PANDA – MANIA - by Peggy

The world’s cutest animal, paws down, is the giant panda. With their black and white fur, roly-poly bodies and constant chewing on stalks of bamboo, you can just watch them for hours. We had two excellent opportunities to spend some time "up close and personal" with giant pandas during our trip to China.

One area, Wulong, is about 130 kilometers from Chengdu in the Sichuan province. It is in a mountainous area where giant pandas thrive best. Yet, like other animal species, the panda is threatened by changes in natural surroundings, habitat destruction and the influence of human activities. So at Wulong, there is a giant panda preserve where people dedicated to saving the panda work to study, breed and promote them. The goal is to help the giant pandas be successfully integrated back into the mountains without human support, although that will (hopefully) be a longer-term result.

For a small donation to the panda efforts, I had a photo opportunity with a nine-month old panda which sat on my lap. The handlers gave the panda a piece of apple to occupy him during the photo shoot and thankfully he was more interested in that than me. Pandas have impressive claws and teeth! He was so cute, though, and his fur was very wooly and thick.

Closer to Chengdu, there is a busier giant panda breeding and research facility that attracts lots of tourists and schoolchildren every day to see pandas in fairly large natural landscaped areas. On both days we visited the panda facilities, it was raining which was actually helpful because the pandas like cool weather and were active and readily visible. It’s just so fun to see the pandas, here are some more for you to enjoy!