Seeing as it seems people actually read this, I should make an effort to update more regularly. I often think of things that I should write about and then get lazy. I will try to change that!!
The weekend of the 1st of May was a long weekend in China. Of course, they don't refer to it as a long weekend, but as a 'holiday'. Seeing as it was a holiday, it meant that most of the country was on the move! It was also the opening of the Shanghai World Expo!!! Once we found out about the long weekend, Matt and I had dreams of getting out of town for the weekend and heading to Hangzhou. In typical Chinese fashion, we were left totally ill informed until the last minute as to whether weekend classes would be canceled and exactly what time we would have free to do our own thing. This meant that we were unable to book anything until a couple of days prior to the weekend and as it was such a busy peak period, this spelt trouble! It is so frustrating, but it's China, and I wonder if any other company would be different? We managed to get a room at a decent hostel (at holiday prices!) and get bus tickets (not without hassles!).
Saturday morning rolled around and we were up and off. We arrived at the train station in plenty of time (luckily) to be met with mobs of people!!!! We could have died in the crush (haha .. maybe not but soooooooo many people all pushing to get somewhere!). The bus took about 2 and a half hours to get to Hangzhou, after going through multiple toll booths and a weird border crossing where we saw a couple of trucks with pigs piled 4 cages high! Buses (coaches) drive the same way as cars, pretty much - beeping of horns, cutting in front of other cars etc. A few times you'd drift off to sleep only to be woken with a jolt when the driver slammed on the brakes. It's ok though, we made it! Once in Hangzhou, we thought we'd get the bus downtown and then a taxi to the hostel. This sounded fine in theory as we're quite used to catching local buses, but not great in practice as there were sooo many people, and every time the right bus came along, it was a mob scene all over again to the point where the driver had to push people off the bus in order to close the doors!!! We ended up opting for a taxi as it was quite warm (yay for 30 degrees - when the heat comes, it comes with a bang!!) and I was sick of waiting for a bus. The taxi ended up taking about an hour and a half (much to the drivers impatience and dismay) to get to the hostel. Everyone must have been at West Lake. So we ended up making it, it didn't cost us an arm and a leg (luckily) and we were settled. We dumped our bags and went walking down towards the lake with hundreds of other people.
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| Afternoon at West Lake |
It is really quite beautiful and the weather was so nice. It did get overcast and windy and a sudden shower came along which caught us by surprise. I had decided to take my umbrella out of my handbag as it looked like such a lovely day, so we were left ducking for cover along with everyone else. At about 5pm we decided we'd head into town to see if we could locate the night market, but after standing at a bus stop and surveying the traffic jam, we headed back to the hostel to consult a map and chose to walk there instead! Our hostel was quite close to Wushan Square and Hefang Jie, which is a traditional touristy shopping street filled with stalls. We walked up through here, taking in the atmosphere and stopping every now and then to browse stores. We walked up Zhongshan Road with is the Imperial Street of the Southern Song Dynasty. This area has older traditional buildings as well that have been turned into art galleries and other similar stores.
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| Zhongshan Road |
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| Street Performers getting ready - traditional chinese style |
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| The most amazing mullet! (Pity I didn't take a front on shot) |
We headed into the downtown area in search of the night market and wandered and wandered and ... wandered. Matt thought he knew where it was, I stubbed my toe about 10 times and we reached the end of the main street and I nearly reached the end of my patience. We were just about ready to give up on the market idea and low and behold we stumbled upon it! It was full of heaps of great stuff and I bought some cheap DVD's and I probably would have purchased more had it been closer to home. We gave up on getting dinner and headed back to the hostel and stopped at a street stall on the way and got some tasty noodles.
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| Night Time at West Lake |
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| West Lake surrounds by night |
We did attempt to get a taxi but discovered that due to it being a holiday, the taxi's were choosing not to use their metres and were very willing to rip people off. After waiting at least half an hour, we walked home to the hostel to shower in a bathroom which got soaked by the shower as there was really no shower recess and the water took 10 minutes to drain properly (apparently these type of bathrooms are common in China - so glad our apartment is NOT like this!) and bed. At least we had a bed with a proper mattress! Heaven!!
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| Trusty hostel hire bike! |
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| Tourist Map of West Lake |
We awoke on Sunday morning to be greeted with another gorgeous day. We got ready to face the day, hired bikes from the hostel and rode down to the lake area and had breakfast at the Mingtown Youth Hostel.
I highly recommend the Mingtown Hostel chain. I think they must have some kind of western influence but they are really quaint looking and we had a great breakfast. We really wanted to ride around the lake but bikes aren't allowed on the path around the lake so we had to make do with riding for a bit, stopping and then walking to see the sights. I guess as there were so many people too, riding would have been a hassle. I can't remember everything that we saw but I will post photos when I can. We spent the whole day riding around the lake, stopping to look at sights. We rode across the Spring Dawn at Su Causeway, even though there were 'no bike' signs. Hey, everyone else was doing it! If we had of walked, we would have had to walk all the way back across it just to fetch our bikes and that would have taken hours! I guess because we went across the causeway we didn't see the very far side of the lake, hence why I couldn't find where they held the spectacular west lake concerts that Mum kept going on about. (I don't think Matt was that interested anyway and it was expensive once we could look up prices!). We took a boat ride to Three Pools Mirroring the Moon and had trouble getting back. Maybe we had to catch the same boat back from whence we came? I don't know .. but we made it back to near where we had left our bikes and rode on until we came to Precious Stone Hill Floating in the Rosy Cloud (yes, you just have to love the literal translations of names from Chinese to Chinglish).
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| Precious Stone Hill Floating in a Rosy Cloud |
This was a pagoda on a hill that stood out from a distance. We stopped here for a much needed beer break and then continued our journey around the final leg of the lake.
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| The view from here was pretty amazing! |
We reached the downtown area probably about 6pm, so had spent a full day exploring West Lake, but boy it was so much easier doing it by bike than by foot!!
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| Sunset over West Lake (so beautiful!) |
I think we stopped somewhere near Hubin Road to find something for dinner, but all of the restaurants were touristy and more western style and expensive. We tried to dodge a parking person to leave our bikes somewhere and went for a walk, but couldn't find anything which tickled our fancy. We really wanted to try to find Hangzhou style traditional food. We jumped back on the bikes and headed back down towards Hefang Street and found Gaoyin Street just behind it, which was full of more traditional restaurants. I'd like to say we had a really awesome meal, but it was probably the most disappointing chinese restaurant we've been to! To start with, we tried a traditional pork dish and only ordered 1 serve, which we didn't realise until we received it. HA ... so yes that was our fault. We then ordered spring rolls, but they had none!! We received our fried rice ... ate that, then received our plate of vegies .... ate that ... and finally after waiting for about half an hour .. we received the fish we had ordered. The fish was small but tasty, but the service was so slack, it was disappointing. The restaurant was extremely busy but ... we were left feeling disappointed with our dinner. Oh well.
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| Downtown Hangzhou |
After dinner we rode back up to the night market as I wanted to buy a shirt that I'd seen the previous night. I couldn't stop thinking about it.
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| Wushan Temple |
We headed back down to Wushan Square, grabbed a quick bite to eat from a bakery, re-hydrated and found a tourist information centre. It turns out that Wushan Hill is full of scenic things to see and do, unbeknownst to us! The temple looked as though it was hidden with trees and we kept hearing music and Matt thought that it was some mystical temple on a hill with monks going about their daily business and it was top secret and secluded and only those in the know could get up there! HAHA how wrong we were .... it was totally touristy. Still, it was great to see as we got an awesome view of West Lake and over Hangzhou from the temple balconies.
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| View of West Lake from Wushan Hill |
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| View of downtown Hangzhou from Wushan Hill |
We headed back down and visited the pet and flower market, had lunch at a sushi train up the street (which ended up turning out alot more expensive than we thought!) and then it was time to head back to the hostel to grab our bags and a taxi to the bus station.
We had a nice weekend away and got to relax, but we found it a bit disappointing. I guess because we were traveling on a national holiday, it was really busy and took ages to do anything. We didn't get to our Hostel until 3pmish on the Saturday and our bus left at 3:30pm on the Monday, so our 3 days turned into 1 and a halfish days! There is so much more in Hangzhou that we could have seen but just didn't have time (tea plantations, silk factories, temples and stuff on the other side of town / the other side of the lake). Hopefully we can go back again one day. It keeps being advertised as the Tourism City of China, but in our experience, I wouldn't really class it as such. I went to buy food from a street vendor around West Lake and was left standing there being totally ignored (obviously), the taxi's trying to rip off everyone, the sheer number of people making getting around difficult and causing traffic jams! .... Still, we are learning. This is china and nothing is explainable. It's China, it just is. You have to be prepared for everything to take time (if you think it will take X amount of time, add a few hours), you have to be prepared for not so perfect pictures because you can't take a picture without people being in the way and you have to be prepared for people in different cities to treat others differently.
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| SOOOOO MANY PEOPLE!! |
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| I am amazed the bridge could handle the amount of traffic! |
I think that we are getting so used to Suzhou and it's friendly people that it was a bit of a shock in Hangzhou. Still, it's a really pretty city and I would go back again if I had the opportunity ... but probably not until I've seen other places first!
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