Wolong National Nature Reserve — Local services in Wolong

I have mixed feelings about my experience at Wolong Panda Center so I will break my review up into different segments. Hopefully my review will give you an insight on how to get here and fully utilize and enjoy the pandas!

Pandas: 10/10 There are many many enclosures, ranging for little panda cubs with their mothers, to older pandas (20+ years). Pandas are very lazy creatures so the only time to catch them when they are up and about is during feeding time! After that, all they do is sleep so when you get here is important. Park opens at 9am and the pandas are let out of their pens between 9-10. They will eat, play, and tumble until like 11am and after that, everyone sleeps the day away. The enclosures are nice and clean and you can get a very good view of the pandas. Because this reserve is hard to get to, there are also no crowds!

Getting there: 6/10 I give getting here a low rating because we were searching for days on how to get here and could not find any good option. We used baidu and read guidebooks but were getting either 7h bus rides or non-existing bus routes! You can get a taxi one way for probably 400-700 RMB. Later, we found out from xiaohongshu 小红书 that there is now a bus service direct to wolong nature reserve.

Bus service: 6/10 Very convenient, but there is only ONE bus to and fro per day. The bus to Wolong departs from Chunxi Rd (春熙路米瑞购物广场) exactly at 7am. If you booked with a local Chinese number, you will receive a text message the night before with the bus number plate. It takes about 2h to get to Wolong. The ONLY bus out of Wolong is at 6.30pm. So the dilemma is that you have a very convenient direct charter bus to and fro from the reserve but you are stuck there for the whole day when you will be done with watching pandas in 2-3 hours. We ended up sleeping in a small waiting shed to pass time. The cut off time to book the bus tickets is 9pm the night before.

Buying bus tickets: 8/10 If you read Chinese, this will be a piece of cake. I provided the QR code for bus ticket reservation in one of my pics. You will need to scan that QR code using WeChat to book. If you don’t read Chinese, you will need to get someone to help you.

All in all, I had a great time watching the pandas but it was quite painful to be stuck in Wolong the whole day when there wasn’t anything to do in town. Perhaps in a few years, the area will be more developed and vibrant making the whole trip there more worth it bus as of now, the town is still very underdeveloped with not much other sites to see. Also, be prepared to have zero-signal the whole day if you are using a roaming...

WoLong Panda Center Covering an area of 150 hectares, the base has 59 sets of giant pandas enclosure, which can accommodate 60-80 giant pandas and has the largest captive giant panda population in the world.

As a national treasure living habitat and leisure place, surrounded by green hills, the trees are lush, the summer temperature is about 10 °C lower than the urban area, it is a good place for summer recreation.

The base is divided into three areas: Shenshuping Giant Panda Breeding and Visiting Area, Captive Giant Panda Wilderness Training Area and Field Repatriation Area. It is a collection of giant panda breeding, breeding, research, field training and release studies and the public. A world-class giant panda research center that combines education and high-end scientific observation.

There are more than 150 wild giant pandas in the Wolong Nature Reserve, accounting for 8% of the...

I was planning to go the beginning of December but I called and they told me that is closed the whole December. The one in the city is always closed for 70 days from November until middle of January. You can go to here bifengxia panda base in Ya’an with a...