Entries about zhejiang province

March 29

The bus to Ningbo left at 0700 so we got up at 0500, checked out of the small hotel and went to where we were supposed to catch the bus. No bus station just a small restaurant where we bought our 150 Yuan tickets. We had a quick breakfast and boarded the ten-minute- late bus to Ningbo. It took us seven hours to finally get to Ningbo. The bus was not crowded and was comfortable.

On the bus, we met a monk traveling from Mount Jiuhua back to his monastery in Ningbo. He was personable and gave us a lot of information about Mount Putuo, our destination. He also told us about a very old temple called Baoguo Temple. Seems all major cities had a temple with that name. He invited us to go with him to visit the temple in his car. I had not done much research on Ningbo which I knew was once considered to be the financial center of the region but had been surpassed by Shanghai.

We arrived to the bus station (a very big one) and got a taxi with our friendly monk to his car. He then drove us to the temple which took over an hour from the bus station. And what a temple it was! It was the oldest temple in the region but was no longer a Buddhist place of worship but a museum. Check out the pictures from our visit.

Baoguo Temple is located on the mountainside of Lingshan Mountain, about 10 miles away from downtown Ningbo City. It is what the Chinese call a cultural relic. It was initially established in the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) and rebuilt and expanded in later dynasties. The present Baoguo Temple is a mixture of constructions made by various dynasties.

The Grand Hall is the main construction of the temple. Built in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), it is one of the oldest and the best-preserved example of wooden architecture south of the Yangtze River.

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03_Mainhall

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What was interesting about this Grand Hall was the fact that it was a thousand years old and collected no dust inside nor were there ever any insects to be found. The guide who went with us (the temple was actually closed but was opened just for our visit) told us that the wind blows through the hall in such a way that all dust and insects are carried out on a regular basis. The temple reminded me a lot of the wooden temple that housed the largest reclining Buddha in Gansu Province. The joints and trusses look the same. The wood was beautiful and well preserved. Well worth the visit.

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Here is the picture of our friendly monk and the guide posing with Sunee at the front of the Main Hall

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The complex was obviously set up as a museum with the grounds well-kept and information signs placed on the various items.

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13_Grounds

The column shown was the oldest part of the temple and dated back to the Tang Dynasty (618-97) or a couple of hundred before the current temple. Buddhism first came to China in 64 AD.

Inside the temple, along the central axis are located the Mahavira Hall (the Grand Hall), the Kwanyin Hall, the Devaraja Hall and the Scripture Repository. Around the Grand Hall are scattered the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower and the Guest House.

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Half way up the hill to the main temple is a natural spring called Linlong Spring which formed Hansu Pool. It was very nice and the water was cold.

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We finished our tour and invited the monk to join us for dinner when we found a Hanting Hotel in downtown Ningbo. He had just the place for us to have dinner - the most famous vegetarian restaurant in the city.

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We enjoyed a fabulous vegetarian meal with our friend. The vegetarian food was as good as anywhere we had eaten in China and the world. It was not cheap but well worth the effort. We got the name and address of the monk and promised to keep in touch.

We checked into our hotel and made reservation for a tour to Mount Putuo the next day via the hotel. No problems getting to sleep this evening.

March 30

Our tour began at 0620 this morning with a van coming to pick us up. The first time around the van came while we were in the elevator coming down. The front desk called our room and got no response so the jerk in the van immediately left. We had the front desk call the tour service for the van to return. Jerk is the kindest word I would use for the driver. We did finally get to our bus which was filled with Chinese tourist planning to spend the night on the island.

The bus took us to the port which was about two hours away. We then got on a medium sized passenger boat which took us to the island.

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Medium size boats like this carried passengers to and from the island on a regular basis. I counted four going and coming just in the few minutes we were waiting to board the boat.

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Welcome to Mount Putuo, a highly successful commercial venture featuring Guan Yin as the main attraction. Emphasis should be placed on commercial as we paid a lot of money to come to the island with this tour. Everything is set up for tours and I doubt if many independent travelers can conveniently come here. I would not even try.

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One must always start a new adventure with Good Luck.

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22-Crowds

The tour begins with the few of us on the day trip gathering around the welcome area just down the road from the entrance to the temple area.

23-Courtyard

We love Chinese courtyards so I take pictures whenever we come across one.

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The Official Entrance to Putuoshan. The following represents what we saw in order. Commercial is the key word here.

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28_Guanyin

The main Buddha for the island is Guan Yin and this statue seems to be the center point for tours. It looked to be new and was obviously set up for toursists. Nice, new and commercial. I took a few obligation photos as you can see.

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This place was crowded tourists! We walked for several kilometers on a beautiful day.

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After the tour up the side of mountain to see the giant Guan Yin, we came back down to the beach area to have lunch. A typical Chinese tour lunch with bland food and lots of rice. Eat quick and meet the tour group over by the door.

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After lunch we followed our tour group to some ancient buildings that had be preserved nicely. This, to me, was much more interesting than the commercial stuff we had been visiting. It was obvious that these building were built several hundred years ago. In fact, this was the center for Buddhism in China during the Tang Dynasty.

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Since a couple of bats visited our apartment at Mount Emei, we have seen lots and lots of stylized Chinese bats. Bats are good luck for Chinese. Here is but one example.

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Once again, the operative word for these ancient temples and buildings was Commercial. We saw lots of monks and nuns so this place really is an active center for Buddhism but . . . the crowds, the crowds!

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Finished with the temples it was time to climb another mountain. This would take us between two and three hours and we lost our tour crowd very early on so we enjoyed taking our "senior citizen" time. I took lots of pictures with the following providing a good sampling.

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Finally we came to the end of the well-worn path that let down out of the mountain. This path was easy and well maintained - very commercially viable to make sure all the tourists could walk at leisure among the temples. It led back down to where the boat was waiting for us to climb aboard and return us to Ningbo.

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On the way back to Ningbo, our tour bus stopped at a huge shopping area that specialized in local products. I talked Sunee into buying some Focha or Buddha Tea which had been processed on the island for a few hundred years. It is a green tea and it was extremely expensive.

We finish our final Buddha Mountain visit with a relaxing evening in our hotel room - sleeping and preparing for our morning trip to Hangzhou. We were tired from the excitement of visiting Putuoshan and the climbing of its many mountains.

We woke up early, had breakfast and went out to do some quick shopping before we left for Hangzhou at around noon. I wanted to go check out the tea market and so that was our first stop after buying our bus tickets. The part of town where the tea market is located is heavily industrialized and thus it was hard to get a taxi to and from the shopping market. We ended up buying some Ningbo Tieh Guan Yin at a fairly reasonable price (not heap) so at least I could say we bought some tea. I was really interested in the Anchi Bia Cha (White Tea) but it was super expensive, running as much as 800 to 1000 yuan per kilo. I had to remind myself to look this tea up on the internet when we got back to Bangkok.

We finished our shopping, such as it was and caught our bus right on schedule. The trip to Hangzhou was a little over two hours. Arriving in Hangzhou we fell for one of the touts at the bus station who took us to the Hanting Express Hotel not far from West Lake. We paid double what we should have but . . . when one is unfamiliar with where things are, why not get a dumb looking truck to travel to the destination?

We were pretty tired so we took the rest of the afternoon off to rest.

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This is the view from our hotel room in the later part of the afternoon.

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At sun down, we were out and about exploring the night life of this area of Hangzhou. Got some stuff to eat and walk around to get the feel of the area. Nice town. Very nice town!

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The above pictures are from our first visit to Hangzhou streets. We were both impressed with what we saw this first evening in town. We asked about the night market but got some really confusing directions. Even tried to find it but ended up in the really expensive shopping area. Maybe later we will be able to find it.

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Early mourning view from our window. These people get up early!

We also got up early and headed in the direction of the famous West Lake. It did not take us long to find it, even at 0700 in the morning. The lake is absolutely beautiful. Everything one hears about the lake and more.

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It probably took us two hours to walk just a few hundred yards. The lake had that many things to see and take pictures of. The Leifang Pagoda in the distance was especially nice. That is the direction we decided to head along the banks of the lake.

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As we got close to the pagoda, we saw a place that charged 5 Yuan to dress up in Chinese outfits for pictures. The Chinese really like to do this and so do we. Sunee chose what I thought was probably a Song Dynasty outfit (Southern Song Dynasty capital was Hangzhou).

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The pictures came out really great! I also took a time elapsed movie with the GoPro but it turned out very short.

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The Feilong Pagoda did not disappoint. The grounds were nice and the whole park area was professionally run and maintained. While taking pictures, I met this Tony who was a PhD student from Hunan visiting on summer holiday as were we. His English was excellent and so we had a great time talking about college life in China.

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I took about a hundred photos in and around the Feilang Pagoda. Inside the pagoda which had just recently been rebuilt, we found a travel agency advertising a tour to Xitang, an ancient water town not far from Hangzhou. We decided to take the tour the next day.

Sunee wanted to check out the art situation in Hangzhou since we found there was an art museum somewhere around the lake. We walked until we found it. It was very modern and very well managed. The exhibits, however, were a bit modern for Sunee's tastes.

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While relaxing inside the museum and while Sunee shopped for some art supplies, I found this magic faucet suspended in midair with water flowing down. Took a great picture of it, didn't I?

We had walked more than we were used to so we went back to the hotel to rest and get ready for our Xitang adventure the next day.

March31

The Hangzhou area is noted for several famous water towns which were build on many of the canals in and around Hangzhou. We decided to buy a tour to XItang, one of the water towns closest to where we were staying. The tour started really early so we got up and around in plenty of time. We went to the designated hotel and amongst a crowd of several dozen Chinese waiting for tours we boarded our bus. Turned out there would be around ten or so tourists on this trip. Most of the Chinese tourists were headed to Huangshan in Anhui Province. Nice uncrowded bus with nice people for the trip.

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Right away I began to take pictures as we entered the town. This was obviously the real deal, although it was apparent that there was a bustling tourist trade built up in the town. For the most part, the town appeared to be authentic with the people doing the selling actually living in the town.

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Ah, how pictures are worth a thousand or two million words. I took over 500 pictures with my Canon 7D! Check the ones I chose for this blog to get a feel for what Xitang is all about.

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35_Riverway

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If you can't tell, I was also taking a few pictures with my new GoPro Hero 960 camera. It does a 180 degree fisheye and is the smallest camera of its kind in the world. The pictures from it are amazing but the video is even more amazing! Can you tell which pictures came from the GoPro Hero?

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Our visit ended with a boat trip on the canal to the exit area of the town. The boat trip was not that expensive and gave one a different view of the town of Xitang. A great ending!

On the way back to Hangzhou we stopped at a silk shop and another store which I do not remember. For those traveling in China on tours, this is just SOP (Standard Operating Procedures). Most of the time these stops are worthless but occasionally they do stop at interesting stores. The stops on this trip were . . . . boring!

It took us three full days to find the night market we had heard so much about. Was this a problem with Sunee's Chinese or just lousy directions. We finally found it this evening and it was only three blocks from our hotel. The way was easy and had some interesting things along the way.

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The road leading to the night market was filled with upscale department stores and speciality shops that sold jewelry, branded clothes and upscale restaurants. Very clean and very modern.

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About two blocks from the night market we found this old trolly. We were in Hangzhou a little off season but it looked like this thing was used to carry tourist to and from the night market.

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This carved family scene was also within two blocks of the night market. It was very impressive with a lot of detail. Is this a Chinese extended family? It looked like it from what we saw.

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It was April and the Christmas signs were still out. See, they celebrate Christmas everywhere in China. Wonder why it is such a problem in the States? PC PC PC PC PC. No such problems exist in Thailand either which is 95% Buddhist. Ignorance comes before the falll!

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We met Jenny Cheng almost immediately upon starting our night market walk She was an American (parents originally from Taiwan) and working in Shanghai. She was a newly-minted architecture. Her last name is the same as Sunee's. She was eating a grilled squid which looked good but weird. When she saw me looking at it she said in perfect American English - "Do you want one? They are just down the road and are cheap." Surprised, I then visited with her about her Americanism. She was wonderful, smart and sweet so I had to get her picture for this blog.

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The next hour we spent getting some chops made for Sunee. I think she bought four from this shop.

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The lady "chopper" had a great selection of chops to chose from and she did not mind me taking all the pictures I wanted. We had a great time watching her work and visiting with her about art and chops.

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Now you know where my Facebook mug shot came from.

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The above two pictures came out really well so I included them here.

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Hangzhou is the birth place of the number one tea in China - Dragon Well Green Tea or Longjing Cha. Expensive, yes but I talked Sunee into buying a few kilo.

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As you can see from the above pictures, the night market in Hangzhou did not disappoint. It is large, bustling with lots to see, eat and shop. This was a highlight of our stay in Hangzhou.