It was another early start for us and one we almost missed as both of us were on our way to falling back to sleep after the alarm when Dave realised what was happening and leapt from his bed to wake me up. We hurriedly dressed and headed down to the awaiting minibus where I found that due to our snoozing and an 'administrative error' I had no seat and spent the journey wedged in the doorwell praying that the lock would hold and I wouldn't be pitched out into oncoming traffic. Thankfully the journey was a mere half hour and I emerged with cramp in my right buttock but otherwise unscathed. We headed in to the Panda Reserve and were taken straight to an enclosure holding a youthful panda male who was happy to play for our cameras. Pandas move in a way that's much more laconic than other bears, you get the feeling that even if one went back from it's vegetarian way of life to try and attack you if you just ran 10 yards it would probably give up and have a snooze. We moved on to other enclosures where we watched older pandas engage in their second favourite act, eating, before they headed back indoors for their favourite act, sleeping. There was a wonderful incubation unit for the pandas born that year, due to advances in artificial insemination there were over a dozen infants at various development stages, and the only drawback was that you weren't allowed to photograph the little ones. We then headed on to the cheesiest part of our trip, where you could hand over an exhorbitant fee to be photographed right behind a panda and a docile fellow was brought out to sit on a stump as a parade of tourists, mostly Chinese, stood gawping behind looking terrified as if the vegetarian beast might fancy a change in his diet any minute. We then had a quick look at some red pandas, which look like cute ginger raccoons and aren't quite as endangered, before heading for a video which informed us that sadly though the insemination problem has been solved there's still a long way to go in raising the babies to maturity. The majority of the babies we saw probably wouldn't make it through their first 18 months.

I rested in the afternoon as my familiar stomach trouble was back but rose for the evening and another trip to the food fair. As we sat down at a new restaurant we noticed a strange group of 4 with three guys in jeans and t-shirt and a girl dressed as if she was off to a classy party. She introduced herself in English and asked us a few questions while leaning languidly across our table and we immediately concluded she was a lady of the night but after being given free Chinese wine (sickly sweet, fermented millet apparently) by her male friends and noticing they were giving it out to everyone we realised she was a promo girl for the wine and here for the food fair. Sadly, by the time we realised the waiting staff had entirely forgotten our order her offer of 'help in any way' (which we'd originally dismissed, we've both got girlfriends!) was no longer available and we had to communicate our displeasure through comical hand movements, which wasn't quite as effective in getting the point across. Our food arrived eventually but it was cold and nowhere near enough so we retreated to our restaurant of the first evening and filled up on taster meat kebabs again (I should mention you did have to pay for them, we weren't just being pikeys!).