What brought us to Langzhong? It’s a pretty small city, certainly by Chinese standards, just a little over 100,000 people in northwestern Sìchuan. But we had a few days to kill before heading back to Hong Kong and wanted to get a little off the beaten track. It’s got a reputation as a place to see great, traditional Chinese architecture in its old town – the real “old China” that’s quickly disappearing beneath massive new development projects – so we hopped on a bus and took the four-hour ride.

And yes, the old town was attractive and atmospheric; lots of activity and color and traditional architecture. The only problem is that it only takes maybe 45 minutes or an hour to kind of walk through the whole thing and we were here for three days. We’d debated whether to spend two or three days there and settled for three. The good news was that the weather turned really nice on the third day, after some pretty chilly and damp weather the first two days, so we got to enjoy just hanging around the last day.

One of the challenges here was the very limited English spoken. There was precisely one person at our hotel who spoke English at all and if he wasn’t around we were pretty helpless; the rest of the staff didn’t understand even when we asked for something pretty simple, like a taxi (we were a couple miles out of town). Restaurants were even worse; typically no English whatsoever. Here, then, more than most places we’ve been so far, Mark’s rudimentary Mandarin came in really handy. By the time we got to our last dinner Mark just ordered the stuff we wanted – Kung Pao Chicken, eggplant, and a traditional Sìchuan beef dish – without relying on a menu or pictures at all.

With little else to do, then, our days centered around eating and reading. My book right now is amusing. I’m reading a biography of Charles de Gualle and it’s pretty rare to read about such a heroic, historic figure and find yourself constantly thinking “What a dick.” It appears to have been a pretty universal reaction to him. When I search my Kindle for “son of a bitch” a number of quotes from American officials pop up.

As we hoped in our attempt to get off the grid a bit in Sìchuan Province, the star of the show was the food. The peppers – the Sìchuan peppercorns and the various green and red peppers – are becoming addictive. We had a particular green bean dish a few times, always with lots of peppercorns and red peppers and garlic, that was just the best bean dish I’ve ever had. Some dishes I wasn’t entirely sure what part of the animal I was eating and was probably just as happy not to know, but boy was it good. The prices, meanwhile, were unbelievable. We’d order maybe four dishes for dinner, along with tea, and it would come to under $15. For a really good meal. That’s why we came to Langzhong!

And so that’s Langzhong: great food, a quaint old town, lots of time to read, and a chance for Mark’s Mandarin to blossom. From here we have a quick two-day stop in Changqing and then a three-day detour back to Hong Kong for Mark’s surgery before we come back to Sìchuan for a three-day cruise up the Yangtze River. We’re pretty excited about that (the river part, not the surgery part).

From Hainan we flew up to Chengdu, a city of seven-and-a-half million people and the capital of Sìchuan Province in Southwest China. Mark’s had a fascination with Sìchuan cuisine for some time and Anita in particular really wanted to see the giant pandas to be found there, so it seemed a pretty appropriate place to spend our last few days with by brother and his family.

The highlight of our couple days there was definitely the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base. We got to the center before 8:00 AM on a Monday morning and had the opportunity to watch them with only a few other tourists around. Highly recommended!

Giant pandas – now the symbol of the World Wildlife Foundation – are among the rarest animals on earth; there are only about 1,500 of them left. A big problem is that they are described as “sexually reluctant,” and thus incredibly difficult to breed. Then even when they successfully birth, the infant pandas have high death rates. A movie we saw at the breeding center showed the newly born pandas: blind, completely unable to do anything for themselves, and about the size of a stick of butter. The mothers – 1,000 times the size of the infants – are clueless on how to take care of something so tiny. One wonders what evolutionary forces led to such a bizarre reproduction cycle.

Along with the giant pandas at the center, they also have a number of red pandas. I’d not only never seen a red panda before, I’d never heard of them. They look more like a slightly oversized – and very cute – raccoon than a bear, and in fact are not particularly closely related to giant pandas. As arboreal animals we saw a bunch of them up in trees, eating, napping, and just in general hanging around. Very cute, but I have to say no where near as impressive as the giant pandas.

The other big excursion for us was a day trip to Mount Qingcheng, described variously as one of the key centers of Taoism for over 2,000 years and even as the birthplace of Taoism. Either way, it’s a beautiful retreat with trails and pagodas and temples and lots and lots and lots of Chinese day-trippers from Chengdu. Part of the fun was just figuring out how to get there and then to the top. Travel included subway, a big bus, a little bus, a little tour car to the entrance, a little boat ride at one point, a cable car, and many, many steps up to the main temple. Then, to my enormous surprise, we stopped for lunch right outside the main entrance. The restaurant was very homey, not bright or fancy at all, but the food was fantastic with enough choices to satisfy the variety of tastes assembled at a table with little kids, adults who don’t like spicy foods, and me and Mark, who do.

One of the things that we’ve noticed a bit in China, and we saw in spades in Chengdu, is how easy transportation is. The highways, for instance, make the freeways in Massachusetts look like third-world disasters. The subway in Chengdu was incredibly fast, efficient, clean, and easy to follow. We were amused at 8:00 AM on Sunday morning as we were trying to get a subway to the bus station, to just miss the train we wanted. We looked at the monitor and saw that the next train was coming by in three minutes. At 8:00 AM on a Sunday, all for just 50 cents each! And if all that weren’t enough, the taxis are super cheap, too; a 30-minute ride up to the northern suburbs to see the panda breeding center ran us about $6.50. There are definitely things to like about traveling in China.

Finally, a word about the food. Sìchuan food is hot. Really hot. In some ways, though, our limited experience so far is that it’s not exactly or not just the spiciness. They use a peppercorn here that gives a unique and fascinating tingle to your mouth. Hot, yes, but more than that, something I’ve never experienced with any other food. And the good news is that it’s hot enough that there is only so much I can eat; no matter how much I want to keep going, my burning mouth keeps me from overeating. That, and the fact that my last night there I had an awful reaction to something I’d eaten earlier. After saying goodbye to my brother and his family Mark & I went to dinner at a place we’d eaten our first night that has spectacular Sìchuan food and I couldn’t eat more than a bite of it. It didn’t last too long, though, so I’ll be able to enjoy more of it over the next few days before heading to Hong Kong for Mark’s knee surgery.

The only sad part of the experience was saying goodbye to Al & Anita and the kids. We spent two weeks with them here and had a really great time. The kids were real troopers when the walks were too long and the food too weird for them; they’re either just really good kids or really good at acting that way around their uncles. Either way, it worked for us. Now we have to start planning a couple weeks with them in a year or two in South America or Europe!

Imagine you’re in Hangzhou, you had a couple beautiful days around West Lake, but the weather is supposed to be turning pretty bad throughout the region; cold and wet. What do you do? Change plans a bit, go further afield than planned, and head to the beach!

When you say “the beach” in China, that pretty much means Hainan, an island in the South China Sea east of the Gulf of Tonkin and about the size of Belgium. The rest of the country is too far north to have great or even particularly good beaches (especially this time of year), but Hainan is sort of the Hawaii of China.

When we go to the beach, there’s usually not a lot to write about. The day is pretty much breakfast, reading at the beach or pool, lunch, reading at the beach or pool, dinner, sleep. Repeat. And for the most part that’s what we did. We’re still traveling with my brother Al and his family, and you might guess that eight-year-old Jacob and nine-year-old Sierra had no objections to hanging out in the sun and at the pool. So it was a really laid back six days.

The one remarkable thing was just how bad the food was there. The place we stayed was pretty much completely isolated; there was nothing anywhere near where we were and so we ate at the resort. Limited choices, and what there was wasn’t very good. Now, Sierra & Jacob loved their PB&Js and hot dogs, so they certainly weren’t complaining. And Al was happy that such limited choices and modest quality was a great incentive to limit his intake. Otherwise, though, there’ll be no pictures of great food. None of great drinks, either. When you go to the bar and ask if they make Martinis, the bartender is supposed to know that a Martini is not just the Martini-brand vermouth.

At Anita’s instigation, we did one fun day trip outside the resort. We hired a car and went first to the Guanyin of the South Sea, a 350-foot statue of a bodhisattva (an enlightened person) on the south coast of the island. We’ve seen a lot of buddha-type stuff in our travels, but this one was pretty good: a great location on the coast and really tall. Then we went up some big hill to a really good Thai restaurant for lunch. After days at the resort with food that was mediocre at best, this was a real treat.

So that was it. A lot of time at the beach and pool, lots of chances for the kids to run around and have fun, lots of reading. From here we’re off to Chengdu, one of the fastest growing cities on earth.