Chengdu Pandas

Recently spent a few days in the city of Chengdu and had a trip to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. The pandas here have a pretty charmed life - basically it seems to be a 24-hour a day all-you-can-eat bamboo buffet. 

Taking a short eating break to ponder the meaning of life

According to our excellent tour guide, whose English name is Jack, since these pandas get so big, they have to eat a lot and conserve their energy. In the wild, they live a mostly solitary life since each grown up panda eats so much, it needs its own territory. Giant pandas only stop their virtually constant eating to take a 2-week vacation each year to go search for a mate and (according to Jack) some of them don't even really like to give up valuable eating time even for that.

Although these guys are into kung fu (功夫, pronounced gongfu in Chinese) like their Hollywood namesake Kungfu Panda, I did find one youngster who, like many young Chinese, are crazy about the sport of basketball.

Basketball Panda (maybe a good premise for a future Dreamworks animated film)

In addition to the giant pandas, the Chengdu Panda Base also has some of the smaller and lesser known red pandas. 

For more panda pics, feel free to take a look at the slideshow or click on this link for larger sized photos.

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