a film all about the work of the centre and its future expansion plans, its nice to know that at least the Chinese government realises the importance of the panda and is making funds available to try and stop it becoming extinct.

After our panda visit we went off to check into our hotel, which was really nice and then went off to a Buddhist temple which apparently had a wicked vegetarian hall - much to Rob’s delight. All of us except Greg we veggie so that made things a lot easier. The temple was lovely but all the old area and little streets around the outside of the temple had been knocked down and was being replaced by yeap you guessed it yet more ugly concrete buildings. Greg was telling us that this was happening more and more in each city, the government just says that the houses are too old and they are to be replaced, regardless of any historical significance the area may hold, our

guide told us that the government just does what it wants regardless of what the people want - it’s a crying shame that no historical world organisation gets onto the government to try and persuade them to leave some of its culture behind. The Chinese government is its desperation to become more western and number one world power is just destroying its own history and heritage and alls its does is replace this beautiful old places with bland soulless concrete sprawling metropolises, they really are a law unto themselves.

We headed straight for the vegetarian hall to get a good feed as we were all pretty hungry after our early start and busy morning. The restaurant is run by monks but a lot of the dishes are mock meat so they have things like ‘intestines with monkey head mushroom’ now even though I fully understand that none of these dishes contain meat it still doesn’t sound too