Next stop was Chengdu following an 18-hour overnight train from Xi'an. Our cabin companions were two sad looking Chinese guys who just seemed to sleep and eat noodles and sleep and eat noodles. In fact, eating seems to be something that Chinese people do all the time. They're constantly grazing. And with so many shops and restaurants and markets, we're not surprised they're always eating. Food is literally everywhere. We ventured to a market in Chengdu where we saw piles of toads waiting to be consumed, eels being sliced, ducks being boiled alive and all manner of colourful veggies and spices. Outside we saw a guy with a tortoise on a lead and a whole bag of them beside him. They seem to eat everything and anything - and by the same vein we're almost certain that we've eaten something entirely foreign when the Chinese characters on the menu have meant we've had to resort to pointing to something vaguely chicken- or beef-like on a skewer.

But luckily for the world, the one animal they don't eat is the panda. And aaaah aren't they cute and bizarrely human-like. We saw baby panda cubs (thankfully they had already grown out of that pink bald rat stage), sub-adults, giant mamas and red racoon-like pandas. And all they seem to do is sleep and eat and sleep and eat. Only it's not tortoise and eels but bamboo on the menu for them.

After the pandas we decided to get some culture in and went to see a Sichuan Opera - not the kind of opera Pavarotti would be starring in, but a mix of love stories acted out, chinese music, fire spitting, a girl who spun a balanced table round and around on her feet and masked people who 'magically' changed their mask in a blink.

And apart from the pandas and the opera, there really isn't much of a reason to visit Chengdu. It's yet another massive Chinese city of malls and tower blocks. Except this week was different as the final of the World Cyber Games was taking place in town... Geeks and technology galore. Anthony and his free i-pod touch games suddenly shrank into insignificance against the might of the Serbian Warcraft team...