we went into a food court. Admittedly not what you’d do to find local dishes back home, but this is how it works here. First you need to buy coupons, or a stored value card from a central cashier to get food. Saves the food stalls from having to deal with cash, which is beneficial considering the high volume of customers they serve.

I opted for some xiaolongbao while my co-conspirator tried some glass noodles. Xiaolongbao are little dumplings that are thin skinned, but filled with soup and a meat like crab, pork, or other critters. They are dee-fucking-licious. The glass noodles tasted of glass minus the gl.

One set of xiaolongbao wasn’t enough for me, so we set off to find another establishment. We found this hole in the wall type place by the river and copped another basket, with another bowl of noodles. This time the noodles were better, but they weren’t anything to write home about, despite the fact that I am doing just that.

After all the food and walking around, we felt that the day was a success, so we called it quits before something outrageous could come along and ruin it, like a bunch of hobos having a big gay orgy in our hotel room.

We stepped off the train in the fabulous neo modern inspired station, and took a deep breath of the cool night air. In the pickup area was a group of Harbin’s most beautiful women, bikini clad and ready to lead us into the Rolls-Royce Phantom that the seven star hotel had sent for us. And then I woke up and was faced with reality. We jumped off the train and dove into the human blob that was the taxi line up, trying not to breathe in the minus 34 degree air that caused the boogers in our noses to crystalize. We tried to maintain a central position within the blob, to minimize heat loss. Slowly we were excreted into the warm and smoky confines of a taxi that I could have sworn was a Lada, and at the very least; drove exactly like one. Then off we went to the budget hotel.

For meteorological reasons beyond my comprehension, Harbin gives Amundsen-Scott a run for its money. Its latitude puts it further south than the vast majority of Canada, yet it has temperatures that are similar to Tuktoyaktuk. Maybe this was god’s way of saying; “don’t live here”. Well those godless Russians didn’t listen, and neither did their Chinese comrades. As of the most recent census, there’s about 5 million people freezing their balls off in Harbin.

Once we got ourselves checked in at the hotel, we took a stroll down Central Street to see if we could find some salvation through fine dining. We got lucky and found a Russian restaurant about five minutes into the walk, which was great because we had already lost a few members of our group to a pack of wolves. After we had been satiated by caviar and borsch, we all jumped in taxis for the quarter mile journey back to the hotel.

The first tourist trap of the day was the Harbin Tiger Reserve. The gist is, you pay the entry fee, and wait for them to call your bus number. When called you board your bus and it takes you on a tour through the metal fence-enclosed park. Oh and when you buy your entry ticket, they have a “menu” that lists everything from steak to free range chickens to live goats. If you decide to pony up the extra cash, you will be treated to treating the tigers to some lunch. I sprung for a chicken, while my friends who were on a different bus, got a goat.

As we made our way into the first area, everyone on the bus scrambled up against the caged windows and began oouing and ahhing at the first sight of tigers. The tigers were apathetic. That was until a white SUV appeared, and then suddenly it was like that dude who’s scoring the booze for the party in high school shows up, and they all gave chase. I knew what was coming. Out of one of the windows popped my chicken, and within about 3 milliseconds it was being torn to shreds by a happy tiger.

Later on we would meet up with the other group, and I was shown a video they took of their goat. It was not for the feint of heart, and if PETA saw it, they’d go apeshit. In it, a truck with a cage on the back of it showed up instead of the white SUV. The doors were unlocked, but obviously the goat who was scared shitless wasn’t about to leave. Outside there were about 8 tigers ready in waiting. Poor goat, that truck had a dumptruck like mechanism that tilted the cage up on an angle, so that the goat was doomed to be dumped right into the fray. Within a matter of moments the shrieking goat was torn to shreds by the pack. Blood and goat guts squirting everywhere. The moral of the story is, don’t be a goat.

Next up on our agenda was the Snow Sculpture Fair. This was basically a regular city park that had decided to charge outrageous fees so that one could enter and be amazed by sculptures of snow. It was a tourist orgy and within 40 minutes we had seen all there was to see. We spent the next couple of hours huddled in one of the coffee shacks making homemade milk chocolate out of the hot soymilk that was being sold and cheap Russian chocolate we’d bought earlier.

After the Snow Fair, the group wanted to move on to the main event, Ice World. As darkness had now fallen, so had the temperatures and we had left the relatively balmy minus 20-degree weather for the mid thirties. Yes in Harbin, it is so perpetually cold that when they say the temperature, they don’t bother saying “minus” because it’s already assumed it’s below zero. After the general disappointment with the Snow Fair, the weather closing in on absolute zero, my Chinese compadre and I made some alternate plans. We decided to head over to the Ice World, but when we arrived we told the cabbie to wait for us. We dashed out to the main gates of the Festival and took the requisite photos to show we’d been there, and then made a break back for the cab and by extension, vodka.

After the group had reconvened, we went on a hopeless quest to find a Russian restaurant that had lots of good reviews, but we were unable to get there before it closed at … 9PM?!!? Not that we were likely to fit all 11 of us in there anyway. We settled for a rather crappy dongbeified version of Bifengtang (a Cantonese food chain). It didn’t satisfy, and I found myself munching down a Big Mac shortly afterwards.

The rest of the night involved multiple bottles of bourbon, Russian girls, French guys poledancing and some bears riding around on bikes with midgets on their backs. Or maybe it was all a dream. I read Word Up magazine.

We capped off our time in Harbin, the same way we started it, with a feast at another Russian joint called Café Russia. This one with an ornately carved wood interior, subpar service, but food that got the job done. We finished just in time to catch our train while we watched Harbin disintegrate into the arctic sunset. All in all a decent trip, but it’s definitely one of those things you do once and never again.

I’d wanted to ride in China for a while, I mean, the shear geography of the place meant there had to be some decent slopes somewhere. The country is roughly the same size as the States area wise, and is home to the tallest mountain rage on earth (the Himalayas), surely there’d be a ski bums paradise hidden away here.

Our thorough research, which consisted of googling for ski resorts in China, somehow winding up looking at trail maps of places in Europe, followed by deciding what bars would have the most attractive members of the opposite sex that night, lead us to Yabuli Sun Mountain as our best chance for international quality runs.

My friend happened to have some contacts up in Shenyang, a city only a few hours away from Harbin, a former Tsarist Russian outpost that now plays home to China’s largest snow and ice festival. So what the hell, with all these places being roughly in the same geographical void of nothing, we figured after our snowboarding excursion, we catch a train over Harbin for the ice fest.

The ice festival has gone totally mainstream in China, and I suppose it’s on a billion plus bucket lists, because the prices attached to everything Harbin for that time of year are pumped up like Arnie circa 75’. For that reason, we decided to fly into Changchun, then take the overnight train into Yabuli saving the cost of a hotel and letting us start the morning fresh on the slopes.

Now it’s time for some helpful travel tips. If you decide to travel anywhere by train in China, especially closing in on Chinese New Years…buy your tickets in ADVANCE. Here’s what happens when you don’t. We flew into Changchun, and foolishly took a 45 minute taxi ride to the train station. There’s actually a brand new train station right outside the airport (Longjia Stn.) that takes you downtown in about 15 minutes for one tenth the price of a taxi. Our planned train from Changchun to Yabuli was to leave 1:50am, which was fine, because we also planned to sleep during the 6 hour ride. These plans were shattered into a million tiny ice fragments when we discovered that the only tickets available were standing room. Not only would we not have beds to lie down on, we wouldn’t even have fucking seats. That ladies and gentlemen, was not a comfortable train ride.

Apart from the small time crooks who made the bad choice of trying to steal from an army guy, the ride was uneventful. Four hours into the journey, the train lurched through Harbin, and enough people got off that I could finally get a seat. Sleep would have been nice, but by then, then sun was rising, and the snow covered wasteland was reflecting light into the carriage making any attempt impossible.

On arrival at Yabuli Station, we were greeted outside by touts trying to lure us to whatever resort they were on commission for. We told them to bugger off, and hopped into a minibus to take us to the mountain. For some reason I didn’t quite understand because I was physically and mentally exhausted from lack of sleep, the touts jumped into the mini bus with us and off we went.

MAO’s in the fuckin house!!!

I bet you’re calling up your travel agent right this damn minute.

In this edition of my travels to famous Chinese tourist meccas, I present to you my do and don’t guide to visiting the famous Karst Limestone mountain area of Guilin/Yangshuo.

Do: tell your driver to take you on the Bamao (巴茂) highway to get from Guilin to Yangshuo. It offers endless views of the karstic mountains and lush green farmland you could eat up like a salad. Because no one else uses it, your driver will be able to see if his Santana really can make the needle hit 140km/h.

Don’t: let your driver take the provincial highway to get from Guilin to Yangshuo. It’s basically two lanes of giant trucks crawling along 40km/h that everyone else on the road is playing chicken with in order to get one position ahead. It also costs 30 kuai less than the fast highway. But takes an hour more. So if there’s 12 of you traveling together, and you do this, your time is worth a whopping 2.5 kuai an hour. That’s what I’ll pay my legions of peons, when I give them a 2.5 kuai raise.

Do: stay in one of the many chilled out resorts on the outskirts of Yangshuo. Other than being family run, having great service and food, clean rooms with internet, they’ll also remember your name every time they greet you while you reply back with an embarrassing “oh hi……you”.

Don’t: stay anywhere near downtown Yangshuo. It’s a giant swirling vortex of watch! bag! dvd!, shitty tourists, dirty hippies, “western” food and probably even some god-damned nazis. If you have to go, wear a cape and a mask to confuse the hell out of everyone, and bring some bear repellent just to be sure (I heard it works on them nazis).

Do: make sure to arrange all your transportation in advance of leaving wherever it is your staying. Best bet is to hire a driver for the times you need him, like when you’re so drunk you decide to go swimming naked in the Li river with a bunch of naked chicks, who are actually just your clothes that are floating away.

Don’t: expect to be able to hail taxis and pay a metered rate. Supply and demand rules here. Actually demand rules, and supply is its little bitch. The open air taxis are greedy blood sucking vampires. They will stop at nothing to pick you up and bring you somewhere at a grossly inflated rate given the vehicle they are transporting you in will probably break down and go out Hiroshima style on its way there.

Do: eat Guangxi style Chinese food. The chicken soup puts the chicken back in soup. Not that it ever left…well it tried to, but that’s a story for another day. A good restaurant to check out in Guilin is: 祥云居 in 鲁家村. You can find that on 桃花江路.This is a real deal local place, you won’t find it in the LP or Frommers. Once you get there you have to walk across a dam to get to it.

Don’t: bother with the western food in Yangshuo. If you want garbage save yourself the time and go straight to McDonalds. Although it might be a little hard to find.

Do: take a boat cruise down the Li river from Yangti to Xingping and have your photo taken in the famous spot that’s rendered on the 20Y bill despite it being as ridiculously cliché as throwing a penny in a fountain and wishing for world peace or eating dog meat in North Korea. Just watch out for pirates.

Don’t: take one of the big ass cuise boats down the river. They’re noisy, too fast, and akin to trying to take in Route 66 from the back of your grandpa’s Winnebago when you could be in a Cadillac drop top. I would also like to mention that almost every one I saw had a naked dude washing himself in the back of it. Ass pirates. True story.

Do: go exploring into the towns and villages along the river if you can. There’s all kinds of ancient buildings still standing, random chickens doing that thing they do, and well adjusted locals that don’t seem to mind you scoping out their hood.

Don’t: not go to Guangxi. The scenic beauty is something you should never not have the impossibility to lack the chance to see in your lifetime when you aren’t busy not trying to figure out all these double negatives.

On Thursday, at the crack of dawn, we awoke to grab some free breakfast from the hostel (yes this place had it all) and get ready for our trip to the magnificent Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. We were joined by a family who I guessed to be from the Canton area due to the Cantonese they were speaking. They had two very affectionate daughters, or possibly one daughter who brought along her girlfriend. Giant panda sex was not the only topic of discussion my friend and I had that day.

The ride along the smoky highway was quick, the traffic wasn’t too fierce, and our loaf-of-bread-mobile made it from the hostel to the research centre in about 30 minutes. Once there, we followed our awesome driver/tour guide as he cut straight to the chase. This guy didn’t mess around, he barely spoke a word the whole time he was with us and once we were past the entrance we followed him on some sketchy trails through the bamboo right to the red panda enclosure.

These red pandas were awesome and IMO better than those big black and white cousins. They troop around like soldiers, foraging about for whatever it is they forage, and then they go hang around in trees like little ginger acrobats. I wanted to spend more time with my new found friends, but our tour guide insisted we get a move on to the main event before the stars passed out. I came to the realization that the giant pandas and I had much in common, we’re both active for only a short period of the day, consume a lot of a certain substance (for them bamboo, for me booze) after which we crash hard, wake, and repeat.

After more trekking through the bush we came to a large clearing where the actual breeding center was. It looked like something from the USSR or maybe even the Temple of Doom. Shit, it even had a rope bridge to get in! Despite the large warning signs saying not to rock it, our tour guide made sure everyone of us damn near fell into the gravel pit below to be eaten by what I can only imagine were mutant gravel dwellers.

Once inside the compound, we came across this poor bastard. After seeing him, I was worried that we were too late. All we’d get to see would be a bunch of pathetic black and white bags of fur, passed out in their own manure.

To my relief, we soon happened upon some delightful characters, who were quite entertaining. No I’m not talking about the mother and her baby cub in the following pictures. I’m actually talking about the group of Japanese girls who were all wearing matching panda hats and making the KAAAWAAIIIII!! and kekekeke noises that their species is well known for. If I ever get the chance, I’d also like to visit their breeding centre.

Obviously, at this point there were pandas everywhere. But most of them were just eating and pooping. Kind of like big hairy babies. You see their metabolism doesn’t get much energy out of Bamboo, so they have to spend their waking hours eating as much of it as possible, instead of, well, switching diets to something that could keep them from winning the Darwin award. Furthermore, I can’t help but wonder if these animals would be so special if they didn’t have that unique coat of fur. Like if they were hairless, blobs of bear meat would they still be revered like this? I’d bet they’d already be extinct, or at the very least emasculated, having their dicks all chopped off to be ground up into some erectile dysfunction super tonic used by the locals.

Our Journey ended with a 15 minute video on Panda breeding, that was actually quite informative, despite comparing Panda breeding to putting a satellites into space and having a 1 minute looping soundtrack by Enya. I, like the 3 other people in the theatre watching, was definitely ready to watch some hardcore panda porn. To our disappointment, the big buggers aren’t really into knockin boots. Most of the captive Pandas are bred via artificial insemination. It looks to me as if this animal’s raison d’être is to be extinct. I wonder how they even evolved this far to begin with.

Actually I lied, our journey really ended with another walk through a museumish place full of funny pictures of pandas from the past, and the evil western imperialist invaders hunting them. And then finally another series of really awesome dioramas. I’m going to start searching out Chinese museums just so I can see these, I mean just look at this. A horse being attacked by a saber-tooth tiger? Looks more like the tiger’s trying to get it on! And what’s with all those white things on the horse? Are those fleas? The damn thing isn’t even real! And what exactly does any of this have to do with pandas? These dioramas and the whole day at the centre left me with more questions than answers. I was puzzled and my feelings could be summed up exactly like my friend here:

My food poisoning had subsided by the time I’d boarded that morning, heading from Chungking to Chengdu via the high speed train. Originally when we were at the train station buying the tickets, we thought that the robotic ticket dispenser was a genius idea compared to waiting in a big line for the ticket window. Little did we know that robotic son of a bitch would screw us over by getting us to think we had seats next to each other with sequential numbers, when in reality the two seats were cut between different sections of the car. Not only did I get cut off from my friend but I had the pleasure of sitting in one of those annoying seats with the back to the front of the car, looking across at two other guys who were staring so hard at me I thought they were trying to steal my soul. A few minutes after the train lurched out of the station I felt like He-Man after kicking Beastman’s ass when my friend came to inform me that the seat next to him was vacant. I blew a kiss goodbye to my soulmates and spent the rest of the morning staring into the smoggy, hilly farmland of Sichuan at 200km/h.

We were staying at the Chengdu Mix Hostel, and it was pretty generous because it provided us free pickup from the train station via taxi. Now I may be comparing apples to peacocks here, but if you stay at the Peninsula in Shanghai, they charge 2500rmb to pick you up. Sure they may pick you up in a Rolls-Royce Phantom, but I mean, it costs infinitely more times than Chengdu Mix Hostel’s service. You just can’t argue with infinity…unless you want your formulas to explode. But enough about Iranian scientists.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the city by foot, bus and taxi. Now I want to make it clear I’m no fan of temples. I recognize that they have some cultural importance and are handy for the odd human sacrifice, but honestly, you’ve seen one you’ve seen em’ all. I’m especially repelled by the fact that they usually want ridiculous admission charges to see boring poorly re-built designs that looks like all the others. Add in all the tourists, and I avoid the places like a Justin Bieber concert. Chengdu gave me some exceptions to my rules when it provided a couple of decent temple complexes (Aidao Nunnery, Wenshu Temple and Qingyang Temple) and that were cheap at 5 to 10rmb, devoid of tourists, and somewhat unique in design. They even had people praying instead of the typical junk sellers that congregate at these venues.

Lunch was some authentic Sichuan street food at a place that literally was a hole in the wall. I’m not talking smack here, it looked like the kitchen had been fashioned out of a mortar blast from the civil war. The food was real tasty and lived up to it’s spicy reputation. Although I was still skittish thanks to my experience in Chungking, everything seemed cooked properly and nothing caused me severe or debilitating pains. Dinner had us in a rustic but clean and new hotpot restaurant, because I missed out on it in Chungking. We ordered the dual pot system, with a spicy and non-spicy broth and thank god for that. The spicy broth was so incredibly tongue numbing, after trying it I couldn’t taste anything. I mean, it doesn’t hurt, it just removed all sensation from my mouth. So would someone please enlighten me on what the point of it is, if you can’t even taste the food? It’s like going to a concert and setting the volume so high that you go deaf, or buying a porcupine instead of a pet dog, or going to watch a play and the actors pull out real guns and start shooting the audience right in the eyeballs. Jesus. Maybe the whole experience is some Chinese post-modernist experiment on consumption, like “if your mouth doesn’t feel anything, are you really eating?” Anyways the non-spicy bowl was yummy, plus the quality of all the stuff they gave us was seemed to be above Toyota grade, so overall I would go back.

After the hot pot we took a stroll through this hyper-touristified pedestrian area called Jinli Ancient Street. It reminded me of Qianmen Street in Beijing, or any of the other recreated old style pedestrian districts that have been appearing like boils over China’s urban skin. In a delicious twist of irony, the only thing I find these “ancient” streets useful for is the Western modernity that inhabits them. Starbucks, Dairy Queen or any number of restaurants selling burgers and Italian food are always guaranteed. I suppose the people watching can be mildly entertaining, but if you really want to check out the freaks, hang around the train station for a bit.

Fast forward to our last night in Chengdu. Nothing says awesome like finishing a bottle of vodka while wandering around the central business district and hanging out in Tianfu square while the place swarmed with military police. Sampling the nightlife in Chengdu was a little bit like sucking balls. Not that I would know. Or that that’s even a bad thing. It’s just something I wouldn’t want to do again, personally. The nightlife in Chengdu that is. I heard it was supposed to have more bars and clubs than most cities its size so I had my preconceived notions. While there was a few clubs and bars playing music that wasn’t by Lady Gaga, the patrons of said bars were as wank as…papa-razzi. Case one: My friend walking across an empty dance floor to the bar when another patron walks by and coldly crosschecks him. Case two: At another bar some random comes up to me and tells me that he makes more money than I’ll make in ten lifetimes, and then walks off. Also some guys as white as snow dressed as if they just finished filming a rap video…from 15 years ago. We wound up going to some Chinese clubs identical to the ones we saw in Chungking, and everywhere else in China, where we met a few patrons who were quite accommodating to us in sharing some booze. It’s funny how that works out.

The next day I flew back to the beautiful bubble of modern westernization that is Jing’an and lived happily ever after. There’s probably a ton more stuff that I should’ve seen in Sichuan, but the traffic was so bad and the pollution so thick that the hours stuck in a tourist bus to see the blurry whatever it was wouldn’t have been a wise investment of my time. You’re probably wondering what happened during the daytime of second day because I fast forwarded through that part. I’ll give you a hint, it rhymes with PANDA ORGY.