after spending the night in dujiangyan, i took the bus to the china conservation and research centre for the giant panda. the centre has a volunteer program, where for 700 yuan you can work for the centre (that is, you pay them the 700 yuan; they don’t pay you).
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| panda crap. | more panda crap. |
the work involves clearing out the uneaten bamboo from a few panda enclosures in the morning, picking up panda crap – which is basically undigested bamboo shards bound together with some nasty stuff – and bringing in fresh bamboo; then there is free time; then you hand-feed some of the pandas; then there is lunch; then there is free time; then there’s a video documentary about the program to reintroduce pandas to the wild; then there’s a little free time before another round of cleaning the enclosures and hand-feeding the pandas, and then you’re done. there really isn’t a lot to do, which gives you a lot of time to walk around and look at the pandas. i didn’t know there would be so much down time, so i signed up for three days of volunteering. in the end, i didn’t mind, because hand-feeding the pandas never got old, and i was too jet-lagged to do much else anyway.
okay, let’s look at pandas:
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| i got a million of ’em, folks. | |||
feeding time:
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play time:
next: hiking
COHN17 