Overview
The giant panda, considered a national treasure in China and adored by the world, is easily recognized by the large, distinctive black patches around its eyes, over the ears, and across its white and round body. The giant panda lives in a few mountain ranges in central China, mainly in Sichuan province, but also in the Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, where they subsist almost entirely on bamboo.
As home of the panda, Sichuan giant panda habitat was designated as a world heritage site in 2006, including sanctuaries of Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, Bifengxia Giant Panda Base in Ya’an, and other wild panda’s nature reserves along Minjiang River gorge. Plateautours.com offers ranges of tours for Giant Panda, from general day trip sightseeing, panda keeper as a volunteer for close-up pandas, to wild panda research and exploration. The following is one of the example panda tours covering all of ranges for the wildlife lover.
Outline Itinerary
Day 01 Chengdu Panda Base / Ya’an (Bifengxia)
Day 02 Bifengxia Panda Base / Shangli / Dujiangyan
Day 03 Dujiangyan Panda Valley – Wild Panda Nature Reserve
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Detail Itinerary
Day 01: Chengdu Panda Base / Ya’an (Bifengxia)
We visit Chengdu’s Giant Panda Breeding Research Base and be a Panda Keeper today. This is the best chance you can get more knowledge and more up-close touch of giant panda. You’ll be guided by an expert in the Panda Base, learn about the pandas’ habitat, diet, mating habits and how they have survived despite increasing threats to their existence. You’ll clean giant panda’s dorm with base’s breeder, select the fresh bamboo and make food feeding pandas, watch Panda Story Cinema, look around in the base that offers excellent opportunities to photograph pandas in a natural setting of lush bamboo thickets. Or you can have photo taken with holding panda (optional, can decide onsite). We then drive to mountainous Ya’an.
Day 02: Bifengxia Panda Base / Shangli / Dujiangyan
Get up early morning to nearby Bifengxia Panda Base. The base breeds over 90 giant pandas that were moved from the previous Wolong Giant Panda Nature Reserve after suffered extensive damage in 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and now it is the largest captive giant panda institution in the world. This is another chance to interact with the pandas, including cubs! Then, we ride down a 26-story elevator to the bottom of Bifeng Gorge for a leisurely short hike amidst the stream, waterfalls and abundant plant and bird life. We’ll practice techniques for photographing waterfalls, and low-light forest landscapes. After lunch in the ancient village of Shangli, we head to Dujiangyan, a birth place of Chinese Taoism.
Day 03: Dujiangyan Panda Valley – Wild Panda Nature Reserve
Morning drive shortly to the vicinity of Dujiangyan town, visit Giant Panda Valley – the sub-branch of Chengdu Giant Panda Base, focusing on panda’s rehabilitation experiment and research. It is established in December 2011 and now has 6 captive breeding pandas here which will be gradually released to the wild in the coming years after they pass the transitional period. More pandas and red pandas will move here for the wild restoration in the future, forecasted with 30-40 giant pandas and 50-100 red pandas. Then we will drive north into the Minshan Mountains and arrive at Wild Panda Nature Reserve. Beyond lies a secret slice of Chinese wilderness, a chain of nature reserves little known to outsiders and visited by only a handful of westerners. Our focus is a remote 100,000-acre sanctuary encompassing a lushly forested ecosystem that’s among the most diverse and intact in Asia. This national reserve, rated Grade I by WWF as a global biodiversity hotspot, is home to healthy populations of some of the world's most endangered wildlife, including some 60 giant pandas. The reserve also harbors more than 1,200 takin and 1,000 golden monkeys among its 430 different mammal species, as well as more than 2,400 different kinds of plants.
