Travels with my eee
I’m currently in Bifengxia Panda Base in Ya’an, China. I was originally supposed to go to Wolong and had in fact purchased my air ticket a few days before the earthquake on 12 May. After the earthquake, I kept hoping things were really not so bad in Wolong and it would re-open close to the time of my trip. But when it was confirmed Wolong would not be re-opened to the public any time soon, the volunteer programme was transferred to Bifengxia Panda Base, and I followed suit.
Bifengxia was set up in December 2003 as an alternate to Wolong, to house some of the pandas (mostly the older ones and the females not in the breeding programme for a particular year). It was part of a “disaster management programme” to house the Wolong pandas in two places in case anything should happen. And something did - something BIG - the earthquake on 12 May 2008.
While some of the pandas have been relocated to zoos in other parts of China, and seven remain in Wolong, the majority of the Wolong pandas are now living in Bifengxia, including 4 of the cubs born in 2006. Eight of the other 16 are in Beijing Zoo, including my Feng Yi, and three are in Yunnan.
What? Oh, this post is called “Travels with my eee”.
eee is the ASUS eeePC 900 that I’d bought in early July. I’d actually bought it for this trip. I’m typing this post on the eee. It’s great! Very light, gives me about 3.3 hours with the wireless turned on. And it’s drawn a LOT of admiring looks and questions from the staff at Bifengxia. Even the director, Mr Zhang Hemin, who was in the Base on the first day I was here, came over for a look and asked some questions.
The eee is now running on the original Linux OS. I had a lot of problems with the XP installation - lots of blue screens, followed by lots of recovery back to the Linux OS. Eventually, I decided to stick with the Linux OS, only to find that the 16GB hard drive partition had disappeared! But thanks to a very hardworking tech support, I got the missing partition back. Apparently, the disappearance was due to the way the two OSs format hard disks - in a word, differently.
Now, back to my trip.
I’m in Bifengxia for 11 days, helping out in different areas. So far, my work has included helping to edit some of their English materials translated from Chinese. I will also be helping the keepers to clean panda enclosures, move bamboo around, and scoop panda poop, too.
This morning, I was working in the Volunteers Office located in the same building as the nursery and enclosures for the 4 cubs from the 2006 batch and 2 older pandas. Each time I heard a panda bleat, I would look up and walk out to look in on them. This is panda heaven for me!
Oh okay, this has been a post about pandas, too. Pandas and the eee.
