During our itinerary planning months ago, we had to shorten our initially planned itinerary of 14 days to 13 on account of the flight timings we’d booked. That meant that a visit to the Wolong Panda Reserve on our way back from Sichuan to Chengdu had to be dropped. We didn’t think too much of it then, as it was in our plan to visit the Dujiangyan Panda Valley anyway on our own in the last segment of our trip. Our local guide though managed to squeeze it back in outside the official itinerary by visiting Shuangqiao Valley as early as we could, bringing us to Wolong Panda Reserve after that in the mid-afternoon for a 1.5 hour visit, and then racing back to Chengdu to get us to our hotel by 9PM. Which he managed to pull off with time to spare even: we reached our service apartment in Chengdu at 7PM.
The Wolong Panda Reserve is actually a fairly new facility: the original one was destoryed in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, so this one was built in 2016. Unlike the Chengdu Panda Base inside the city itself, the Wolong one is considered to be perhaps the more authentic experience, since it’s located right where the natural habitats of these lovely bears are, and at the elevation of 1,800m altitude too. We arrived at the reserve mid-afternoon at 3PM where there were very few visitors around.
We’d read earlier on that pandas are most active in the morning: so were pleasantly surprised to seee several of them lazing about, engaged in deep thought, or just munching on an early dinner. The only real real-life encounters I’ve ever had with pandas before this has been at the Singapore Zoo, and that was just 2 at most at a time and in very crowded areas.
Wolong Panda Reserve was a vastly different experience: there were a dozen enclosures that we were able to cover within the 1.5 hours we could spend, and we saw perhaps a dozen pandas [the rest were hiding in their houses], in unhurried settings, and barely any visitors around us too. There were also watchful park wardens trailing visitors who were gathering to make sure all visitors abide by park rules. There is also a larger eastern side of the reserve that we didn’t have time to explore, and I suspect that is the area where you could potentially spot wild pandas or other animals that live in the reserve and that are free to roam.
The reserve is at 1,800 altitude, and sits against the mountain range which I think is the natural habitat of these pandas.[/caption]
As the daughter quipped, we could spend hours at just one enclosure watching that trio of pandas munch away on bamboos. It was that surreal + cute. I don’t know what the visit to Dujiangyan Panda Valley will be like, but our expectations have certainly been made very high with this visit to Wolong!