OK, so I'm well behind. No point trying to hide it. Still, I'm back in the UK now (4 countries behind!) so have the combination of time to write and lack of interesting new things happening to me, so I'll pick up the narrative where I left off. Pandas. Again.

After the panda prison in Kunming, I needed some quality time with these noble animals. Everyone makes fun of them for being lazy and too dumb to have sex to save their own species, but really the tale of the panda is the old familiar story of humans cocking it up. If it wasn't for hunting and huge land clearance in China's industrialisation, we'd have plenty of pandas. Yes a female only has 2 or 3 babies in her lifespan (and the first one usually dies as they adopt a trial and improvement attitude to parenting), and they eat low nutrition bamboo which flowers and dies on regular cycles, but consider that the panda is actually an ancient animal and can be traced back in its current form beyond virtually any other animal on the planet (us included). It's not lazy, it's efficient - the panda has everything it needs and is quite happy. They can be vicious, but if it's more prudent for them to run away or climb a tree or take the gawps of strangers, they will. And if it wasn't for us destroying their numbers and habitat, they'd be in perfect harmony with nature and wouldn't have to bother about all those silly territory disputes and alpha male nonsense that keeps the BBC busy.

No, all in all I'd like to be a panda. And there's no better place than the zoo in Vienna, but if I wanted to be around mates yet in my own private quarters, like a sheltered housing scheme, my first choice would be Ya'an. It's 3-4 hours out of Chengdu, although the vagaries of transport effectively mean a day's trip. Claire was working so I went with a friend from work called James who loved both pandas and walking so was perfect company (Claire rushes me after the first few hours of watching a panda sit and watch us in return).

And here's a handy travel hint (though you'll have to email me for the name to prevent it creeping onto more popular forums) - stay at the hostel. First off, it's pretty much a hotel anyway, especially by Chinese standards. There is a sort of English menu, but they'll produce a random mix of food anyway. No matter, it's the best I've had in all of China and pretty cheap too (£2-3 a dish). Even better, you'll actually profit because the owners were quite happy to let us pop through their side gate and save the £15 entry to the park. It also allowed us to get in with the volunteers rather than the tourists, so we got some real quality time with the pandas before the hordes arrived.

Unfortunately my bargain hunting stopped there as I'd hoped to hold or sit with a panda for a photo. I'd done this in Thailand with tigers (£4) and elephants (40p) and was shocked that it was £60 for one minute in Chengdu. No matter, I thought going to this out-of-the-way place would remove the tourist trap/foreigner ripoff element. Well, it doesn't - £100 for 20 seconds. Staggering - basically if Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston patched up their differences and decided to offer threesomes to businessmen, they'd still be undercutting the panda by several hundred pounds a session. I'm pretty sure that I could be turned into a panda with hormone pills for not much more in Bangkok. So, I didn't do that, which is a real shame. But I'd still recommend the panda reserve, it's brilliant and surrounded by amazing scenery (you'll have to walk a mile of it if you sneak in like us because you won't have a bus ticket). It was lush, green, clean and largely unspoilt with farmers walking their cattle around and a real serenity to the place. In China, such tranquillity is almost worth panda-w**** rates.