Just for you, here's a love song

N 30 41.010 E 104 05.103 - 16 November 2008 - Chengdu

Ok, more directories of photographs, this should get us through the current part of China now. Sorry, just bought a new camera last week so I took a whole lot of pictures. And lots of them were of birds, which are hard to get before they fly away and you end up with empty tree pictures. Oh well, sorting later when I get to Australia.

Anyways, I know I haven't written about Beijing, Pingyao, Luoyang, Xi'an, or even Chengdu yet, really not a lot of time to write and I've spent a lot of time trying to get better at Chinese. I'll try to get back to those and write about them at some point. But this last week was quite a nice trip through Sichuan and over nearly in to Tibet (umm, ok the Xizang Autonomous Region) up over the Tibetan Plateau looking at birds and seeing the countryside.

C had been determined to find some sort of birding trip, especially since we missed our opportunity when we were in Sweden (stupid English test) and spent (much to my annoyance) a lot of time searching for different sorts of bird trips in China and stumbled upon Sid and Meggie who said they could lead us around and gave us a quote that seemed pretty reasonable for 5 days, straining our already way over budget journey but then again so much else has. We jettisoned the idea of the Yangtze river cruise (already rode a lot of ferries and saw lots of fjords in Norway and didn't fancy the idea of sharing crowded cabins on a ship with lots of smoking Chinese tourists) so that freed up some money we had thought we would spend there. And we are in this amazing place in China, when else would we get to do something like this. Happily it lived up to our expectations and was a great five days.

Chengdu is yet another huge Chinese city. We half heartedly went through some of the temples but mostly just kind of chilled out and also spent a lot of time shopping for a camera (C's camera died and mine isn't so great anymore). China isn't a great place to buy electronics and it took a lot of looking and bargaining to get it down to about what you would expect to pay in London. But the camera is nice and I loved having it on the trip.

On Tuesday, we were up and ready for our 8 am start. Sid and Meggie were caught in traffic and were a little late. Traffic has been rather mad all over China as more and more people ditch their cycles for cars or even just electric scooters. It was a bit sad to be here and not see the masses of bikes that had always heard about here. China has become just another crowded motorized city and we spent a whole lot of time stuck in traffic or really lost. Road building is booming here and so much is torn up or old signs haven't been taken down and no new signs put up that reflect the changes. Also, the roads seem to be falling apart so quickly too, roads that have been barely used. I suppose either shoddy cheap materials or just overly used by lots of traffic and lots of heavy trucks.

Our plan is to start out slow, get us out sort of into the country, see some birds and get us into the rhythm of what to look for and just how to do it and then plan the rest of the trip after that. Since we are in Chengdu, everybody who comes here goes to see the pandas. But it is also a park and Sid thought there would be some good birds for us to see there and we could see the pandas as well.

Sichaun suffered some pretty devastating earthquakes a few months ago and there is evidence of it all over still. The panda reserve was almost in the very middle of it all and suffered a lot of damage and much has been moved around since then. It seems like this region has suffered quite a bit since then, especially since a lot of the tourist trade dried up pretty quickly. But yeah, there were still pandas there, the beloved national symbol of China and featured on countless products all over the region, even cigarettes.

The birding was pretty cool. You know, you can just go random places, they don't even need to be pretty and there are birds around to see. A lot of our trip was just stopping by the side of the road and wandering off a few meters and there were lots of things. We would even wander around people's backyards, in their farmland, which was a really interesting way to see China. C was totally into the birds. I liked it but don't have the same capacity for watching them, but the other things to see certainly kept my attention.

I have lists of birds from the trip, but I'm not quite sure how to present them in anything but a boring list that would mean nothing to anybody who hadn't been there or who isn't just super tweaky about birds. In the panda reserve, we see Mandarin ducks, wild ones who haven't had their wings clipped and Sid gets really excited about that. We tromp around the back areas of the reserve seeing kingfishers and loads of small little things that somehow Sid could instantly recognize even before I could find them in my binoculars.

The other interesting thing about the back areas was the laborers. China might try to project an image of being very technologically advanced, cutting edge and all that, but really, almost all the work in China is done by that guy with a shovel and a wicker basket on his back. The amount of manual labor we saw was just overwhelming, I guess since it is cheaper to hire a worker than any other way of getting work done. Labor costs are almost negligible.

The pandas, yeah, they were pretty cool. I actually think I like the red pandas better. It was a bit sad seeing endless tourists (mostly Chinese) taking flash pictures of them and all that. Seems like a sad life for a panda, but they seemed to just move slowly and seemed happy having bunches of bamboo chucked at them for their meals.

We leave the park and head over to a nearby lake with a boardwalk around it and have a picnic and plan our route for the rest of the trip. Going to Moxi tonight, Kangding the next day, then over to Tagong and then work our way back to Chengdu over the next two days. A lot of this area is just slowly opening up again after the recent events in Tibet, it has all been closed to foreigners and only in the past week or two are the roadblocks starting to come down. We still see hundreds of police cars and army vehicles (funny, they are mostly white Land Cruisers) over the five days, especially as we get closer.

Much of the rest of the day was spent getting out of Chengdu through the horrible traffic jams and then started on the expressway climbing up into the mountains and stopping for the night in Moxi.

So much more to write about, but no time today to finish. Didn't even get to the subject, the mountain that had been commercialized with "The Love Song" written all across it which annoyed Sid to no end. And Tibet...

But another day.