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Published: August 30th 2017
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Dongqian Lake is one of the main tourist spots in Ningbo, so we hopped in a taxi and headed there. Since the lake is massive and we didn't know which part we wanted to be at a quick phone call to someone gave us a location to show the taxi driver. The journey took about twenty minutes. The taxi dropped us at the start of a smaller road and we walked down it. There we found a ticket booth and paid the entrance fee to Tao Gong Island. I can't remember how much it was now. The God of Wealth, Fan Li, and Venus, Xi Shi, lived on Tao Gong Island several thousand years ago, or so the story goes. We consulted the map and it seemed that there were a few things to do on the island, so we set off to explore. Our first stop was the God of Wealth Hall, which was a pretty temple. I had missed the temples of Asia, while I had been travelling in the US and Scotland. This one was pretty and immaculate. Entrance fees to places might be high, but at least it means they are well looked after. From the temple
we walked uphill a little to reach Heaven's Gold Key, that was a bit random, just a big gold key. Maybe it has some significance that I am totally missing. One thing I liked about the island was that it wasn't too busy. There were people about, but not the usual tourist hordes.
Keeping up with the theme of big golden things, we headed over to the statue of Tao Gong. I have no idea who he is, but he has a giant statue overlooking Dongqian Lake. It was really cool. We spent a while up there taking some photos, but it was too hot! There was no shade and I was baking in the sun. So headed back down under the shade of the trees. We came to a kind of square thin, which was lined with traditional style Chinese statues, I would have loved to have known who all the men were. There was also a wall at the back, which was painted a deep, dark red with a giant gold heart on it. It was very pretty. We took the path further around the island and came to a small village. We weren't 100 percent sure
if people were still living there, as no one was about and it felt a bit abandoned, however some places had clothes drying outside, so some people must still live there. I wonder if it is the families that run the boats on the lake. We wandered the village for a bit before heading back along the path we came. We came to a booth where we could take the boat across the lake, so decided to do that as we felt we had seen everything the island had to offer.
The boat ride across Dongqian Lake was a little bumpy, but it didn't take too long. One of the girls in our group spoke Chinese, but she said she was unable to make out anything that the boatman said as he was speaking in the local Ningbo dialect. The other side was a bit busier and we went to explore. We found a hillside path, I don't know if it had been some kind of fort or watchtower, but we climbed up to the top. It wasn't that interesting. We headed back down and got some cold drinks from a little shop and chilled on the grass, chatting
for a while. There was some kind of boardwalk area, so we headed over there to get some photos. Looking back at the island, I could see the big gold statue. Then we decided to call it a day. Luckily, we were right by a main road, so we were able to flag a couple of taxis pretty quickly.
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