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Published: July 10th 2008
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Lion Hill Nanjing
This is a fairly new Pagoda in Nanjing, built on Lion Hill. You can see part of the old Ming Dynasty city wall, which surrounds the city centre inside a moat. Here we are, back in Yancheng for a couple of days, before we are off to Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province. Anhui Province Adjoins Jiangsu province to the southwest, and Hefei, is about 150 km southwest of Nanjing. The holiday was generally good, as far as a holiday can be in china, but it wasn’t until we got back to our school apartment, that our real dramas began. That will be another story. We are sure that one day we will laugh about what happened, but until that day, we are still a bit upset with the widespread Chinese lack of consideration of others.
Onto our holiday. We started out going back to Nanjing, only because we wanted to train it to Wuxi, then ferry ride from Wuxi to Suzhou, then bus back to Yancheng. It sounded good in theory, but when in Wuxi, we were told that there are no ferry rides along the grand Canal to Suzhou. We are not sure if this was the actual case, or as happens here, if the particular person doesn’t know, they say it doesn’t exist. We know this, because on many occasions we were able to prove to the odd
Lion Hill Pagoda
This is the Pagoda, but inside was fantastic, with their decorations and stories. Chinese that after they were adamant that something or other didn’t exist, we were able to show them later on, much to their astonishment. Anyway, we ended up by bus from Yancheng, train from Nanjing and bus from Wuxi and Suzhou. The trains are normally fairly cheap, unless you get a Sleeper, but the train from Nanjing cost RMB115 each. It was one of their fast trains, but we didn’t know this at the time, and our Chinese and their English, wasn’t good enough to get us onto a cheaper local train, which ply between the two cities.
We didn’t do much sightseeing in Nanjing on this trip, but we did get out to the fairly new Lion Hill Pagoda. This is located in the northeast of the city limits inside the moated area, overlooking the Yangtze River and their famous Yangtze bridge. This Bridge was the first Chinese designed and built bridge, after the Russian engineers pulled out of the country. One this you have to say for China, is that they don’t scrimp on spending money on transport infrastructure. The road, rail and bus networks are amazing. The size of the bridges is staggering, and the cost
Ancient Vase (copy)
An example of an early vase with gold and inlay work. doesn’t seem to matter to them. They recently opened two new bridges either side of Shanghai, one being 32 km long and the other 27km long. It is not unusual to see several levels of roads criss-crossing each other, too.
Wuxi was good, but we had enormous difficulty in finding a taxi at the railway station. Taxi’s dropped off passengers, but wouldn’t pick anyone up. You had to go to the taxi rank. However, we couldn’t find the taxi rank, and in three days, still never did. Directions were given to us from Information staff, police and locals, in every direction, up, down and sideways, but we never found the taxi rank. One of those mysteries of the city, eh. We ended up walking some distance from the station, before a taxi would stop and collect us.
On a day excursion from Wuxi, we visited Yixing and the Pottery museum of Dingshan. Seeing some Neolithic pottery which was made 5,000 years BC, is quite amazing. Some of these relics have only been discovered in the last 20 - 30 years, too. Wuxi is claimed to be the ‘pottery capital’ of China, and they have these pottery figurines as
Story Wall
Ming Emporor - Cheng Zu, Zhu Li, wanted to build a pagoda on this hill, but never got around to it. It now has been built (from his dream), and this is a large mosaic of his world and China travels. their symbol, but from walking around the city, you wouldn’t know it. They have missed one huge marketing opportunity by not showing off what they are famous for - their pottery. A good marketing campaign would see many thousands of tourists flock to Wuxi (maybe some signs for the taxi rank would help too).
Suzhou is raved about as being a very beautiful city - but we haven’t seen such a thing as a “beautiful city” so far in our travels. Certainly once outside the city limits the scenery may be good, they have canal cities, garden cities, lakes, mountains, and parks, but he city itself is still as broken down and unmaintained as all the others we have visited. They certainly spend money on capitol projects, but there is no maintenance programme as such, and everything falls into disrepair.
We probably didn’t see Wuxi and Suzhou in their best time of the year either, as it was stinking hot. On the news, we saw everywhere else in China seemed to be getting rain, except where we were. Isn’t that the place where the weather forecasters say raining here and there but fine elsewhere - we were in
Wall Carving
A pictorial of the travels of the Emporer. elsewhere. Anyway, the experiences weren’t that bad that we wouldn’t go back to those cities again, if the opportunity presents itself.
Tomorrow, we’re off to Hefie, and won’t have internet contact for 5 - 6 weeks, so you are blessed in not getting anything from us until late August or early September.
Best wishes to all.
Graeme & Betty-Anne
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