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Published: November 12th 2008
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The Yangtze cruise docked in a placed called Yichang. Like loads of places in China you’ve never heard of, this actually turns out to be a city much bigger than Manchester or Birmingham without the public transport! Our next real place to stay was Nanjing, but to get there we had to follow a convoluted route of a taxi from the dock, a bus to another sprawling place called Wuhan, a night in the airport hotel and then finally a flight to Nanjing early the next morning.
Our time at the airport hotel in Wuhan, was one of those “why do we do this” experiences. Cleanliness in China sometimes leaves a lot to be desired, but there must have been more hair stuck to the bedroom carpet in our room than carpet fibres. Those of you that know Lynne would know she was not pleased! We also got a phone call from the hotel prostitute offering her services, which was very thoughtful of her.
We eventually got to Nanjing the next day after a 3 hour delay due to fog. Visibility was about 30m so it was no surprise we were delayed. I’ve been wondering whether the pollution has
something to do with it, and water molecules stick to the pollution particles. I’ve got no idea whether this is true but it would seem to make sense.
Nanjing
Anyway, Nanjing itself is a really pleasant place for a Chinese city. Yes, it is sprawling, but the traffic didn’t seem half as bad as the other places we’ve been to, and there was actually a lot of green space and waterways. We stayed in part of town called Fuzi Miao. This is a bit of a tourist hot spot, where the thousands of Chinese tourists can take a boat trip along the canals, admire the neon or buy loads of tat, like a clockwork seal that spins a ball on its’ nose. Nice!
After a day of jobs (unfortunately we still have jobs to do, like my slowly progressing dissertation), we hired bikes and set off for a whirlwind tour of the city. We quickly got lost but some old dears waltzing to music in a park directed us the right way (after trying to persuade us to have a dance with them) and we headed out to see Sun Yatsen’s Mausoleum. Sun Yatsen was briefly President
when the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911 and is widely admired by the Chinese. We also know him well, as a character in a great book called the Russian Concubine named her rabbit Sun Yatsen!
Unfortunately, Nanjing is probably best known for the rape of Nanking. Over 300,000 Chinese were basically slaughtered by the Japanese in only 6 weeks in late 1937. We visited the memorial museum, which we’d definitely recommend. It details some pretty horrific acts and has lots of eye witness accounts. The museum itself is built on the site of mass graves and a number of these are excavated. It’s also a nice piece of architecture which is somewhat of a novelty amidst the concrete tower blocks. There is even a section detailing the chronology of Japanese atrocities from 1850 to the end of the 20th century, which perhaps illustrates that Sino-Japanese relations are still not that sound!
Water towns - Suzhou and Tongli
Next stop on China Tour 08 was Suzhou, apparently famous worldwide for its gardens. Not being much of a gardener, the name hadn’t registered with me before, but to be fair, they are very nice.
The city is built around
a network of canals, so away from the identikit city centre, it is a nice place to ride around on a bike. On our ride we visited Suzhou’s largest garden, which is called “The Humble Administrator’s Garden”. The name is loaded with irony because humble it is not. The landscape is picture book China, with pagodas, ponds teeming with koi, weeping willows and jagged rocks all placed against one another. As with most places in China, it is also teeming with Chinese tour groups! This is a shame as the gardens were meant to be places of quiet contemplation and reflection. This is hard to do when all you can hear are numerous tour guides shouting in Chinese through loud hailers.
The next day, we eventually manage to make our way to Tongli. It’s only 20km from Suzhou but after being directed from bus station to train station and back to the bus, we finally figure out how to get there.
Tongli is a really nice day out. You pay 80rmb to enter the old town and then get entry to various houses and gardens, much like Pingyao. As is inevitable, the tourist authority calls it a small
Venice of the East as scores of canals criss-cross the town. Some of the attractions are very random, such as the museum displaying hundreds of slivers of stone and another dedicated to root carvings, sculpted into things like Lord of the Ring type monsters. Still, it is a lovely place to wander and have a lazy lunch by the canals. In a fit of adventure we tried the local delicacy, Tongli fish, which turns out to be dried fish a bit bigger than whitebait. It was actually pretty good. It’s only later when we see the cormorants fishing in the river, that we realise that we have probably eaten bird regurgitated fish - nice!
Hangzhou
Chinese TV has one English language channel called CCTV 9. It mainly has news programmes on, with quite possibly the longest commercial breaks you will ever come across. 90%!o(MISSING)f the ads are saying come and visit such and such a province in China and Hangzhou features very, very regularly. So how could we resist a visit to “Harmonious Hangzhou” as the commercial would have us believe, and go and experience “the essence of China”.
We only spent about 30 hours in
Hangzhou and it didn’t stop pouring down all that time. As a result, we can’t really tell you much about it. We braved the rain at one point for a quick walk on the shore of the West Lake. I can imagine in nice weather, the lake is beautiful. It is supposed to be a picture postcard Chinese landscape and the Chinese believe you are not truly a married couple until you have visited Hangzhou. Well at least we are now truly married, but it wasn’t the most romantic setting. What we saw were waves lapping over the embankments and rain driving into our faces. Still, the hostel we stayed in had a nifty on demand TV system in our room, so we holed up out of the rain and watched 7 episodes of Band of Brothers. It was really nice to do nothing and judging how quickly we got into the swing of it, 5 weeks of being on the go are catching up with us.
So, just Shanghai left to see on this trip before we’re back to Blighty to see Paul make an honest man of himself.
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