Finally out of the Mountains

After our last three days of very long bus trips, we have decided that we will NEVER do this again. The morning we left Xiangcheng (day 2 of bus travel), we again could not get on the bus without some other driver making a joke about us, again causing the whole bus to erupt into laughter. It was not much more pleasant when the bus got going either. The bus was really crowded, dirty as people were throwing their leftover food on the floor and there was constant spitting and smoking. The bus ride was 14 hours and the seats were horribly uncomfortable. To top it all off, I was nauseous for the first four and a half hours of the trip. S was very supportive and the orange juice he got me made me feel a lot better. When we finally arrived in Kanding at 8 PM, we were surrounded by 15-20 touts outside the bus station trying to get us to stay in their hotel or wanting to drive us another 7 hours to Chengdu. We were tired and frustrated and, even as we followed one tout to a hotel, the others kept following us and slapping our bags to get our attention. The icing on the cake was the tout gave us a freezing cold room with no hot water. We woke up yesterday morning deciding that we needed to get out of the mountains and close this exhausting chapter of the trip. We got a 10AM bus to Chengdu and we were so relieved when we arrived in the Sichuan capital, swearing off long bus rides forever!
The last few days of traveling have felt more difficult than any other part of the trip. We both felt like people had been going out of their way to be mean or unhelpful to us. It felt very strange because we have found that the Chinese often go out of their way to help and are incredibly gracious. We brushed it off the first day but felt something strange was going on as we continued to see and feel it happening. When we were in Qiatou after Tiger Leaping Gorge, we met a French couple that told us that they had experienced hostility from the Chinese while they were traveling in the Northwest. Like the southwestern part we were just in, the northwest is home to a large percentage of one of China's ethnic communities. In both areas, there is a history of tension between the minority community and the Han Chinese. We believe that it is this tension that has been causing people to be sometimes unhelpful or aggressive towards us.
We are happy to now be in Chengdu and plan to spend a few days recovering from the long and difficult journey. Today marks day 94 of our trip and have been to 35 different cities/towns in China and 50 places in total. This morning, we got up early to visit the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base. We arrived during feeding time and so we saw the pandas during their most active part of the day, feasting on bamboo shoots and leaves. There were giant pandas as well as red pandas, which kind of look like raccoons, and we visited the nursery where were saw very small and adorable baby pandas. As Sichuan is home to spicy food, we had a fiery hotpot for lunch. As of now, we plan on spending 2 more nights here before heading off to Chongqing.

Sichuan Mountains