Tag Archives: Hangzhou

Anders: 10 days on my own

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On July 26:th I took the bus to Tunxi (“Huangshan city”) in Anhui province. The trip took less time than I expected, there was apparently a nice highway between the two cities. The landscape soon became very pleasant after Hangzhou, with some forested hilly terrain. In Tunxi I had some trouble finding my hostel. I got a ride from the bus station on a motorcycle to the street where the hostel were supposed to be at number one. Problem was, there was no number one. I started walking up the street. There was a noticeable absence of english signs and almost nobody spoke English. After a while I had to call the manager of the hostel, Stephen, and after handing over the phone to a somewhat surprised randomly chosen shop owner, Stephen could locate where I was and sent a taxi to pick me up. Stephen thought it better for me to stay at another hostel, close to the train station. It was a bit cheaper and I didn’t mind. Nobody at the hostel spoke English though, we had to rely on gestures. I then walked down to the the city center and the “ancient street”. When looking for a map of the region I now was in I got some help from a nice female employee at a book store who showed me to another book store, but they didn’t have any English maps there either. I spent some time looking for a decent place to eat in the center of town, only to discover the best place was just outside my hostel, where there were lots of small restaurants, shops and street food vendors. Later I decided to go to Qiyunshan (some mountains 45 minutes west of Tunxi) the next day.

In Qiyunshan it rained almost all day, so the views were not the best but there were some nice Taoist temples and shrines. I bought incense at one of the shrines and did my best to please the gods and “monsters” that was lined up at different places. One of the temples was built under a rock wall and I got some nice photos of another temple when the fog lifted somewhat. Getting back home to Tunxi worked out fine when a mini-bus drove up beside me on the road, I said “Tunxi? Xi (7) yuan?” and they picked me up, then after a while put me on another bus that was driving to Tunxi. I put both the fan and the air-con on to dry my clothes for the next day up to the spectacular Huangshan mountains.

Bus to Tangkou the next day. I was dropped off at some restaurant and got confusing directions (in Chinese) where to go for the next bus to the cable car/trail head but found my way eventually. More rain at Huangshan. And fog. Because of this I took the cable car up, I wouldn’t be able to see much on a hike anyway. In spite of the weather at the top there were lots of people, taking photos of what I do not know. But I got some nice views when the fog occasionally lifted. I had booked a dorm bed at one of the hotels but I upgraded to a standard room at arrival. Had the most expensive dinner at a small eatery beside the hotel. Explained to some of the guests that came to chat with me that Roger Federer was Swiss, not Swedish. Ping pong player “Whauldeneer” was Swedish though. The second day on Huangshan it rained the whole day, not much fun happened. It was a pleasure to watch all the people going up the steep mountain though, as I was heading down.

The day after I went to the villages of Xidi, Hongcun and Lucun about an hours drive from Tunxi. A glimpse of the old China. The weather was initially nice but there were some showers in the afternoon. Booked a hostel in Nanjing and then had a chat with Stephen and some other travelers from Germany. I learned that Stephen had seen the solar eclipse in very good weather in Tunxi and he described the event very vividly.

Bus to Nanjing the next day. The landscape was very nice in the beginning. Then we stopped in some industrial cities by the Yangtse river that didn’t look so nice. I had an interesting chat with an engineer from Tianjin that sat beside me. He had lived in Nanjing for a couple of years. I managed to find my way to the hostel in Nanjing (Sunflower youth hostel) and decided to order pizza at the cozy top floor bar/restaurant. Was surprised to find signs for locally brewed ale – from “Oktoberfest” brewery in Nanjing. But when I asked for it they didn’t have it. Too bad. Next day I visited the “Purple Mountain” where many sights are located. The Mausoleum of Sun Yatsen and a pagoda were my main targets but it took the whole day to wander around the place, I eventually found out the smartest thing was to take a bus between different areas. Then I visited the city wall and one of the city gates before I went back to Hangzhou again. I liked Nanjing and should really have stayed there one more night but I had already booked train tickets and hostel in Hangzhou.

Back in Hangzhou I went to the south side of the lake one day and to the north side the last day. Wasn’t really that inspired, I mostly waited for my flight home. Bought some nice chopsticks for myself. The Air Asia flight from Hangzhou to Kuala Lumpur was more comfortable than I expected, slept most of the time. I had a few hours of waiting time in KL and then a 13 hour flight to London with Malaysia Airlines. No problem when you can watch movies, tv-shows and play games! A few more hours of waiting on Heathrow then a Scandinavian Airlines flight to Gothenburg.

Hangzhou (2009.07.25)

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We planned to wake up early so that we would have more time later in Hangzhou before our airplane. But it didn’t work out so well. We arrived in Shanghai South railway station only 7 minutes before the train and missed it. Later we were told that the train also left earlier.  It takes lot of time to get to a train – the station is huge. Luckily we were able to change the tickets for another train that leaves about an hour later. They even gave back 14Yuans as the new tickets were cheaper because of not so good/fast train. In the waiting hall by a complete accident we met a person from Latvia (again). She was working in Shanghai as teacher and also was going by the same train to Hangzhou. The train was pretty comfortable (more or less similar to the train Xian-Beijing) and the ride was very smooth and fast. After an hour (or two) we arrived in Hangzhou.

Our plan was first to leave all our heavy bags in the hostel Anders had reserved for him as he was staying in Hangzhou for the next night.  There was a big line of people waiting for the taxi next to the train station. Taxi cars were coming and going quickly, so it didn’t take much to get two cars for ourselves. We had only address of the hostel written in English, and in Hangzhou only few people understood English, so we pronounced carefully the street name and luckily driver understood where to take us.

Some of us wanted to go for more shopping, but me with Agnese and Anders went to West Lake – Hangzhou most famous scenic sight. The lake was very large. Also there were lots of other tourists walking around, some boats were floating on lake. We decided to walk along the coast for some two hours in the direction of less attractions, south, as the less attractions, the less tourists.  Right at the beginning Agnese scared the hell out of me, by faking pushing me into lake when I was watching water at the edge of lake. Anders commented this as “it never gets old” :).

The path was not only on the ground, but in some places build like bridge over the water, going parallel to the coast of lake. In some places there was a statue of a famous man or an important ruler of Hangzhou.  At one point a Chinese guy approached me and asked something (in Chinese). As I didn’t understood, he showed with gestures that I am tall, and he is short, therefore he wanted to take a photo with me. We stopped a bit near a small pound with lot of colorful fishes (same as in Shanghai) and Agnese fed them with cookies she had with her.

From the lake we went back along a street full of souvenir shops. In one alley we went into what seemed a traditional medicine shop. They were selling lots of weird stuff – all kind of roots, grains, and also some dead snakes. In other alley there were lot of food stands. You could buy lot of different types of food, including crayfish that Agnese wanted to eat. There were also some boiled snails which we didn’t try.

When we got back to hostel, Mārtiņš K. and Emīls were asleep and the little room without windows seemed overcrowded of people and bags. Then we said goodbyes to Anders and went to Hangzhou railway station for airport shuttle. We were told that bus leaves from the front of railway station. But it took some time to find out that bus stop was on other side of building that was in front of the railway station.

Our Air-Asia flight was scheduled at 23.20. In the airport people were getting in a line. When the line was for about 40 meters long we decided it is time for us to get in the line also. At check-in they informed us that our printed-out boarding passes were not valid in this airport (because it is small?). So we got almost last places which were left in airplane close to each other – at the very tail of the plane. The seats had a small display at back of them where the information about the flight was shown. You could also rent movies to watch, or order food with them. Though the sitting was not very comfortable for me – there was not much space for legs and it was very hard to get some sleep. Although this was my first flying ever, and I was before told by others that plane will shake very much and everything will be bad, it was not true. Flying was very smooth. During the flight we were given customs cards to fill, where we found out that bringing drugs is punishable with death penalty by Malaysian law. Fortunately none of us uses them.

We landed in Kuala Lumpur around 4:30 am.