2 Days Chengdu Panda & Food Tour

Upon your arrival at the Chengdu airport or the train station, your local guide and driver will welcome you and escort you to check into the hotel in the downtown area. Have a short break to refresh yourself. At lunch time, your guide will recommend some best restaurants for local foods, such as dandan spicy noodles, Sichuan-flavor wonton, bean curd jelly, and scalded vegetables and meat.

Now it is time to start your sightseeing tour! The first stop is the Jinsha Site Museum, built on an archaeological site that once belonged to the ancient Shu Kingdom, which flourished from 12th century BC and vanished hundreds of years later. It houses many cultural relics of the civilization, a key highlight of which is the “Sun and Immortal Bird”, a decorative piece of gold foil with a sun carved in the center and four flying birds around it, indicative of Shu people’s worship of the sun. Now it has become the symbol of Chinese Cultural Heritage. Your knowledgeable guide will introduce the twists and turns of its discovery, as well as unveil the mystery about its making. Then we’ll have a break back at your hotel until it’s time for our evening food tour.

Around 17:30, your tour guide will accompany you to take subway or taxi to head for Yulin Road Night Fair to start our exciting food tour. As a vegetable market is situated nearby, we first take you there to learn about a very distinctive culture of China: Unlike the habit of bringing home a week’s worth of food materials, Chinese people buy them from such market per day for next meals. Here you can find almost all everyday food ingredients, like wheat flour, rice, cooking oil, spices, ready-to-eat products, and, above all, fresh vegetables. Out of the market, we are before the Yulin district, where the colorful night fair begins as darkness falls. Foods stands are showing up selling myriad snacks you’d never have another chance to taste: scissor-cut fried potato, brown-sugared sticky rice cake, ice jelly with shredded nut… The best part is, we’ll treat you to 3 or 4 of the most popular snacks, which you can savor while enjoying the energetic atmosphere through the fair. To top it off, let’s stop by a local brewpub for some cool beer!

With your eyes and stomach satisfied, your guide will take you back to your hotel by subway or taxi.

Meal: Dinner (local snacks)

After breakfast in the early morning, we’ll head to Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. Bet you come to Chengdu mainly for it! But why the early morning? That’s because the giant pandas are more active at 08:30 - 09:00, when they are being fed. You can also see them climbing trees, eating bamboos and sometimes apples, playing with each other or just lying there. There are around 210 pandas now in this base divided into different zones, so two hours or more are needed for you to visit this site.

Next, let’s explore the Wide and Narrow Alley, 300-year-old streets lined with traditional Chinese buildings serving as restaurants, teahouses, artistic studios, and so on. Here you can taste more authentic local snacks, watch artists making clay figurines and sugar paintings, appreciate folk arts like Sichuan opera, hand shadow play, and long-mouth pot tea art performance, and enjoy the unique service of ear cleaning. You might try ear cleaning at your expense, and see why it’s regarded as one of the three happiest things in life by Chengdu locals.

Afterwards, visit Wenshu Monastery, Chengdu’s best-preserved monastery dating back 1,400 years. Apart from those old Buddhist buildings, the compound additionally offers insight to classical Chinese garden aesthetics. It is also a charity raising funds to support education in remote mountainous areas, as well as organizing volunteers to go to poverty-stricken places to tutor or have fun with kids, work for nursing homes, etc. As pragmatic as holy, the monastery merits its fame.

At the end of the tour, your guide and driver will escort you to the Chengdu airport or train station to catch your scheduled flight or train. If you want to extend your tour, feel free to contact us. We wish you a pleasant onward journey!

Meal: Western buffet breakfast