Chengdu · Chongqing · Sichuan
Pandas in the morning, hotpot at night, and the strangest, most vertical skyline in China — the home ground we’ve operated since 1987.
Home ground
Panda Journeys is the private brand of Chengdu Everbright International Travel Service Co., Ltd. — licensed in Chengdu in 1987, and based here ever since. This is not a destination we sell from a distance. It is where our planners live, eat, and argue about hotpot.
That proximity shows in small ways: which enclosure to stand at when the panda base opens, which teahouse still roasts its own leaves, which hotpot house splits the pot without being asked. Thirty-nine years of small ways.
Sample shape · 5 days
Not a package with a price tag — a rhythm we know works, written out so you can see the pace. Yours will differ.
Arrive & old Chengdu
A private car meets you at Tianfu or Shuangliu. Check in, shower, walk. Jinli’s lanes are at their best at dusk — lanterns coming on, skewers over charcoal, your first bowl of something quietly numbing. Nothing else is scheduled. Jet lag gets a say.
Pandas early, hands in the food
The research base opens early, and the first cool hours are when pandas actually move — we have you at the right enclosure as the gates part. Late morning, a market walk with a chef, then a cooking class: mapo tofu, kung pao chicken, your own chilli oil to carry home. Evening, Sichuan opera and its face-changing — or a bamboo chair in a teahouse and nothing at all.
Rail to Chongqing
The bullet train takes about ninety minutes. By lunch you are in a different city entirely — one stacked on mountains, where the metro passes through the middle of a residential tower at Liziba and street level is a matter of opinion. An afternoon on foot, then your first proper Chongqing hotpot, ordered by someone who knows the menu.
Hongyadong after dark
Daylight for the city’s strange geometry — Eling Park’s viewpoints, the cableway over the Yangtze if the queue is kind. After dark, Hongyadong: eleven cliffside floors lit gold above the river. Photographs do not prepare you. Stand across the water first, then walk in.
Ciqikou, then onward
A slow morning in Ciqikou’s old lanes — porcelain workshops, mahua pastry pulled by hand at the stall door. Then a private transfer to Jiangbei airport or the rail station. Many journeys keep going from here: a Yangtze cruise east, or higher ground west.
This is a sample shape, not a package. Five days can become three or eight; more food, fewer museums; the other city first. Your version is rebuilt from your dates, your party and your pace.
Concept visualChongqing · after dark
Hongyadong is eleven storeys of stilt-house architecture hanging off a cliff, lit from the river up. Around it, a city where roads stack five deep and the monorail threads between towers. It is the strangest urban landscape in China, and it only really begins at night.
Where it can extend
Chengdu is a hinge. Give the route two or three more days and it opens in any of three directions.
Ready-made next steps: the Jiuzhaigou & Huanglong journeycontinues north from here, and Chongqing after dark is where the honeymoon route begins.
Operated by 成都光大国际旅行社 — licensed since 1987Travel licence L-SC-CJ00008See the paperwork →
Good to know
They work year-round, which is rare in China. March–May and September–November are the comfortable windows. Summer is hot and humid — Chongqing especially earns its furnace reputation — so we tilt those days toward early mornings and long lunches. Winter is grey but quiet, and pandas are at their liveliest in cool air.
At the gate when it opens. The first cool hours of the morning are feeding time — the only window when pandas reliably move. By late morning most of them are asleep in a tree. It is the one early alarm we insist on.
Yes. Every good hotpot house serves a split pot — half fiery, half clear bone broth — and your guide orders, so nothing arrives as a surprise. Sichuan cooking is also far broader than its reputation: tea-smoked duck, sweet dumplings, dishes built on aroma rather than heat. Numbing is optional.
Rail, almost always. The bullet train runs centre to centre in about ninety minutes; the drive takes three to four hours of expressway with little to see. Your driver hands you off at one station, another car meets you at the other, and the luggage is dealt with.
Your brief
Dates, party, and how deep you want to go on the food — three lines is plenty to start.
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