23/08/2026
Panda Land, and the Great Drone Escape: Our Last Day in China 🐼
It is the 22nd of August, and we wake at 6:30, because today we are going not only to make our way back to London, but also to visit the Panda Research Base of Chengdu (成都大熊猫繁育研究基地), as a very last activity before flying. Yesterday was a lovely chilled day. We went around the city looking for bike boxes, did some shopping, and more importantly we cycled through Chengdu without any particular goal but to see it. We rolled through parks and followed the rivers, ran alongside massive three lane roads hemmed in by skyscrapers, and always felt safe, because the bike lanes here are quite wonderful. We even ended up at the Giant store, where we had all three bikes serviced before carrying on with our spin. It was great.
And so today was Panda Land! 🐼
The research base is enormous. It was hot and busy, with far too many people, even though we arrived just as the gates opened. The forest was beautiful, intricate stands of bamboo blanketing huge stretches of it, a rainforest kind of world all around, humid and green and hilly. We wandered more or less at random to the giant panda nursery and managed to see some of these huge, fluffy, faintly clumsy looking animals. One of them was ambling past a pond, swaggering his body from side to side, as though showing off his strength the way bad boys do. 😄
Later we reached the nursery proper and watched baby giant pandas draped in the trees or lying lazily on the platforms built for them. So cute! Around us, thousands of Chinese and European tourists could not help yelling out their delight the instant one of the cubs so much as twitched, which to us felt oddly childish, but you have to go with the flow.
Further on we came across some red pandas. They are far smaller than the giant pandas, a good deal larger than a house cat but not by a huge margin, and they too are impossibly cute. Interestingly, we learned that they are not even related to the bear family the way giant pandas are, and yet the red panda is the only other animal we call by this name. In fact the red panda is in a family entirely of its own, the Ailuridae, of which it is the sole living member, more closely related to raccoons, weasels and skunks than to any bear. In short, there is no small version of the black and white giant panda we all know so well. Instead, the “other” panda is red and looks more like a cross between a fox, a raccoon and a skunk. And that, we had no idea of until today.
We picked up other facts too. The giant panda has a surprisingly powerful bite for an animal that lives almost entirely on bamboo. One study of 151 carnivores placed it around fifth for bite strength, and pound for pound, relative to its skull and body size, its jaws are among the most formidable of all, even if in raw force the polar bear and the brown bear still bite harder. Pandas are classified as carnivores, and they still carry the canines handed down from their meat eating ancestors, even though these days they eat almost nothing but bamboo and a few other grasses.
The red pandas were a joy to watch. Some were eating, being fed by the staff, some were dozing in the trees, one was hanging here, another slowly making its way to a different part of the forest, not on the ground but moving from branch to branch, tree to tree, like a small flame drifting through the canopy. 🔥
At some point Azur and I lost RoPu. We looked for her, doubled back on ourselves a few times, pushing against the tide of people like salmon labouring upstream, but we only found her much later at the exit, a little upset that we had not managed to see it all together, and yet laughing that she had turned out more elusive than the pandas themselves.
The panda base was a fine outing, but to us not quite as thrilling as the size of the crowd promised it would be. And most likely, to us at least, the crowd was the problem. Pandas are and always will be among the most beloved animals on earth, and simply knowing the remarkable work this centre does to protect these two vulnerable species was enough to make a good morning of it, especially when we saw the tiny, recently born cubs being cared for by the staff with such dedication and attention.
Then we came back to the hotel. I had woken around 5 in the morning with one of those crushing migraines yet again, and the pain and dizziness were at their peak by the time we got back to the room. I crashed for a few hours. I took more medicine, but the throbbing in my neck and left temple was still debilitating. I could barely swallow any food either, so I stood under a long, boiling hot shower, using the pressure to knead my neck and try somehow to ease the pain. It helped a little, but there is no magic cure for a migraine. Only time and rest can do the work. Luckily we had spent the previous evening packing the bikes, so everything was ready for the journey home, and I had little to do but get to the airport and check in.
Well, that is what we thought!
We had booked a van to bring the bikes to the airport, and it all went smoothly, that is, right up until security. There, at the oversized baggage check, things began to turn crazy, then ridiculous, and then frankly absurd.
At first it looked like everything was fine. Then, on the scanner, the security man spotted a few items inside a couple of the bike boxes. We had to open them up again and again, because a light was still clipped to the handlebars, or a lighter was tucked in a bag, and so on, and so on, until at last they found the drone, which this time I had decided to check in rather than carry on me, knowing full well it would be trouble in Beijing, where we had a connecting flight to London and had already been through the ordeal on the way in.
And yes, exactly as I had feared, the drone was a problem. After a long inspection of the drone itself, RoPu was marched off to the airport police station, where she spent the best part of an hour surrounded by officers trying to find the serial number of this tiny toy of a drone (a DJI Neo), checking whether it was registered under Chinese flight regulations (it was not), questioning her as though she were a criminal, even filming her, and finally making her sign a document with her own fingerprint, before being told that, regardless of all this, she might still be fined for possessing an illegal item once we reached Beijing, and this despite holding a form that proved her good faith.
The migraine, for its part, had not let up for a moment, leaving me weak and impatient, cranky and short tempered. But you know, here in China you do not argue with authority. Or rather, you can, if you are prepared to end up in a cell. So I took it upon myself, on edge and aching, to open and reseal the bike boxes, once, then a second time when they turned up other irrelevant bits and pieces in my tool bag that had to be left behind. It took three hours to clear the first security check. Then came the second. I was searched again from head to toe, had to run my bags through the X-ray machine twice, my shoes, my hair, my feet, all scrutinised with a zeal that would make anyone feel guilty even with nothing whatsoever to hide.
A moment later we were sitting on the plane. I did not even see it take off, for I dropped straight into a deep, drooling sleep, away from the physical pain and, for a little while, away from the eyes of the police.
Back in Chengdu the police had made it clear, over and over, that it would be far better to carry the drone with us than to pack it in the checked luggage. So that is what we did. And little did we know that when the first flight landed in Beijing, security would be waiting for us on arrival. The plane touched down, and soon after, while everyone else was pulling out their suitcases and starting to queue for the doors, we heard RoPu’s name called over the aircraft’s speakers, and we were made to disembark ahead of the entire plane, because the police were there and wanted to inspect the drone. How mad is that!
Off the plane, we handed over the drone, and were told that unfortunately, because we had not checked it in with the bikes, they now had to confiscate it. We explained that we had been told to keep it on us, so none of this made any sense, since it had been checked in and they themselves had forced us to take it out in Chengdu. And the thing looks so utterly harmless, and we had all the paperwork to prove our good faith. The officer seemed to take it all in while staying completely impassive. He made a call, and we followed him as he led us toward the international transfer, carrying the drone himself, silent and grave, as though his whole career hung on this small piece of plastic.
We made our way through to the transfer section of the airport with barely any time to spare, and once the four of us were in the shuttle, our officer was swapped for yet another, who took it upon himself to carry the little lump of plastic, the source of all our embarrassment and trouble. Other travellers looked at us with fear in their eyes to see us es**rted by police. It was so upsetting, and, as always, so ridiculously absurd that it almost became comical. And more to the point, it also became useful. Being with the police opened doors faster than for anyone else. We skipped queues that let us reach our connecting flight in time, and as we walked we came to understand that the officers were simply making sure we would board with the drone, and not slip out of the airport with this forbidden object still in our hands.
So as we boarded, the policeman handed the drone back to RoPu, and that was the end of the story. The rules these robot men usually follow to the letter, with their blank faces and ramrod postures, as though life itself depended on their serving the power of the system, had, for once, been bent. The power of the mind had won out over the RULE, and they had somehow agreed not to confiscate the thing, but to es**rt us to the plane, where they could then hand it back. I was astonished that so rigid an institution had actually softened, because for a while it looked more than likely that the drone was lost for good to the stupidity of the system, and yet in the end it was not. Hooray! 🙏
So please, be warned. No drones allowed, even on a transfer flight through Beijing. We ran the experiment for you, so you will not have to go through it yourselves. And no lighters either. You can get seven days in jail for trying to sneak a lighter through security. And no battery packs, no power banks, no lights, none of the things they have decided you should not have.
The police state is truly something out of this world in China. I waited until I was out of the country to talk about it, for fear of criticising the government and landing myself in trouble. Here, whether you are Chinese or a foreigner, your ID card or passport is your life. You must register to buy a ticket for a tourist site, or simply to board a train. You must register to check into a hotel, or to book a cab. There is no dodging security, not even to get into the metro, where you pass through scanners and get swabbed in case, who knows, you are carrying a pocket knife or planning to blow yourself up in some terrorist attack. I have no idea what it is they fear, but with so much security in place, the fear of other people seems to melt away, and all that is left is a wariness of the authoritarian regime you are living inside.
Passports here are what you scan to board trains, to visit the pandas or the terracotta soldiers, to cycle through the many police checkpoints. Your every move is traced, analysed, matched to your face, controlled. I had never been anywhere like it, a place where freedom is not a word you say lightly, and where, honestly, it does not really exist. When we passed our final immigration check in Beijing, the officer scanned our passports, and from behind her we could see on her screen all the photographs the police had taken of us over the course of the journey, and there were many. Even the hotels were forever photographing our passports, some of them refusing to let us stay at all, put off by the hassle of registering foreign travellers. Facial recognition is no myth here. It is a well developed technology that the system uses everywhere, every single day. And it is coming our way in Europe. The authoritarian regime seems to be inspiring our own governments. I hope we will not end up under so much control, but I fear it is already creeping in, just not as openly as in China or the other dictatorships, but quietly, in a more hidden way, under the guise of human rights and freedom of speech laws, insinuating itself into our societies.
Let us always keep our eyes open, always, and claim what is undeniably ours to keep, our freedom to think, to move, to speak, and to choose what is best for us, not only as individuals, but as a people.