When Marco Polo visited Hangzhou in the 13th century, he described it as “The City of Heaven” and the most magnificent in all the world. That’s pretty high praise from a world explorer and probably true back then. Fast forward 800 years and I’m sure it still makes the list of beautiful places in the world. It certainly is picturesque and peaceful. It’s even listed on as a UNESCO world heritage site.
Our tour guide, Mary, further cemented this fact by telling us that residents in Hangzhou live lives of leisure. A monthly salary of 10,000 RMB (approximately $1,600 CDN) provides a comfortable lifestyle.
Don’t like the rat-race of nearby Shanghai? Come to Hangzhou instead. With just the right amount of busy-ness and lots of clean and open spaces conducive for downtime and an active social life, work-life balance here is achievable.
Mind-blowing fact: Hangzhou only has one metro line. It took 10 years to build and cost a total of 22B RMB! At the price, the city could not afford to build another line.
Our first stop was at Jingci Temple at Nanping Hill. What makes this Buddhist temple such a draw to pilgrims is the legend of Ji Gong, a rebel monk known for his flagrant disregard for monastic rules. Although he ate meat and drank wine, he was known to be a compassionate, honest and apparently, possessed magical healing powers.
I’m not sure if I was breaking the rules but I couldn’t help but take a couple pictures of people in prayer mode: standing or kneeling, with or without sticks of incense.
After that we headed to Hangzhou’s main tourist attraction, to board a boat and cruise the beautiful West Lake, encircled by misty green hills and willow-shaded causeways. To the west of the lake stands Lingyin Temple, whose origin dates all the way back to 326AD. There’s also a man made island called Xiaoying Island that you could visit, but we didn’t stop there.
When the boat ride ended, we got to walk around West lLke and see the Broken Bridge. We got to learn about the famous legend of white snake. When our tour guide asked us who knew the Legend of Lady White Snake, my mom was the only one who knew. In fact, she remembered all the legends the guides brought up.
The legend tells of a young scholar who falls in love with a beautiful woman, unaware that she is a thousand year old snake that has taken on human form. Although they genuinely in love, a Buddhist monk tries to intervene, as their relationship is forbidden by nature’s law.
I could have stayed by the lake all day, but we had to get to our next stop, the Meijawu Tea Plantation. the entire village of Meijawu is dedicated to the production of Longjing tea, aka ‘dragon well tea.’ There are breathtaking tea terraces to look at and there are 160 tea houses you can visit. (there are over 1,000 teahouses in Hangzhou!)
Once again, we were given a presentation and tea-tasting, in hopes that we’d ultimately buy something. And given that our tour would soon be wrapping up, the tour group was experiencing presentation fatigue.
But here are the interesting things we learnt:
* The best time to pick tea leaves is in the spring.
* Farmers in Hangzhou are the richest farmers in China.
* You can eat a cup of tea leaves. This helps with digestion and cholesterol.
* The smaller the tea leaves, the better. The stronger the smell, the better. The lighter the colour, the better.
* Always pour hot water into a cup of green tea leaves. Never boiling water as it’ll kill the nutrients. If water has been boiled, let it cool down for 5 minutes before pouring. Also leave cup uncovered, otherwise the hot water will cook the tea.
* Recommend 3 cups of tea/day. This will help beautiful the skin.
* Green tea has natural polyphenol and is rich in antioxidants.
* Green tea detoxifies the body, prevents and fight diseases such as diabetes and constipation.
* Eat vitamin “tea” or T with full stomach as it’ll help with digesting food.
The staff was desperate for us to buy. They even offered to break down entire packages into separate smaller bundles and gave us new minimums to buy. Unfortunately for them, there were no biters.
By now, I’ve learned that everyone in China is trying to be hustler. Even our bus driver (who’s been with us since he picked us up in Shanghai) tried to hustle us. Yesterday, he baited us with a side trip to a rural water village on the way back to Shanghai, one of the last ones not affected by tourism. Since it’s on the way, wouldn’t we like to see it? We thought that was a good idea and we agreed.
This morning, he re-iterated the plan and asked if we’d still like to check out the water village, Tongli. Sure, we said. That’s when he dropped a little bombshell on us. The side trip is normally 500 RMB each (about $80 CDN) if you booked through the company, but we can each just pay him 200 RMB. Which you’ll know he’s going to pocket for himself. Why not? It’s on the way to our last stop, we’d get to see a bit more and his company will be none the wiser.
I could care less as it was just $30 to see an untouched rural Chinese village – one more experience for me to chalk up. But to the others in the group, this left a bad taste in their mouths. It was the underhanded way he did it – got us all excited, making us think he was doing it out of the kindness of his heart and not talking about price, until we were just about to hit the road. You could literally see his face light up with dollar signs when he propositioned us. And then his attitude completely changed and his face all crestfallen when the group changed their minds.
A complete fail on his sales skills. Had he disclosed it right off the bat, I think there would’ve been a strong chance everyone would’ve been onboard. I hope he learns from this mistake and tries a better tactic with the next tour group.
It reminds me of what our Wuxi tour guide, Jimmy, told me. He said that a lot of Chinese people’s favourite leader is Deng Xiao Peng because he introduced the free economy to China. Doing so opened up the country to tourism, along with a dog-eat-dog attitude. He told us that everyone’s racing to make more money and own more things than their neighbours.
Not to say our driver was surly for the remainder of the trip, he got over it. (but was probably lamenting on all the things that money would’ve bought him)
After dinner, we went to our last show, A Night of West Lake, which was a great way to cap off our second to last day in China. The show was glossy, colourful and entertaining. it even included Chinese thousand-hand guan yin dancers, which reminded me of the Samsara movie.
I can’t believe the tour is almost over. As enjoyable it was to be brought to different places and shown things, I’m looking forward to exploring on my own.
View more photos of my trip on my Flickr album.
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