Moving away from China’s ‘Golden Triangle’ of Shanghai, Beijing and Xi’an, we headed another 600 miles South West to Chengdu, capital of the Sichuan province and the 4th biggest city in China – most famous for its giant pandas, gastronomy and ‘opera’, plus some great sightseeing in the surrounding countryside.

Debbie had booked a D-class train for the 4 hour journey from Xi’an, not realising that these weren’t the G-class bullet trains we’d taken so far in China. No matter, 1st class was very comfortable and only £40 each, and the train still sped along at 150mph.

We’d originally booked 4 nights at a highly rated Holiday Inn Express in the city centre, but Debbie noticed that the Crowne Plaza wasn’t much more expensive and had a swimming pool. With the weather not looking great (we had hit rainy season in this part of China too), she thought that we may prefer to be in a better hotel with something to occupy us, and she could exercise her shoulder too (it’s still not right but she’s coping). Steve agreed without too much resistance. Debbie then decided that executive lounge access would be a good thing to add as she’s not entitled to it as an IHG Platinum member (IHG are far worse than Marriott in this respect), so booked the 2nd most expensive grade of room which was now not just a little bit more expensive than the Holiday Inn Express but was almost within budget. There was method in her madness though – from a Premium Club room there was only one better room type for Debbie’s complimentary Platinum status upgrade – a 1 bedroom Club Suite – and that’s exactly what we got 🙂 Not fancy but very comfortable, with a separate lounge with sofa, chair and a 2nd loo, this would do quite nicely for a few days! The lounge wasn’t posh like the Crowne Plaza in Fukuoka (Japan) but was good enough for some free wine & nibbles each evening, and afternoon tea if we felt like it. And the complimentary brekkie in the main restaurant (as the lounge didn’t open until 1200) was jolly good too.

We had 3 full days in Chengdu so could take it a bit easier, although we were still kicking ourselves for not having stayed for an extra day in Beijing and/or Xi’an.

The City

We spent a few hours wandering around Chengdu city centre, visiting Wide & Narrow Alleys – 3 parallel ancient city alleys and 45 courtyards restored in 2003 to create a maze of old-China streets. Touristy but charming, with a panda theme throughout, traditional Chengdu face-changing opera performances in every third building, and the Chengdu speciality ‘ear cleaning’ going on all around. We didn’t partake! Randomly we passed a block of shops selling wheelchairs & medical devices, and Steve spotted that one was a Resmed retailer – the brand of his CPAP machine – so we popped in to compare prices. About the same as the UK, but the breadth of range was huge so there must be a lot of sleep apnoea sufferers in China!

On to People’s Park, a beautiful green space in the centre of the city and basically Chengdu’s living room – a place where tradition, community and modern life merge. Dancing was a big thing – a group of oldies doing a routine to music, and deeper into the park several couples were ballroom dancing in proper dancing shoes. A lake, with skyscrapers in the background reminiscent of New York’s Central Park, had locals rowing peacefully but fully kitted out in (mandatory?) lifejackets. We stumbled across ‘Matchmaking Corner’ a famous local tradition where elders post personal ads for their children, blue for sons, pink for daughters. We do wonder who posted the advert for the elderly widow and really must translate some of the ads…

As a city with over 20 million people, of course Chengdu has decent shopping. Debbie’s trainers (the ultra-comfy Skechers slip-ins for lazy people that she bought in Vegas last year) had worn out on the slip-in heel so needed to be replaced, and as they are made in China they were bound to be cheap. Or not, but US rather than UK prices and Skechers did throw in a very good quality t-shirt with a panda logo (obviously, we were in Chengdu!). Debbie had intended to replace her trainers with On Cloud or another decent brand, but Skechers are just so bloody comfortable, and she’s wearing trainers FFS, so….

The Food

Chengdu is the birthplace of Sichuan cuisine, one of China’s 4 great culinary traditions, renowned for its mala (numbing-spicy) flavour and defined by bold combinations of sweet, sour, bitter, spicy & salty. So celebrated is Chengdu food that the city was recognised as a UNESCO City of Gastronomy in 2010, the first in Asia and only the second in the world (after Popayan, Columbia – note to self, we must go there!). Home to over 60,000 restaurants and 2,300 renowned chefs, the choice was overwhelming and as Tripadvisor is unreliable in China we asked our hotel for a recommendation and somehow managed to jump a long queue at Tao De Sha Gho, a huge and VERY popular casserole restaurant. It took us a while to translate the menu, the kind waitress helped Debbie to navigate the WeChat ordering system, and almost immediately we realised that we’d monumentally over-ordered. Firstly – raw king prawns in garlic with vermicelli (to be cooked at the table) was brought in an earthenware pot, the waitress ceremoniously poured on a cooking liquor, lit our burner, replaced the lid and set a timer. This alone would have been sufficient but no, we’d also ordered casseroles of braised beef & potatoes and chicken & black pepper, plus a portion of 10 (huge) dumplings and another of sweet sticky rice cakes. Oh dear God! No thanks, we don’t need any rice!! This monumental feast cost around £24 (with beers) and was delicious, but we concluded that we really must stop judging portion sizes by price. A quick exit followed, embarrassed by the amount of food we’d left, but on the way out Debbie used her translator app to tell the waitress that it was delicious but that we were just greedy pigs who’d ordered too much.

If there was one place in China that we should take a cooking class it was Chengdu, and with a day of torrential rain forecast we found one with good reviews on Get Your Guide and booked, but commenting that it seemed bloody expensive. We met our guide Lance (surely not his real name), Liqi (pronounced Lychee) and our 4 fellow students outside a metro station before proceeding to a local market. The forecast rain had materialised in full force, and even with brollies we were soon pretty soaked. Lots of amazing fresh veg, unbelievable in size (huge) and price (low), stalls selling just eggs in a multitude of varieties & including the 1000 year old egg (which one of the students purchased), beautiful fresh fruit bought for later, meat and seafoods. The Chinese tend to favour pork, all parts of the animal were on display, and Lance told us how much he enjoys tripe and that the Chinese prefer their meat hung rather than refridgerated. The fish and seafood, imported from other provinces as Chengdu is probably 1,000 miles from the sea, was mostly still alive and not the species that we would typically eat in the UK – salamander being the most bizarre offering. And finally – frogs! The French couple in our group were able to converse at length with Lance about the joys of that particular delicacy! Just off the market was the Chilli Cool China workshop/kitchen, where our chef tutor Jerry (again, probably not his real name) greeted us effusively. He was the first camp Chinese person we’d come across on our travels and made Gok Wan seem butch in comparison. We sipped some tea, ate some delicious lychees, peaches, jackfruit and garlic peanuts purchased from the market, and then proceeded to attempt to construct wontons.

Then it was on with the aprons and time to start cooking. Cabbage needed to be shredded by hand not chopped, important in Chinese tradition apparently so as not to upset the cabbage’s feelings! Tofu (yuk) was prepared, and belly pork & huge spring onions sliced, before we were let loose at the wok. Our takeaways from Sichuan cuisine are (1) smoking hot woks (but then turn them down Steve), (2) lots of chilli and (3) even more oil. Delicious but it makes Indian food and Peking duck seem positively healthy in comparison and Steve was wondering how many statins he’d need that night. We cooked the wontons, a spicy vermicelli salad, stir fried spicy cabbage, spicy twice cooked pork in chilli and the local delicacy Maps Tofu. Everything except the tofu was delicious – we’ve concluded the tofu is utterly shit even in a nice spicy sauce.

Eating our dinner at a communal table, we learned more about the culture & cuisine, and got into conversation with Liqi. Probably about 20, he was learning English (and was already excellent and had a posh English accent) through You Tube, watching Downtown Abbey and reading Shakespeare. An introvert who’d dropped out of high school because the teacher bullied him, he was desperate to better himself and thanked English for giving him a second chance. He wants to study in the UK and was so grateful to be able to converse with English people – rather humbling. Before we left, he stood and sang a little song to thank us! Then Jerry gave a speech about why he does the cooking classes – it was about passing on knowledge and traditions and not about the money (really, at £75/head??!!) – then presented us with lovely certificates with our names in Chinese and panda (of course) chopstick stands. Still pissing with rain, and with no taxis available, we had to take the metro and actually purchase physical tickets for the first time in China. It had been a nice afternoon with interesting people, when we’d have been doing nothing else due to the rain, but we felt that it was TERRIBLE value for £150. Debbie did a bit of Google research and found that Get Your Guide had added 50% to the price that Chilli Cool were charging directly – lesson learned, always try to find the provider themselves!

The Pandas

The reason we’d come to Chengdu had to wait until our final day due to the weather, but we were up and about early, catching a taxi from our hotel to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding as we’d learned from t’internet that you need to be there just after the 07.30 opening to get the best chance of seeing then pandas doing anything. By mid-morning they are asleep in the shade apparently. Tickets are only 55 Yuan (less than £6) and free for oldies (Steve), but we couldn’t manage to make reservations or purchase tickets on the official website and resorted to a Get Your Guide ticket service (at double the price). But it was worth it to know that we had the tickets, and the agent even changed the date for us due to the forecast rain, so all good. Our taxi cost less than a fiver, so it’s unbelievable that tours were charging £120 for ticket & transfer, and we’ve now learned to be very careful if booking through Get Your Guide or similar! It turned out that we weren’t the only ones to get the ‘arrive early’ memo and we joined the queue for Debbie to show her passport and pray, and for Steve to just prove that he was an old bloke entitled to free entry.

We just followed the crowd and soon found ourselves in a queue, which took about an hour to get to the front. An English-speaking bloke asked Steve what the attraction was, and he sarcastically answered “pandas”. Actually, we aren’t really sure what the queue was all about as it was just for that one place and we were quickly ushered past a couple of pandas. Hoping that the whole day wasn’t going to be like this, we quickly found that it was a one-off and with no apparent reason. The panda base is an incredible facility and we made our way around the panda villas and houses, marvelling at the giant pandas, red pandas and their young offspring eating their bamboo, patrolling their territory or just napping. We watched in amazement, and obviously we bought a toy panda for our grandson Carey – let’s hope China Post gets it to him safely, unlike Japan Post which seems to have lost his personalised chopsticks.

Our final evening in Chengdu was spent with Steve trying to sort out an insurance claim for the flood in our house back home (don’t ask!) and Debbie catching up on writing our blog while sipping wine in the Executive Lounge. We’d not really seen that much of Chengdu, or done the big ticket excursions out of the city that we’d planned, but we did see the amazing pandas, ate some fabulous food, witnessed some authentic Chinese life in a city most people won’t have heard of – and we probably needed a bit of down time anyway. For the China route that we are doing Chengdu was the obvious stop, and we enjoyed it, but we’d probably not recommend making a special trip there. Chatting to some people on our Xi’an tour, they’d found that Chongqing (3rd biggest city in China, 2 hours from Chengdu) was a better stop and we (and some others going to Chengdu) had sighed, but we guess it depends what you’re looking for.

Anyway, our longest train journey so far beckoned – destination Guilin & Yangshuo……