1-Day Dujiangyan Panda Keeper Program

Your guide will call you at about 8 pm on the night before your tour to arrange the exact pick-up time. If you don’t answer, your guide will leave you a message at the front desk of your hotel.

We will also send you your guide's phone number about a week before your tour. So don't worry about pickup.

Good to Know

• We recommend that you start your tour no later than 7 am.
• Your car will be a 7-seater air-conditioned business car. Your guide, fluent in English, knows pandas very well.

Your driver and English-speaking guide will pick you up from your hotel lobby at about 7 am and head to the Dujiangyan Panda Base. It takes about 90 minutes to drive.

There are only 2,000+ pandas left in the world, about 400 in zoos and 1,800 in the wild, and most of them in or near Chengdu of Sichuan Province. You will see about 20 pandas at the Dujiangyan Panda Base.

Get your volunteer pass, and a working uniform and gloves. A professional panda keeper will tell you the relevant procedures. The panda keeper can speak only simple English, so your guide will be there at all times, to translate for you and to take photos for you to record your special experience.

The pandas will be awake and you will start the Panda Keeper program and learn how to take care of them.

Giant pandas eat lots of bamboo every day. So panda keepers need to supply fresh bamboo three times daily.

Take the old bamboo out and replace it with fresh bamboo, and clean out the feces. In doing this, you will learn more about the living environment and conditions of pandas.

Take a break and have a leisurely walk to visit the panda base. You can watch pandas playing, climbing trees, and rolling around.

Besides bamboo, pandas also eat cakes, carrots, and apples. You will watch a professional panda keeper feed the panda appropriately and learn their eating.

Lunch will start around 12:00 at a staff restaurant at the Dujiangyan Panda Base. Chinese style meal serves two meat dishes, one vegetable dish, and rice. Enjoy your meal with the staff there.

After lunch, you can wander around the base on your own. You also could have a break in the resting room, to renew your energy for afternoon activities.

Remember you fed the pandas with cakes? Now, you will learn about what ingredients are needed for the cakes, and how to make the cakes with the help of the staff. You can make any shape you want. Ingredients will be prepared in advance.

The Base will award you a panda keeper certificate when you finish all activities. Return your working clothes and your volunteer pass to the staff.

The program will end at 16:00. You will be transferred back to your Chengdu hotel at around 17:30.

If you need to transfer to the airport or train station after the tour, please contact our travel advisor.