Thursday, October 20 – Wuxi to Hangzhou

It was an early start in the morning. Breakfast, according to Karen’s journal, was “the best yet.” I’ll take her word, but have no particular memory of it.

We went first to a fresh water pearl farm, a visit that had been scheduled for the previous day but missed. If we ever lost time and had to cut something from the itinerary, you can be sure it would never be a shopping opportunity. We didn’t actually see any pearl farming at this place. The farming is done in the two-meter-deep waters of nearby Lake Taihu, which we would shortly be driving around. The place we went was for processing and, most importantly, selling pearls to tour groups. The parking lot was packed with coaches.

The guide here gave us some mildly interesting gen about pearls, most of which went in one ear and out the other – how they’re farmed, how they’re graded (size, colour, regularity of shape), how they’re used. A lot of them – the smaller ones that are no good for jewelry – are ground up and used to make powders and creams, which naturally have amazing health and beauty benefits. Yada-yada-yada. The guide prised open a clam to show us the trove of pearls inside. This one had over 30 tiny ones that she said would end up in cream or powder.

As Karen says in her journal, we were then “given the K-Tel promise” and ushered into a sales room. Lambs to slaughter. Many of the jewelry pieces on display, other than the plain strands of well-formed white-grey pearls, looked gaudy and tasteless to us. The bigger pearls, and the black and purple ones that lacked that distinctive pearly lustre, just looked like beads. We did overhear some entertaining hard-selling going on. One of our group seemed to be seriously considering a pearl necklace priced at well over $1,000. David floated by and, when asked, told her, oh yes, it was a great bargain. So he wasn’t such a subversive after all. What else could he say, though, without ending up in some gulag somewhere? “No, you silly cow, you’re being conned!”

But what do I really know? The woman might have dickered the price down, bought the necklace, taken it home and flogged it for the twice what she paid. (I doubt it, though.)

We said goodbye to David here, as we were travelling on to Hangzhou, the last of the cities in our mini tour-within-a-tour, and the largest. The countryside we drove through, when not running along beside Lake Taihu for the first while, was similar to what we had seen on the Shanghai-Suzhou leg: rice paddies, market gardens, orchards. The trip was supposed to take a little over two and a half hours, but took much longer because of snarled traffic on the motorway. It would have taken longer still if not for Leo’s heroic navigation.

An hour or so out of Wuxi, we started slowing as the traffic thickened. Then it was stop-and-go. Then we came to a place where police were closing the road. There had apparently been a mudslide because of all the typhoon-related rain. We were hearing this from Leo, who was getting live updates on his phone over the Internet. (Everybody in China has a mobile, and everybody has them out all the time, using them.) I’m not sure if the motorway itself was covered up ahead, or the slide was somewhere else but affecting traffic in the whole region.

Leo used his phone to access a crowd-sourced navigation app that posts up-to-the-minute traffic conditions. It showed him an alternate route that could get us around the closure quickly and back on our way. It involved the driver – an ex-military guy, Leo had earlier told us – shooting across traffic just before the barricades, probably illegally, and careering down a single lane track that looked like a construction site service road. At one point, the driver, not usually given to over-cautiousness, slowed and questioned Leo about where he was being led. You could see why. Looking ahead, it appeared the road was about to dump us in the middle of a muddy field. Leo reassured him, and on we went. And within 15 or 20 minutes, we were back on the motorway, past the blockage, tootling along at a good clip. It still took well over three hours to reach Hangzhou, but we learned later that other Nexus tour groups coming from Wuxi by bus were delayed up to six hours.

In Hangzhou, we met up with our local guide, Jason, who explained right away that he had chosen his English name because he was a great a fan of the Jason Bourne movies. “I just love that guy,” he said. Jason’s English was very good, very colloquial, with a distinct American tone. He was young, possibly under 30, athletic – very different from Leo and David. It came out later that he had spent a couple of years working for an American entrepreneur who hoped to make a killing in China. The guy recruited Jason from where he was working at one of the premiere hotels in town. After the American’s Chinese venture went belly up, Jason parlayed the language skills he’d polished while working for him into this job as an English-speaking guide.

We heard lots more about Jason in our short time with him. He had a young wife, whom he’d met and wooed while visiting her workplace for the American’s business. And a daughter who he was gaga about. His openness was remarkable after Leo’s and Mary’s relative reticence. In fact, Leo grew a little more loquacious, possibly as a result of our time with Jason, and we later learned about his family. He had two daughters. The reason he could have two was that his wife was a member of one of the minority ethnic groups, who were exempt from the one-child law, even when married to a Han.

That first day, Jason also gave us a touching apology for the rudeness he knew we had noticed was common among Chinese – shoving in front of people in line-ups, talking too loudly, never apologizing, never seeming to give much consideration for others, perhaps especially foreigners. The reason, he said, was that his parent’s generation had been raised during the Cultural Revolution, when millions perished from starvation and Red Guard violence. They learned that if they wanted to survive and keep their families safe and fed, they had to take an aggressive me-first stance. And they had simply never learned traditional good manners. He and his wife, he said, were trying to teach their daughter a kinder, gentler way of interacting with people. He admitted he was trying to emulate the manners of westerners – “like you good people.”

The big deal in Hangzhou is West Lake, a small lake that has been groomed and fussed over and considered one of the great beauty spots in China for more than a millennium. It was a great favourite of emperors and nobles, their concubines and flunkies. It is the lake after which the artificial one at the Summer Palace in Beijing is patterned. We drove right into the centre of Hangzhou, a city of almost 10 million, and parked about a 15-minute walk from where we would get on a boat for a tour of the lake. It was still rainy and foggy, but no matter, we would go on that boat ride, come hell or high water. We’d all paid for it in any case.

Hangzhou, West Lake, tour boat

This part of West Lake is lovely. It’s right downtown, with lush green parks, gardens and public art. This is a premiere tourist attraction for Chinese, and the place was jammed, despite the weather. Rain doesn’t seem to faze them. When we got to the busy wharf, Jason went ahead to arrange our “cruise.” It was a little surprising to me again that such an excursion hadn’t been arranged well ahead so we just had to walk onto the boat. Not that we had to wait very long in the drizzle. The vessel was similar in design to the one on the canal in Suzhou, but bigger. We had to share it with a Chinese tour group, which meant the guides would take turns speaking over the PA system.  

Hangzhou, tour boat coming in to dock

As far as Karen and I were concerned, the cruise was a waste of time and money. It was so foggy and rainy we couldn’t see much. The views of pagodas shrouded in mist on surrounding hills might have had pictorial possibilities with slightly better visibility. The “cruise” was, as in Suzhou, pretty much a straight run, out past a couple of islands, around a further one at the end of the lake, and then back to port by virtually the same route. We did slow as we rounded the last island to hear the story behind some stone lanterns poking up out of the water here. I evidently didn’t find it a very compelling as I have no memory of why it was supposed to be significant. The whole cruise couldn’t have taken much more than 30 minutes. And I think we paid $60 each for this. Now we know how Nexus ekes out a profit from these bargain tours: they book lots of high-margin optional extras.

Karen notes in her journal that dinner that evening was “as usual,” by which she means the usual big room, with big tables, okay food, but no choice of dishes, no wine and too little beer. The good thing about eating in China was that we were forced to eat slowly as we only got side plates and small bowls and ate with chopsticks. You know sooner when you’re full and can stop before you overeat. Karen lost six pounds. I probably lost some too.

The restaurant was quite close to our hotel, the Grand Metropark, and we went directly there after dinner and checked in. The Metropark was supposed to be an upgrade from the hotel in Wuxi, and it was certainly grander. But we both noticed how poorly maintained it was. The woodwork in our room was chipped and scuffed, and everything looked a little tired. The offerings of water, tea and coffee were less generous than in other hotels too.

Our evening was not over. We had signed up for an optional theatre event. Cathy had told us when we were deciding which extras to book that, most times, if you didn’t go to the theatre or on the optional boat ride or whatever it was, there was no choice but to wait on the bus. This didn’t sound appealing, which is why we signed up for everything on offer. It’s too bad because, in this case, we could have just stayed in the hotel and rested. The performance, which cost $60 per person, was not, in our opinion, a must-see - although it did have its moments.

Hangzhou, Impression West Lake show

It was called Impression West Lake and was the same kind of over-the-top, glitzy music, dance and tableau production as the one we saw in Beijing, with the addition of some acrobatics. Nexus claimed it was “one of the Chinese top live-action performances” and “nationwide famous,” a “dreamlike” show with “fantastic elegance.” It was created by Zhang Yimous, a film director of some note who had also been the director of the opening ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Gosh! But it just wasn’t our taste. The colourful costumes and sets were fun and the acrobats impressive, but the dancing was uninspired and the music forgettable. To me it was sound and fury signifying little.

Hangzhou, Impression West Lake show

The theatre was also oddly designed, with long aisles arcing around the stage. In the one where we were seated, there was a row of tiny tables at the front with high chairs, then a row of seats behind that were lower, with a cramped walking space in between. Karen and I sat down at one of the tables, but felt badly because it didn’t seem the folks behind, including Pat and Ralph, would be able to see very well. (They said afterwards that they had missed nothing, but I’m not sure.) Each table was set with a small pot of green tea and some cups. A nice touch, except that our table was swimming in tea. It had dripped down on one chair and the floor – where Karen put her purse before noticing. We called Jason over. The tea pot, it turned out, was cracked and leaking. He hailed an usher who did not apologize or clean up as Jason requested, but did go and get us another pot of tea. Thanks.