Visiting the Pandas

Look what I've seen.  Giant pandas!

Last time you heard from me, I was in Dolpo in Nepal, and I was looking for snow leopards not pandas.  After I finished my trek, I flew to a place called Chengdu in the South of China.

Chengdu is one of the only places where you can still see giant pandas.  (There are giant pandas in zoos in other places, like Edinburgh, but not in the wild.)

Pandas are in danger of going extinct as there are not very many of them left.  I visited the panda conservation reserve in Chengdu to see them.  Pandas are specially protected in the reserve to try and help them survive.

I was very happy to see them up close!

Giant pandas eat bamboo and there aren't very many areas where lots of bamboo grows.  This is one of the reasons why pandas are in danger of extinction.

Also, the bamboo doesn't give them very much energy, so a lot of the pandas in the reserve were having a nice long rest.  (Adam, Robin and Grace eat lots of pasta, plus their five a day, so they have much more energy than the pandas!)

I also saw some red pandas.  They are much smaller than giant pandas but they are still very cute!

I've seen lots of amazing animals on my travels.  I enjoyed riding elephants and seeing monkeys in Sri Lanka, but seeing the pandas was just as good!

Harvest Time

When I was in Dolpo it was harvest time.  (It was October - unfortunately I've got very behind with my blog!)  

You see the different levels of ground behind me in the photo?  These are all fields of wheat and you only see them near the riverbank.  Further away from the river, the hillsides are far too steep to grow things.  (I know this because I climbed some of the slopes - well, actually, I mostly let Auntie Susan carry me!)

In Britain, the farmers use machines to thresh their wheat but in Dolpo the villagers do it by hand.  They use tools that look like big whips to thresh piles of wheat lying on the ground.  It looked like very hard work - probably as hard as playing football or running round the park or cycling to school.   The villagers need to make sure they finish before the snow arrives!



Dolpo is very pretty in the autumn sunshine but in a couple of months there will be so much snow that even Adam, Robin and Grace would not be able to go sledging there as they would get lost in a snowdrift!

It's quite difficult to be a farmer in Dolpo.  Apart from the snow, there is another problem: there isn't very much water.  You can see that the ground is quite bare except for some beautiful red flowers.

I don't think I'll become a farmer in Dolpo but I enjoyed visiting!

I've told you lots of things about Dolpo, in Nepal, so in my next blog post I'll be talking about a different country.  I wonder if Adam, Grace and Robin can guess which one?

The Snow Leopard and the Wolves

Hi.  I've been tracking snow leopards!

A snow leopard is like a giant white cat.  It's smaller than a tiger though.  (Perhaps you can find a picture on Google images.)  It's very rare, but there are more snow leopards in Dolpo, where I went trekking, than in most other places.

I saw this footprint and thought it might be a snow leopard.  It's definitely not a goat or a yak or a person or even a stuffed traveller, so what else could it be?  There aren't many other animals in Dolpo.

I saw lots of other footprints too, like these ones:

In fact, I followed the footprints all the way to our campsite!

Grace, Robin and Adam might think this is a bit funny but one of the best ways of identifying an animal is to look at its poo.  Cats leave 'scat' (long thin poo).  Horses and donkeys leave big round droppings.  Goats leave smaller round droppings.  And I think you know what human poo looks like!

We saw some long thin poo - a bit like a cat's poo but much bigger - so we thought it might have come from a snow leopard.

Unfortunately we didn't see the leopard but it would have been very exciting if we had!  We asked some local people and they said they had seen the leopard recently.

We heard some other big, scary wildlife nearby though.  When we were getting ready for bed we heard some wolves howling in the mountains.  It was very frightening.  They howled again in the night and then we heard them coming through our campsite.  I was desperately hoping that wolves don't like to eat stuffed travellers!

The wolves must have found a small yak or a goat to eat, because they soon went away.  I was very happy when we woke up the next morning and everybody was still safe and I couldn't hear the wolves howling anymore!

I wonder what is the scariest animal that Robin, Grace and Adam have ever met?

Dancing with Elephants!

Hi!  I've been looking back at my photos from Sri Lanka and I realised I have a video to share with you.  I was giving the elephants a bath when it was taken.  

They had their bath in the river and when I scrubbed their skin it felt like toothbrush bristles!  I think they enjoyed getting clean because, after bath time, look what happened ...

An Ocean on Top of the Mountains

Hi.  I've just been looking for fossils.  There are lots of fossils of spiral creatures called ammonites in the rocks in Dolpo.  Here's an ammonite that I found when I was on my trek.  (Do you see it?  It's next to my left hand.)

The funny thing is that ammonites are sea creatures.  So what are they doing on top of the mountains?Uncle Guy explained it to me and I'm going to try and explain it to Grace, Robin and Adam.  Here we go ...

Adam, Grace and Robin are very clever so they know where lots of places are, like France and Germany and Canada.  But I wonder if they know that countries move?!  This takes millions of years so Adam, Robin and Grace won't be able to see France or Germany or Canada moving around, but if they came back to earth in millions of years then all of the countries would be in different places!

Once upon a time, India was an island.  There was an ocean between India and the rest of Asia, called the Tethys Sea.  Then India moved north and crashed with Asia.  It was such a gigantic crash that the earth in between India and Asia got squashed and crumpled.  Have you ever seen a crumpled car bumper after a small crash?  Well it was a bit like that except millions of times bigger.  The squashed earth turned into the Himalayas, which are now the biggest mountains in the world.

Some parts of the Tethys Sea got pushed up onto the top of the mountains when India and Asia crashed.  This is why there are sea creatures like ammonites in the mountains.  

Here are some more fossils from the Tethys Sea.  Can you spot them?

Here are the mountains where I found the fossils.  I took this picture when I was over 4,000m above the sea, but the fossils were once on the sea floor.  Isn't that amazing?

Here's one last fossil picture.  Grace, Robin and Adam should be expert fossil spotters by now so they will probably spot the ammonites straight away.

A Monastery in a Cliff

Hello.  Sorry you haven't heard from me for a while.  I'm still in Nepal at the moment.  I promised to tell you some more about my long trek in Dolpo, so here goes...

In Dolpo, most people are Buddhists.  Buddhists often meditate, or sit in silence, to look for peace.  It's a bit like being Quaker in some ways, and Adam, Robin and Grace know all about Quakers in Birmingham.

Buddhists don't go to Meeting Houses though, they go to monasteries.  Can you spot the monastery in the cliff in this picture?

The white and brown statues in this picture are Buddhist monuments.  They are called Chortens and you see them at the entrance to villages in Dolpo.  The pile of stones next to them (Mani walls) have prayers written on them.  You have to walk to the left of the stones when you enter the village.  I wonder if there are any places where Adam, Robin and Grace always have to walk on the left?  Perhaps in their school corridors? Or when they get on the bus?

Dolpo is near Tibet, which is owned by China, and the people speak Tibetan not Nepali.  Here is the Tibetan flag flying outside a monastery.  It's very colourful, isn't it?

I've still got some more exciting things to tell you about Dolpo so you will be hearing from me again soon!

Eighteen Days of Trekking!

Hello!  Namaste!  (Namaste is the best way of saying 'hello' in Nepal.  I'll definitely be saying 'Namaste next time I see Robin, Grace and Adam so I hope they remember how to say it.  I'm sure they will as they are very clever.)

I'm sorry you haven't heard from me for such a long time but I've been trekking.  I went walking every day for eighteen days!  That's the same as going walking instead of going to school for three whole weeks.

I was in a place called Dolpo in Nepal which only has a few people living in it.  (I reckon there are more people in Bournville School - where Adam, Robin and Grace are busy being clever every day - than in some villages in Dolpo.)  

There were no computers where I could log on to the internet when I was in Dolpo, so I didn't get any screen time.  Oh dear.  I don't think Adam, Robin and Grace would like to go eighteen days without screen time!

The scenery in Dolpo was amazing though so I didn't mind.

The photo at the top of the page shows me at the top of the 'Kang La' which was over 5,000 metres high.  (This is more than half the height of the tallest mountain in the world, Mount Everest.)  While I was in Dolpo I went over three passes that were more than 5,000m high and there were amazing views from all of them.

I also passed a beautiful lake called Phoksundo Lake.  The people who live in Dolpo hang multi-coloured flags in special places, including the shore of the lake.  The flags are red, green, yellow, white and blue, as you can see in my photograph.  People in Dolpo think the flags give them special protection to stop anything bad from happening.

I slept in a tent every night during my trek.  It's hard work carrying a tent and sleeping bag and food for eighteen days.  (I wonder what Adam, Robin and Grace eat in eighteen days?  I wonder if they could fit all of their food in a rucksack?!)  We thought this would be quite hard so we took nine donkeys with us to help carry everything.

The donkeys had quite big packs at first but the luggage got lighter and lighter.  This is because we ate lots of food every day so the donkeys did not have to carry it anymore!

There are no roads and no cars in Dolpo, so animals carry most of the luggage.  Here is a picture of some yaks carrying wood to build houses in a local village.  Yaks are a bit like giant woolly cows!

I had an amazing time in Dolpo and I'm looking forward to telling you more about it soon!