How to hug a panda?

From the city of Chengdu, a three hour bumpy car ride into the Qionglai Mountains (Sichuan Province) will bring you to the Wolong natural reserve. In collaboration with the WWF, Wolong houses the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda. The Center has over 100 pandas (= more than 70% of the world’s captive ones) and is the world largest semi-wild breeding farm. Less than 2000 pandas are believed to be living in the wild. This time of the year, the park is almost deserted and as such the local workers and volunteers have plenty of time for you. I had the incredible and once in-a life-time opportunity to go behind the scenes and touch, hug, wrestle, almost kiss the pandas. You have to see the pictures to believe it. At one time, a panda hugged me from behind (meaning he wrapped his right arm around me and his left paw on my left shoulder), I didn’t see him or her coming and I needed the help of a keeper to get free. The panda just wanted to play but I wasn’t so sure. The panda are so huggable but at the end they are still bears. Surprisingly their fur is not as soft as I expected but boy do they look cute. I’m a little in shock and still cannot believe it myself that I actually hugged a panda. This is by far the highlight of all my adventures in China. I took over 250 pictures, just couldn’t stop taking them but then the feeling of touching a panda cannot be captured in a picture or words. I wished many of you were there with me to experience it, especially my son Andreas who has a life long obsession with pandas.