Since my boss was out of the country on a short private trip to Japan, I was able to "borrow" his driver (including the Audi A6 L 3.2 Quattro) or the day. No rush, no busses or train schedules to keep in mind, home pickup and drop-off, and someone on standby who would pull up with the car at the agreed meeting point about 60 seconds after a simple phone-call. Very convenient indeed! Well, apart from the fact that we got quite lost in the beginning (somehow he (or any other Chinese driver apparently) did not have a map in the car, and a GPS system was not installed in the car), and communication is a bit of a challenge. The driver is a very nice gentleman with pretty good driving skills (by Chinese standards), but his English is limited to: 'bye bye', 'tomorrow', and 'dubble yoo see' (whereby the latter means WC, or toilet).
It being my first experience on a Chinese highway, I was keen to see whether the Chinese driving style would be any less chaotic and dangerous outside of the big city of Shanghai. It's not. Overtaking happens left and right without any consideration for each other. And when traffic is not moving fast enough in general, it's not uncommon to just take the emergency lane and pass both lanes on the right in one go. I am starting to see why the Chinese roads - even outside the city - are among the most dangerous in the world. Apparently, more that 110.000 people perish in road accidents in China each year. I was glad to be in the big German car with working seatbelts.
The 'orientation issue' we experienced in the beginning had two consequences. First of all, I got a bit of a better impression of the landscape within the Hangpu delta. I won't spend too many words on it. It's flat as a pancake, really quite ugly, and with buildings scattered without any perceivable order or structure. The landscape in the delta is a mix of small towns (which would be considered big already by European standards), huge factories, and endless power lines. Distances can be deceptive. Hangzhou looks to be really close to Shanghai when looking at a map (I checked Google maps the day before - should have made a printout for the driver), but in actual fact, there's about 200km of delta country between the two cities.
The second consequence was that we only arrived at the West Lake a good 4.5 hours after departing home. In the driver's defense I should say that that time included at least 30 minutes of Hangzhou traffic. I was definitely no the only one to visit the lake that day.
Now, because the guidebooks had been soo overly positive about the looks of the lake, I was expecting something along the lines of the Mondsee in Austria, or Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies (check google for some pictures of those lakes).
The West Lake does not really look like any of those lakes, and as a result my first impression was somewhat subdued. Standing on the Hangzhou side of the lake, it is, well, just a semi-big lake with some hills in the background. Nice, but not really spectacular. Not wanting to give up on the lake just yet (also considering the 4.5 hours I had just spent in getting to this place), and thinking that the guidebooks can't be that wrong, I set out to walk around the lake, taking the Su Causeway halfway through the lake as a shortcut. The further away I got from the city, the nicer the lake became, and halfway through, it started to give away some of it's features that make the West Lake so special. The scenery turned into the type of scenery I had originally pictured rural China to be.
I walked the 10kms in about 3 hours, stopping for some snacks along the way. It was extremely crowded, and getting through was difficult at certain points (especially the points that were easely accessed by the tour busses). Because the West Lake caters to tourists from all over China, I did actually meet some people that apparently had not seen too many (or any) non-Chinese people before. You could see them pointing me out to whomever they were with, followed by a prolonged stare. In Shanghai, that doesn't happen at all.
Anyway, when getting closer to the city again, the landscape became more and more park-like and organized. The crowds increased again, but still allowed for a nice picture:
After meeting up with the driver again, we drove to the Wuzhen Canal Town. Wuzhen turned out to be quite a distance from Hangzhou again, being situated somewhere halfway between Hangzhou and Shanghai. We arrived at the Wuzhen site just before dusk. Whuzhen Canal Town is a small ancient town crisscrossed by small canals (as the name suggests). Wuzhen (and several other similar towns in the region) has been preserved especially, and now serves as a tourist attraction.
I really enjoyed my visit to the Wuzhen Canal Town. Perhaps it was the fact that the crowds were abating and I wasn't being shoved around anymore by hordes of tourists eager to take the best pictures, perhaps it was the setting in of darkness and the glistening lights in the water, perhaps it was the sensation of walking through an ancient Chinese village, but I thought the Canal Town to be truly delightful.
After getting back into the car, it took a little more than an hour to get home, where I thanked the driver for his services, and retired to bed many experiences richer.
