16 hours on the cleanest overnight train EVER lands us in Chengdu, the home of Pandas and the capital of the Sichuan province known for it's spicy food!

Our Tour Leader Tomic was having trouble getting us taxis to our hotel when we got off our train as it was too early for the police to be at the train station so the local taxi drivers were refusing to take us anywhere in favour of better fares - after 25 minutes of no luck Tomic decides that the only way we are going to get to our hotel is by Moped Rickshaw - it's 5.30am and the roads are empy as our 5 rickshaws each carrying 2 people and backpacks proceed to have the funniest and scariest wacky races though Chengdu ever! It takes about 15 minutes of haring around corners on 2 wheels, very fast overtaking of each other whilst shouting to each other that no one knows where they are going and short cuts the wrong way up one way streets and we eventually arrive to find that one of the drivers only has one leg and they have charged us 10Yuan over the taxi rate!!!! It was hilarious!!

We chill out in Chengdu for the rest of the day as we look forward to seeing the Giant Pandas. The Giant Pandas are the cutest animals - the place we go to see them is a research facility where they are breeding the pandas in an effort to try and increase their numbers. There are currently about 1000 left in the wild and they aren't sure yet if they are able to introduce any to the wild, but we saw about 6 young teenage pandas and 7 really tiny babies and then we did the BEST THING EVER - Liz (paid a lot of money) to cuddle an adult Giant Panda!!!! IT WAS GREAT!!! the meny will all go back into the research so that's good news - we have some amazing pictures that we will try and get up very soon.

We had some traditional Sichuan Hotpot - which was very spicy and as we were a fairly big group we shared two - one had a whole fish - not too bad but perhaps a little too fishy by the end and the other had a WHOLE CHICKEN - including the head!!!! YUK!!!

We took some time to visit a monastery that was really relaxing and had great gardens to explore before we head off to Leshan and Emei Shan.....