Chengdu is the capital of the Sichuan province and home to the Giant Panda. The pandas are amazing creatures, they’re big, cute, fat, lazy and stupid, and pretty much everything I would want to be if I were an animal. The cubs we saw at a couple of months old and less than two weeks old were especially adorable. I did have some resentment about them though. So much effort and time is going into prolonging the existence of these animals when they are dying out through no fault but their own. In the wild they separate themselves from each other and refuse to mate and if by some miracle they create offspring, they are so small that it is nearly impossible for them to survive. Evolution is just too difficult for some species, only the strong survive.

In the evening we went to the Sichuan Opera, which in truth was more like China’s Got Talent than an opera. It had dancers, table jugglers and a hand shadow puppeteer that put Phil Halliwell to shame. Once it was over we jumped a cab back to the hotel and had an early night.