Day 8 – West Lake and “The bus ride”

10/14/2009 06:55:00 AM Tully Mars

Sean and I have figured out that most of the tour is about walking so slowly as to drive both of us completely insane! Ninety percent of the time he and I are in the back of the group messing around and heading off in other directions because the guides walk SO SLOWLY from point to point. We really can’t know for sure, but we think they are as lost as we are and walk slowly figuring if we pass the same point over and over again we will never know. If he and I were leading the group this would be a 4 ½ day tour instead of a 12 day. Think of the money we would save on hotels and food – ha, ha.




Well we headed back over to West Lake and got to ride a Chinese yacht! Okay it was just a tour boat but you should now be getting the theme of the way they name things here. The lake tour was pretty nice, but as you can imagine that Sean was pretty excited about riding a boat and walking around a park. If memory serves he does that all the time when we are at home. There are some really interesting things to see, along with getting the stories and history behind the pagodas and bridges. Especially how and why they name some of the sites and their Chinese character meanings.



After cruising the lake for 40 minutes (followed by an exhausting walk thru the park – LOL) we headed to the Dragon Well Tea Plantation. Now I was actually looking forward to this part of the tour. It is one of the places where I planned on spending a little money on good green tea. I figured, what the heck, I might as well buy it at the source. The most interesting part was learning about how the land is divided up and families assigned to specific parcels to farm the tea. They are required to farm the land and pay the government in the form of tea for taxation for the use of the land. The farms then can sell the balance of the tea to the plantation or use it for personal use. No one owns any land in China, it is all “owned” by the government and the government determines the proper use of that land and how it’s allocated. I still don’t have the whole picture, but it’s very different from our property ownership ideas we have in the states. (Oh yes, I purchased about ¾ of a pound of fresh green tea for about 600 yuan – you figure out the conversion.)




The bus ride from Hangzhou to Shanghai took just about the rest of the afternoon. Bill always has the driver stop at a pit stop along the way to visit the “happy room”. It’s been very interesting to browse the shops at the stop area to see what is available for purchase. We’ve been grabbing little goodies along the way and trying the tastes of China “7-Eleven” snacks. So far, I have been the only one to take to those flavors. Sean, just today, found some stuff he liked. We are all losing weight because of the high veggie and smaller portions of food. We may have take on this type of eating when we get home.



Sean has a friend who draws these little characters on stickers that they plaster on telephone or power poles back home. He has brought some along to sticker here in China. The interesting part of Sean’s vandilizism is that here the poles are all clean with no advertizing or other junk or markings on the poles. He stuck one up near the first hotel and the following day it was gone, so I guess he is keeping someone in a government paid job. I told him if he gets caught and gets tossed in jail, he’s on his own!


Cruising the lake

Happy in the park

Drying the tea

Learning about the different grades of tea

Lotus in the lake along a walk to one of the pagodas

Taking a break in the park
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1 Response
  1. Unknown Says:
    October 20, 2009 at 7:27 AM

    Tracy, I love reading your blog. The pictures are amazing. I hope you are having a great time. Can you do me one favor? Just run on over to Changzhou City and pick up Danielle for us. Please! :) Have a safe adventure and a safe trip home. Deb


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