Second China International Animal and Nature Film Festival starts tomorrow, August 19 and runs through the 25th. The website is touting it as Panda, Animal & Nature week.
"The International Animal & Nature Film Festival in China is aimed at showing the films about the Nature (documentaries, fiction, education, animation...), especially those related to animals, and the relationship between animals and nature. It is also intended to sensitize the media, officials, and the general public to protect the environment and nature."
They have a video that introduces the festival by showing clips of the people from Ya'an, its culture, its famous 'Sichuan Cuisine' and tea fields. Along with that video, they also put together a couple of other videos showing panda cubs including sound, so you can hear the cubs as they wrestle and play.
They have 20 films they will be showing, from Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, New Zealand, Iran, Swiss, UK and U.S.
All of this coincides with the 140th anniversary of the introduction of the giant panda by Pere Jean Pierre Armand David a French Catholic missionary who first discovered the giant panda in 1869.
Pere proved himself to be a serious plant collector for France, sending many samples from China back to Paris, designing ways to preserve them with glass jars and wooden boxes.
He was taking a break from one of his excursions across China, when a landowner invited him in for some tea. Inside, he discovered the skin of a giant panda hanging from the wall. Intrigued with this, he arranged to have hunters bring one back for him. They returned with a panda but they had killed it to make it easier for them to transport. He asked them to return with a live one. It is disputed as to what became of the live giant panda that Pere had obtained but it was he who first alerted the world of its existence by sending photos of it back to Paris.
A hike was set up for those panda lovers to retrace Pere's famous trek. Twenty brave souls from around the country departed from the West China Medical School of Sichuan University in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan.
They passed health checks before the 350-km (over 217 miles) journey that will not only provide beautiful scenery but also steep, dangerous mountain paths.
They began their trek on Saturday, 15th of August and are expected to arrive at the Ya'an Bifengxia Breeding Base of the CCPPRC, China Giant Panda Protection and Research Center of the Wolong Nature Reserve, on August 25, 2009.
If only I was so, so young again, I would have loved to make that hike myself. This may be an event to plan a trip around for next year.
