The pandas are awake long before the coaches arrive.
Panda Valley is twenty minutes from our gate. We leave at eight, walk in as it opens, and are back for a late breakfast before the tour buses turn up from Chengdu.
熊 · Panda Valley, Dujiangyan
Breakfast is at half past eight, and it is not for you.
Panda Valley is the Dujiangyan base of the China Conservation and Research Centre for the Giant Panda — the quiet end of the panda system, where older animals are retired and adolescents learn to climb. It sits in a fold of hillside, it has no coach park, and on a weekday morning you can hear the bamboo being cut.
We leave at eight and arrive as the gates open. The upper path first: the keepers wheel out fresh bamboo at feeding time, the cubs come down out of the branches and forget that anyone is watching. For the first hour you will pass perhaps a dozen people, most of them local, most of them walking slowly.
By eleven the groups have arrived from Chengdu, four coaches deep at the gate. By then we are back at the house with coffee on the table and the mountain still in cloud. This is the whole trick, and it costs nothing but an early alarm.
Arranged the night before, over tea.
Every guest gets a printed itinerary before bed. Timings shift with season and weather; the rhythm does not.
Two minutes of pandas, no commentary.
The first is the Chengdu base an hour north — same animals, ten times the crowd. The second is what feeding time looks like at opening.
One morning, in the order it happens.
Photographs from our own runs — early light, wet bamboo, and the path before the crowd.
All photographs taken on the route described above, on ordinary weekday mornings.
What guests say afterwards.
Notes from the guest book. The early start is the part everyone mentions.
We were the second car in the car park. When we left there were four coaches and a queue at the gate. The early start is the entire trick.M. & P.Lyon, France · March
Our daughter counted eleven pandas before breakfast. She still talks about the one that fell out of the tree.The H. familyUtrecht, Netherlands · July
I expected a zoo. It is not a zoo — it is a hillside with animals on it, and almost nobody on the path.J.Melbourne, Australia · November
The early hour, and everything around it.
We have been doing this run for years and know the keepers at the gate by name, which matters more than it should: it is why the car is allowed past the first barrier, and why the tickets are already in an envelope.
Included for guests
- Car and driver, both directions
- Tickets bought the night before — no queue
- Flask of jasmine tea and pastries in the car
- Breakfast held back until you return
竹 · feeding timeThe other three doors.
Most guests take one door a day and leave the afternoon empty.
Sleep twenty minutes from the gate.
Four rooms with private hot springs at the foot of the mountain, from ¥XXX a night with breakfast. Panda mornings are arranged for guests, not sold as a tour.