Chengdu: near the border of Central China

Hi guys!

Here we are once again. You may not believe it, but roughly three days ago we were still Wuhan describing our adventures and now we are already in Chengdu! Actually, the funny part is that we have already finished visiting the rather unknown city of Chengdu. I know, probably we travel way too fast to really see enough of all the places. We travel so quickly because we have a time limit and we try to cross as much countries as possible to experience as much different cultures as we can. Below, we have described some of the interesting we did past two days in Chengdu.

Chengdu is a booming city very close to the border of Central China with Tibet. This city is situated in the province Sichuan which means that we had to travel quite a lot to get here from Wuhan. Three days ago, we took ourselves a whole day to travel to here, as we did that by train and it actually went fluently. The evening we arrived we did nothing anymore as it was already late. We were tired from travelling and we went to bed.

The morning after, we sat together to discuss about what things we were going to visit in the next two days in Chengdu. We have a laptop with us so we can easily look up some interesting things. We decided to visit some Taoïstic and Buddhist temples, the panda centre, one of the biggest golf clubs and a tour through the industrial and financial centre of Chengdu.

The temples…

Rather unfortunately, we can’t tell you a lot of entertaining stuff about the tempels. We visited one Taoïstic and one Buddhist temple but to be honest, they were looking quite the same as the previous ones. We’re not trying to say that these temples are not interesting and so on, but we have just nothing new to tell about them!

Save the Panda!

Yesterday in the afternoon, we have visited a quite unique centre. As you might know, Panda’s only live in specific Asian regions (around China) and they might extinguish in the future for several reasons. The Central Chinese government built up a nice initiative to save the Panda’s. They have created a special centre where Panda’s can live in peace with each other without have to suffer from human threats. We were able to visit the centre and it was really nice to see some Panda’s in real life as most of us had never seen these animals before.

After this long but interesting day, we went for dinner somewhere near the centre of the city. Once again, the food was really spicy. This time it wasn’t even funny because it was just too spicy for us Europeans. The dish we ordered was called ‘Dan Dan Mien’ but it was just too spicy. Even the Chinese people admitted that it was spicy so that says enough. Some of us ordered another dish and in the end everything turned out to be fine!

Golf!

This morning, we went out to visit a local golf club. To our surprise, golf is a quite popular sport in China as there are over 500 major golf centers in the whole country. We visited the most famous court in Chengdu, named the Luxehills International Court. In exchange for some money, we had the chance to test our skills with a golf stick. We can assure you that golfing is way more difficult as it looks as we all sucked pretty hard.

Financial and Industrial centre of Chengdu

This afternoon, we took ourselves a Guide to lead us quickly to the financial and industrial centre of Chengdu. As it is a booming city, the city is a nice mix of authentic, scenic little streets and new, giant skyscrapers. Chengdu is known to be one the best cities in the world to invest in. The reason why Chengdu has such a nice industrial and financial part is to be found in the second World War. Chiang Kai-shek, a Chinese leader at that time, had to escape to this region because the Japanese were quickly invading eastern parts of China. Kai-shek took a lot of engineers, workers, businesspeople and academics with him and that group started to build a nice industrial and economical center in Chengdu. We also saw a lot of green in the City centre actually and our guide confirmed that Chengdu is by far the most green city in China

To conclude, Chengdu is a slightly different city compared to cities like Shanghai in eastern China but they also have a lot in common. Now, it is already evening and we are at our Hotel room, writing this blog to you guys. We have planned to leave Central China tomorrow to visit a part of China that is slightly independent, Tibet.

Stay tuned at this page to miss nothing from our adventures!

Greets from the Travelers!