About China - special guest post from Grandma Boop

* this post was written on a flight from China to Nepal back at the end of March, we're just getting it up on the blog now!

About China

I, the grandma, Kim’s mom, arrived in Chengdu to meet the family, with the remains of a flu bug & jet lag, since it was over 24 hours since I’d left home.

So, although my impressions of Chengdu are a bit foggy, the highlight for me was the visit to the panda reserve. It is heartening to see the success this facility is having with breeding pandas. There are so few left in the wild, mostly due to habitat destruction. This is the first place there has been success at breeding & raising the young. They are so playful, cute, & can they even climb trees! The enclosures are large & seem very natural. How successful the releases back in the wild will be remains to be seen.

Leaving Chengdu by overnight train was not an experience I really want to repeat. There was little privacy( 6 beds, 3 stacked on each wall) ; it was very crowded; and the bathroom facilities were really primitive – typical squat toilet as in most of China, supply your own toilet paper, and hard to say if any flushing would have happened since the last occupant!

I must say the people of China were very helpful & courteous, except when you were in their way. Then an elbow or a shove moved you on! But many would stop to help with directions or give up their seat on the bus/subway when they saw me! Also they seemed very hard working. Some of the workers in Pingyao, who were doing restoration work on the Ancient town were at work from dawn to long past dusk. Most of the work was done by hand, using old wheel barrows to move earth, bricks, cement. And I don’t think people live as long there as you weren’t allowed to rent a bicycle if you were over 60 when in X’ian. Also in several places, such as the panda reserve, the largest Budda, I got in free cause I was over 70!

Another highlight was our visit to the terracotta warriors. So amazing that a farmer discovered this site when trying to dig a well in his field. There are 3 massive rooms underground that were full of warriors, horses, chariot remains & weapons. The first & largest room is estimated to hold 6000 warriors. All are in many pieces, so work continues on piecing these back together. Talk about a jigsaw puzzle! But the results are remarkable, a testament to the perseverance & dedication & skill of the archeologists involved, all of whom are Chinese.

My last highlight, of course, has to be our day on The Great Wall. It’s a long trek to get to the first spot we visited, so we hired a driver & guide. The idea was to walk from this section, at Jiankou, to another section at Mutianyu. This was an area where no restoration had been done so fewer tourists go there. In fact, there was not a soul when we began the trek up the trail to get on the wall. What greeted us, though, were few  complete stairs & many crumpled ones. Crumpled to the point that it was necessary to find hand & foot holds to ascend!  A bit of a harrowing experience, since it was a long way down on both sides of the columns of tumbled rock & bricks! After about a good hour of scrambling, we came to a sheer wall of rock where the wall had completely fallen away. Chris & Maya did some treacherous scouting, but could find no way through, so we had to return to the starting point. Our driver then drove us an hour around to the place we were supposed to get to. There the wall had been completely restored so we walked – many stairs up & down, quite a few more tourists. But what fine weather we had – the first time we saw the sun out in blue sky since arriving in China. Sure hope this country can find a solution soon to their terrible air pollution!