China – Chengdu

After a smooth and pleasant flight aboard British Airways BA0089, arriving at Chengdu International was a dream. Immigration was a breeze and while queuing up to have our passport and visa checked we could already see our baggage arriving on the carousel. Probably the most efficient international airport we’ve ever passed through. Well done Chengdu International!

In an effort to cut down on arrival hassle we pre-booked an airport pickup through our hotel, the Crowne Plaza Panda Garden, and as promised, our driver was waiting outside with our names on a card. Very easy. In fact, between the doors opening on the aircraft and pulling out of the car park in our ride it had only taken 30 minutes. Brilliant.

The hotel had predicted a journey time from the airport of 45 minutes and even encountering some awful traffic and being driven by what appeared to be an amateur rally car driver, we were pretty much on schedule.

Hotel check in though was chaos. Total chaos. With reception staff giving me back a different guys passport and completely mislaying my wife’s! Saying that, during the chaos the bell boy did manage to bring me a package that was waiting for me, our train tickets delivered as promised by Travel China Guide who were totally brilliant during the whole ticket purchasing process.

So, finally checked in we were shown to our room on the 19th floor, a club level room with a great view from its huge windows.

Being exhausted by the overnight flight we crashed out before 6:00pm, waking fitfully during the night as usual, but being entertained by the amazing array of lights from the nearby tower blocks in the next town.

Our primary purpose for visiting Chengdu, along with every other Westerner we encountered, was to visit the Chengdu Giant Panda Research Base which was only five minutes away by the free Crowne Plaza shuttle bus. We booked a ride on the first bus out at 8:10, which is highly recommended if you want any chance of beating the crowds of tourists and locals that start pouring in to the park from around 10:00. Once inside, having paid RMB58 each or about £6.00, we had a good hour of being almost completely alone at Panda House #1 and #2 as everyone else we saw had stopped at Panda House #14. We had a good view of a male, who looked rather sad and lonely padding around his enclosure followed by great encounters with pairs of pandas having breakfast. The rest of the morning was magical watching young cubs wrestling and climbing trees. We also saw a couple of Red Pandas too, creatures I’ve never actually seen before as they are so elusive in our UK zoos, and they are really cute when you get close up.

By 11:00 we’d seen everything in the park and been thoroughly wowed by all the pandas we’d seen and the crowds were now becoming overwhelming. After a short break in Hanhans Cafe for refreshment we picked up the shuttle bus at 12:00 for our return to the hotel. Outside the park was bedlam. Huge queues of people jostling to get in, crazy queues of cars trying to park somewhere, with most people appearing to just dump their cars anywhere that they saw a gap. Crazy. We discovered that the weekend of our visit coincided with a national holiday in China, Qingming or tomb sweeping day, which may have accounted for the extra crowds.

After enjoying the peace and quiet of the Crowne Plaza for a while we then booked our return airport transfer and went for a walk around what we thought was part of the garden of the hotel, but which turned out to be a rather fancy communal garden for the nearby partially occupied tower blocks that surrounded it.

Chengdu itself turned out to be much greener and more lush than we’d expected and the Giant Panda Research Park was well worth the RMB58 to get in.  The Crowne Plaza was exactly what you’d expect from any Crowne Plaza, but some of the club level perks were missing and some extra chaos thrown in for good measure. The service was mediocre at best, but as we discovered through the rest of our holiday, was way above what we experienced in other China hotels and is nowhere near what customer service is expected to be from a Western viewpoint.

Overall Chengdu was a pretty good start to our holiday and a very worthy stop.