Suzhou is a small city just an hour east of Shanghai, and conveniently for us, on the bullet train line from Nanjing. So we travelled there at high speed in extreme comfort – we were in a carriage so swish we felt obliged to get our laptop out and play with it just to fit in with all the businessmen! I think we’ve got Chinese travel cracked now – as I’ve mentioned before our method for getting train tickets works a treat, and we even managed to get from the train station to the hotel using their bus system this time. Not bad since we can’t understand Chinese, and they can’t understand a word we say… Luckily numbers and maps most withstand linguistic problems!
Anyway, Suzhou is a very pretty place, renowned in China for its canals and gardens. So lots of the streets have lovely green tree-lined pavements and mini waterways running down the sides. Luckily while we were there it didn’t rain too much like in Nanjing, so we were able to look around reasonably well for a change without running for shelter every five minutes.
We scrambled around three gardens – have a look below for pictures as usual. And I mean scrambled. Perhaps the most fun was a rock garden where the rocks were all meant to look like lions (although we only found one that really did). This garden consisted of a few courtyards arranged around a medium sized pool surrounded by a labyrinth of rocks. You’d follow a path up some steps, over the top of the rockery, then down another flight, duck into a cave which would take you underneath where you’d just been, only to climb up another flight of steps to another part of the rockery for a different glimpse over the pool. And then you’d go through another twist and turn and descent and cave… and so on and so on. It was great fun, but a bit wearing on the legs after a while! You felt like you’d climbed a mountain instead of strolling around a peaceful rockery.
The other gardens were a little more what you’d expect – pools, pagodas, ornamental trees (including some bonsai ones which Gary hadn’t encountered before) etc. Saying that, the largest garden had a pool with by far the largest carp we’d ever seen – these were black monsters about 3 feet long. The gardens were all peaceful and pretty, despite all the visitors – including of course the usual flag-following, red-capped hordes of traditional Chinese tour groups. Why they all wear matching baseball caps when on tour is a mystery to me, but hey, each to their own. What I don’t like is the way some of the tour group leaders have microphones and loudspeakers, allowing them to broadcast their annoying voices to everyone within 100 meters – really really irritating! Saying that, we’ve seen a fair few European tour groups out here too, but these tend to be a lot smaller than the Sino packs, lack microphones, and are mostly French. They are still pretty annoying and best avoided though!
Anyway, Suzhou is a very pretty place, renowned in China for its canals and gardens. So lots of the streets have lovely green tree-lined pavements and mini waterways running down the sides. Luckily while we were there it didn’t rain too much like in Nanjing, so we were able to look around reasonably well for a change without running for shelter every five minutes.
We scrambled around three gardens – have a look below for pictures as usual. And I mean scrambled. Perhaps the most fun was a rock garden where the rocks were all meant to look like lions (although we only found one that really did). This garden consisted of a few courtyards arranged around a medium sized pool surrounded by a labyrinth of rocks. You’d follow a path up some steps, over the top of the rockery, then down another flight, duck into a cave which would take you underneath where you’d just been, only to climb up another flight of steps to another part of the rockery for a different glimpse over the pool. And then you’d go through another twist and turn and descent and cave… and so on and so on. It was great fun, but a bit wearing on the legs after a while! You felt like you’d climbed a mountain instead of strolling around a peaceful rockery.
The other gardens were a little more what you’d expect – pools, pagodas, ornamental trees (including some bonsai ones which Gary hadn’t encountered before) etc. Saying that, the largest garden had a pool with by far the largest carp we’d ever seen – these were black monsters about 3 feet long. The gardens were all peaceful and pretty, despite all the visitors – including of course the usual flag-following, red-capped hordes of traditional Chinese tour groups. Why they all wear matching baseball caps when on tour is a mystery to me, but hey, each to their own. What I don’t like is the way some of the tour group leaders have microphones and loudspeakers, allowing them to broadcast their annoying voices to everyone within 100 meters – really really irritating! Saying that, we’ve seen a fair few European tour groups out here too, but these tend to be a lot smaller than the Sino packs, lack microphones, and are mostly French. They are still pretty annoying and best avoided though!
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