Day 10: Green dreams (A trish post)

We started our day early, in the sense that we were both awake and wide-eyed early, not that we actually got up and out the door early. Today we had planned to go check out a bamboo forest outside of Hangzhou, however in consulting many maps, it seemed the place we had in mind was quite far and difficult to get to. We finally settled on Yunqi bamboo forest walk, a cloud-inspired area established in 967, which was conveniently right next to the Meijiawu tea plantation town. Win-win. The downside was that we had to take TWO buses to get to the area. This was only a problem because all the travel guides I read warned against taking buses if you wanted to actually get where you wanted to go (due to lack of English and confusing stops). But Jen and I are adventurers, so we packed our rain gear (it was set to thunderstorm in the afternoon) and headed out. 

Once we finally made it to the bus stop (lots of confusing pedestrian underpasses in this area – in which we found some interesting advertisements, see attached photo):

 the bus portion of the trip went surprisingly smoothly. Turns out travelling in a moving vehicle while sitting and not carrying all your luggage is pretty rad :) 

The entrance to the bamboo forest path was crowded with many tourist groups but once we got a bit further in the area cleared out and we were able to wander quite a few portions with no one else around. Considering we were just a few kilometers outside of a city with a population of 5-8 million (sources are unclear on population), it was pretty surreal to be somewhere so peaceful and beautiful (see 4 photos). 

The trail included over 1000 meters of walking path, winding through to little temples and pavilions, highlighting different plant life and 280+ year-old trees. We also met a couple super duper floofy caterpillars, so cute. Words don’t do justice to this place, it was truly magical.

We wandered the walkways for about an hour, and then headed over to the tea town (after grabbing some ice cream, obviously). The walk over provided many awesome views of the sprawling tea fields. 

Once in the town area we decided that we should get back into the habit of eating meals – the excessive heat here has put a damper on our appetites (a very unfortunate fact because the food here is SO CHEAP and so delicious). We headed to the first restaurant we saw and once someone approached asked if they had an English menu, after this obvious fail, we asked if they had any sort of menu since we know how to use google translate like champs. Once seated, instead of even trying to translate anything we asked our server (who had quite good English skills) what he’d recommend and went with the local specialty of “chicken soup” and BEERS. (this is to be emphasized because when he asked what we wanted to drink and suggested beers I nearly jumped out of my seat and hugged him, turns out a cold beer on a hot day is totally my jam). 

After wrapping up the meal I wandered over to pet the family dog, Simba, a lovely floofy german shepard type who was a big suck for tummy rubs, it was a really nice way to end lunch. Wandering down the street we found a suspicious looking vehicle labelled “B.P.R.D.” (Bureau of Paranormal Research & Defense) and “N.N.H.R.C.” (Non Normal Human Research Center) however no one was around for us to inquire as to how to join the cause. :p After a quick pop into a store for some local tea (dragonwell tea is very famous here) we hopped back on the bus(es) to the apartment for a refresh.

The great part of being on holiday is that you can do whatever you want – for us, this often means naps, reading, trying to understand non-subtitled Chinese dramas and looking at random city maps for kicks. After taking some time to recharge, we headed over to Qinghefang street, a local historical shopping district. 

Here we tried to hunt down our elusive matching pajamas (we found a few nice silk pairs, but nothing that inspired twinsie status), did some more tea shopping, visited a cat themed shop, and Jen maybe made a cameo on a weird iphone recorded TV show. 

Tomorrow, we head back to Shanghai for the last leg of our trip!!

Cat sightings: 2