Chengdu, Sichuan, China (成都，四川， 中国)

I was in Chengdu last weekend. First time in Sichuan. Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan and boasts 10 million inhabitants (14 million for the municipality)., a very important city of Western China. People speak Sichuanese, a dialect of Mandarin, and I found it really hard to understand it. The pronunciation in particular is not easy – and to be honest, they found it hard to understand me too at times! We had a wonderful time and were lucky to get perfect weather on the first day (the city has a reputation for rain). We went to visit the Panda Research and Breeding Centre, unique in the world. They breed pandas there and do amazingly well. You should visit the centre from July to December, which is the time pandas are born. Incredibly they are only a few centimetres long at birth. We were lucky to see a dozen or so three-week old pandas, sleeping happily in incubators. What a sight! They are gorgeous things, so cute we wanted to take one home! The whole park is stunning. Be warned, it's better to visit early in the morning when the pandas are active.

We also went to visit Leshan's Giant Buddha, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, a two-hour drive from Chengdu. As it was Mid-Autumn Festival, the place was swarming with Chinese tourists and we had to queue for one and a half hours to get to the buddha, but it was worth the wait. In the past you used to be able to climb up on the left hand side, but now you go down on that side and walk back up on the other side. The buddha is 71 metre high and was built in the Tang Dynasty (618–907AD). Luckily, it was not damaged by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.