Tips 👏
- Taxi are very cheap.
- Local food, called Sichuan food, is excellent.
- Have a walk on Bar Street at night, the view of the bridge with the river is great.
🏠 Accommodation
We stayed in a basic but central AirBnB with everything you need inside (including video-projector).
🚲 Getting there
Bullet train from Xi’an, 3h.
⏱ Duration
We stayed three nights, including one chill day, and that was enough.
❌ Miss
We didn’t had time to checkout the Leshan Giant Buddha but it look amazing!
Pandas Research Centre 🐼
This was the reason why we came to Chengdu, to see pandas in their natural habitat. While we saw a lot of pandas, red pandas and swans in the nature, it felt more like a big zoo than a proper wild place. Anyway, still worth to see those buddy from that close!
To get there, we took a cab, for 30RMB/way. We found plenty of taxis waiting for us on the way back. Also, we went super early, around 7AM, since they feed the pandas around 8AM which is the moment where they’re active. We bought our tickets onsite for 60RMB with no queue since it was early.
Lastly, the site is quite big so it took us some time to walk around. We started by the big pandas enclosure, follow by the red pandas, and went back down to the lake where you can see black swans.
Sichuan Food 🍛
That turned out to be the best highlight of this city, the food. We literally felt in love with the region cuisine. Simple dishes, spicy, super tasty and cheap. The one you must try are dan-dan noodles (plain noodle with pork mince and spices in some red oil broth, also exist with chickpea for vegetarians) and wontons (cousins of dumplings).
We found a place online, thanks to the FoodRanger, which ended up being the crush of our trip. Very cheap, very fast and best Chinese food we ever had, you have to get there: ChunYanGguan Yuxiang Paigumian (check the food ranger website).
We also did a food tour we found on AirBnB, where you go around with a tuk-tuk trying different street food places. It’s nice but we wouldn’t recommend it since quite pricy for what it is.
Once we finished eating, we went grab a drink at the bar area nearby the river to have a gorgeous view on the Anshun Bridge.
Read Next ⏭️
Our three days stay in the biggest city in world Chongqing to check out the three bridges, check again Xi’an, or go back to the main China post.