Mei said that Beijing and Xi'an show me old China, Shanghai new China and Hangzhou natural China. And it's true that it is much more green and beautiful than the other three cities. In some ways it reminds me of Tasmania or Hamilton Island - you can drive down roads just totally lined by hills and foliage, thick and beautiful, with all these sights to see tucked in there. Wherever you drive there are all these signs for tourist spots.

Like Anne of Green Gables or Emily of New Moon, I am a great appreciator of beauty and I really had my fill of it today, drinking in one beautiful landscape after another.

We joined a tour group which, as usual, means we have to rush through places far more quickly than I would like, which is annoying especially when a) the place is peaceful and beautiful, suited to slow strolling to take it all in and enjoy it or b) the place is big and has many buildings and cool things to look at. We rushed through both types today, but I still enjoyed them while I was there.

Today's itinery was: West Lake, a tea place, a silk place, Tiger Pawing spring (Hupaomeng Quan), Song Chen, Lingyin Temple and the Garden of Good Luck.

West Lake (Xihu) is a very big and famous lake, very beautiful. It's said that if you walk across all six bridges hand-in-hand with your lover, you will have a 99.99% chance of being together forever. (Chinese places are full of legends like that.) We took a boat across the lake to the largest of three islands, and then quickly back again to meet up with our tour group.

View across Xihu

The tea place was a small building where they gave us glasses of green tea, tea that is very famous, the best in China, Longting. China's leaders, and even Queen Elizabeth, have been there to drink the superior tea. It *was* good. I like green tea, it's warming and feels cleansing and healthy. I didn't buy any though; I thought 80 yuan was a bit steep.

Then we went to a silk factory, Jiacen. As far as sales pitches go, this one was definitely interesting. We got to see how they get the silk threads, saw some women stretching out silk sheets to make a quilt (many beautiful silk quilts for sale, naturally!). We got to see how to tell if silk is genuine (burn it and it lets off white, smelly smoke) and not cotton, and best of all, got to see a fashion show. Five beautiful, tall young girls and two shorter, stouter middle-aged ladies, showing off lots of cool silk clothes.

Silk clothes are so beautiful and soft, but you'd have to be rich to buy them. I bought some silk handkerchiefs.

Then to the tiger spring - the story goes that the spring opened up when two tigers dug at a rock in a certain place. Oh, this was a truly beautiful and serene place. We tasted the water from the spring and it was good and clean. Our tour guide carefully placed a coin on the water in a still pond, and the coin floated on the surface due to the many nutrients in the water. Heh, there were a bunch of local people there with lots of assorted bottles to fill from the spring. Even Chinese people can't drink the tap water in China so I guess this is a good alternative.

Then to Song Chen, or Song City. This is definitely a place we should have stayed at longer. We got 50 minutes. The entrance fee was 80 yuan ($18). It was big an interesting, a recreation of buildings from the Song dynasty taken from paintings from that time. Everything was old-style; the people wore traditional clothing, carts sold Chinese treats and souvenirs.

We saw a show; in old times, a woman could be married off by throwing a cloth ball into a crowd, and whichever man caught it would wed her. They acted this out, it was fun though I couldn't understand. A guy standing next to me caught it and was led into the building, dressed in traditional clothing and wed to the lady, while his girlfriend screamed with laughter.

That was a cool place.

Lingyin was this place featuring the oldest temple in China, and once the largest. Catholics and Muslims were prohibited to go in; we didn't go in. But we looked at the river and the rocks and caves nearby, in which over 300 figures were carved. We had a good amount of time to enjoy ourselves, wandering around and exploring.

I also really liked the Garden of Good Luck, though again, longer would have been appreciated! This was a garden with pagoda buildings and a theme of good luck in the structures and statues and attractions there.

There was a god of marriage where you can pay to put your hand in and pull out a tag to find out what kind of guy you'll marry. Mei is gonna marry the very, very best, the son of an emperor. ^_^. There was a pool where you can pay to buy old-style coins and try to throw them into the centre of a statue in the middle of a pond to get good luck. There are lucky statues and characters. This was a pretty garden. We also saw Chinese opera being performed live - very cool!

So that's what we did today. Then we came here and went out and had dinner. I tried chun cai soup, a Hangzhou specialty made with a vegetable that can be found nowhere but in West Lake. It was very tasty.

You know, I really hate bikes. I hate walking down the street and hearing a sudden loud ringing right behind me, or Mei saying "Careful!" as I have to look in all directions at once to see what's about to mow me down. There are lots of bikes. [There are also cars that come up behind you and honk, and motorbikes that people drive on the footpaths.]

Okay, I'll just catch up on some miscellaneous things.

Today was lovely, weather-wise - not even cold! [Of course, we were wearing thick, warm jackets, but it was nice not to feel cold.]

In our Hangzhou bathroom I just noticed that there are several packets of bath products that you have to purchase to use. They are labelled "uncomplimentary". Uncomplimentary!!

13 Dec - Fri - 7:50am

Brr, it's cold! Stupid tour company! They told us to be ready by 6:30am, so we got up real early, but the bus didn't come until five minutes ago. Stupid bus! Stupid hotel! When I got up at 6, the hot water wasn't on. We rang them, they said "it's on, just let it run for a mniute and it will come". It didn't. I had a painfully cold shower, early on a cold winter's morning. Stupid everyone!

Okay, I just had to get that off my chest. ^_^.

The sun in the Chinese sky, when half risen or half set, is so round and perfect and clear and orange. Even when it's cloudy you can see that sun like it's a sharp hole cut in the sky, it's so well-defined, and you can almost look at it.

I felt a bit dodgy yesterday, low down in my gut, and ditto today, but I think I'll be alright. Maybe it was the water a couple of nights ago - it was supposedly boiled but it tasted pretty sus.

We are in the tour bus now on the way to see more sights of Hangzhou. The sun rises earlier here than Xi'an and Beijing - all of China is one time zone, so that explains it. We're a lot further east.

Traffic is loud, lots of honking for no reason. In some areas they actually have "no honking" signs posted. Traffic is still chaotic; in Shanghai and Hangzhou it is made still more interesting by the cars driving on both sides of the road. The car in front is going a little slow? No problem, just go into the lane on your left and trust that the oncoming cars will get out of your way in time!

We've been stuck at this one intersection for about ten minutes, oh, we're moving now. I love the way cars turn onto roads whether or not other cars are coming - sometimes you zip in with a couple of feet to spare.

We just drove by a park of people moving slowly in unison, doing tai chi. I have also seen morning aerobics classes on the street, people doing sword manouevres, and a guy on a go-go ball. Completely unselfconscious, in front of the whole world.

There are lots of young couples, looking very sweet and cute together, a kind of innocent, sweet romance where they walk hand-in-hand or the girl hugs the guy's arm. The girls are so cute and the guys so gentle and protecting. A couple has just got our bus.

Our hotel room is fine, apart from the cold water, but the building is kind of dingy. Two star. A triple room should be over 300 yuan a night, but we got it very discounted, 150 yuan. Which amounts to $12 a night each! From the dark, dirty balcony at the end of the corridor, with someone's clothes and underwear hanging up for all to see, we can see a fancy, brightly lit 5-star hotel. "Some day I'll make it there!" says Mei.

One thing I don't like so much about this trip is everyone saying "eat, eat!" I usually have a diminished appetite while travelling, especially after long plane or train trips. And the servings are always so big. Now, Mei has a healthy appetite; she can always eat, eat often, eat large amounts and eat anything. So my eating habits look sickly in comparison, although I don't think they're that bad.

I think I have yet to finish a whole meal. Seems like we've wasted enough food to feed a starving village. But I'm doing my best, but I can't just say "I'm not hungry, I'm not eating" without everyone getting worried and continually offering me things. No! Yet I've only skipped a couple of meals, I feel healthy, I eat plenty of food to keep me going each day, and I do like much of the food, it's just too much, and meals are a bit of an ordeal, and I never never finish.

Last night I ordered nothing but fried rice, wanting a small, easy-to-manage meal. The bowl they brought me was more than I could have eaten if I were ravenously hungry and ate/drank nothing else. I ate more than half but there was still a lot there...

Mei says there is a Chinese proverb that if you can sleep and you can eat, then you're healthy. But I *am* eating! And I can certainly sleep!

3:45pm

We are driving back to Hangzhou after our day out in the countryside. It has been another good day. I am glad I haven't been getting travel sick because this ride is very bumpy in places, we bounce and rattle our way along, and there have been some windy roads, some roads that aren't really roads at all, and lots of exciting driving - meaning driving with lots of horn honking and playing 'chicken' by continually overtaking on the other side of the road, often when other vehicles are coming. Very fun.

[Actually, it was fun. Because I never really thought we would come to grief - I tend to just trust that people know what they're doing on the road, even if they *look* like maniacs - it *was* kind of exciting and cool to just watch the road as we drove and had all these near-misses. ^_^.]

So we really saw some Chinese countryside today, from chickens wandering freely about on the sides of the road, to wet fields of crops, from a man driving an ox, to a handful of ducks in someone's backyard. The Chinese countryside, as I've seen it today and from trains, seems very wet - lots of ponds and swamps. Some of it is coloured with a rich, dark green, and there are hills, with little houses and people standing around outside, and clothes hanging out to dry, and animals hanging around... but my memory of it is kind of... pale colours, light greens and browns and very flat ground stretching out across the river we visited today.

Our itinery was: to this kind of village place, a row down a river, and this big, cool place with lots of miscelleneous cool things to see, including a huge cave. [See, it's getting pretty obvious that I have no idea where we get taken on tours. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the name of the place on a sign, but they're always in Chinese so they're easy to forget in the hours between seeing it and next writing in my diary.]

5:50pm

I have been in toilets with no flush, no paper, no seat and no water to wash with, but this one takes the cake. The very first place we visited today was a crystal store in the countryside. This one did have water for washing hands (ice cold, as always) but nothing else, not even a door or a pan. There were just waist-high walls separating the platform into stalls. There was the floor with two kind of platforms running parallel to each other so that the floor was like a trough between the platforms. Basically you had to plant one foot on either platform and pee onto the floor. Magnificent. It took me a while to work up the guts to use it; no doors! But you can get used to things quickly; when we had to use another doorless toilet later that day I did it with no qualms. But it makes you feel like a guy; you can just look to the side and see the person in the next stall, not that I went in when there was any other person there. ^_^.

9:05pm

There are so many aspects to China and Chinese culture. I mean,, what does Australia have? Cool animals, the outback, pies and Vegemite. But China... jade and bamboo, green tea and chopsticks, ancient opera and modern stars, a long history, ancient buildings, traditional clothing, 12 zodiac animals, calligraphy, fans and umbrellas, enamelware and statues, dragons and lions, kung fu and tai chi, Buddhism and good luck, silk and crystal, Chinese medicine, such unique food, a million stores, many landscapes and sights, red paper lanterns and chinaware, pandas and ancient weapons and feng shui and tea sets and, and...

So rich!

My souvenirs have tried to reflect this. I've bought tea and candy, fans and silk, enamelware and crystalware, a sword, a gold etching, handcrafted stuffed toys... lots of stuff.

These two days in Hangzhou have been really good - the days are interesting and beautiful, the evenings are fun. It's good with three of us, we can joke around and be silly a little more. Ling is very nice. In the evenings we go out, look around, shop a little, eat dinner. Tonight I had some tasty beef with rice and some untasty complementary soup (seaweed-flavoured, it tasted just like sea water >_<.), and some nice Chinese bread, the stuff that looks and tastes like donut.

So, today's activities... first was a kind of village in the countryside; kind of laid out like a village, lots of little stores, little sights like people pumping water or hammering metal or doing other village-type things. There was an old man with a performing monkey, a playground and miscellaneous activities (little boats, archery, a toboggan ride) but they cost extra.

Then we got into small rubber boats and were rowed for about half an hour down the river. It was peaceful and beautiful, surrounded by the nice countryside and slightly misty mountains, with little birds fluttering all around in front of us... so nice, and no roads or people in sight apart from in the other little boats.

Finally the big, cool place. ^_^. Things to see included collections of rocks (ones that looked cool, or resembled something), roots (ditto), money (over the years and from around the world), a collection of peaks (big rocks), wax figures illustrating many of the 36 tactics for winning a war, all sorts of cool things. I also went on my first ever 'ghost train' without even knowing what I was going on, but I can't say it was even remotely scary. And most cool of all was Fairy Land, which was a big cave.

We took a one-hour tour through the cave, it was pretty cool! Our guide pointed out the formations that looked like things. Of course I didn't understand a word and had to use my imagination, as I often couldn't see anything where he was pointing. I found myself thinking things like "is that a lion or a pineapple?" But I still saw quite a lot of what I was supposed to be seeing, and it was all very beautiful and impressive.

So that was our day, in a nutshell. I sort of have less to say as this diary continues; fewer things strike me as strange or new. Umm... people often drink warm or hot water instead of cold... dried fruits are popular snacks... Chinese food stores contain many totally unrecognisable items... I've seen Mao Zedong watches, with his arm ticking up and down... sales assistants in stores follow you and if you look at anything for more than one second they start a barrage of words.

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