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Zhejiang

More water counties as I escaped Shanghai, and headed towards Shanghai. You know a province is rich when you go to a supermarket in a town that Westerners don’t live in…and you find New Zealand cheese.

For something different, here’s a typical Chinese roadsign. They don’t work the way you think they might – next to each arrow is not the name of the road, but the road that that one leads to. You’ll also notice they translate the characters into Pinyin for most of them, but not the bottom centre one – the name of the actual road you’re on.

Chinese roadsign

A factory, cunningly disguised as a castle.

Castle factory

I have been searching for this for ages, and I finally found it at Carrefour Hangzhou – beer that is “Free from formaldehyde.” It does raise questions about why they have it – is it because other beers contain formaldehyde, or was it that this one particular brewery used to put formaldehyde in their beer, and have decided to stop?

Formaldehyde-free beer

Hangzhou was all quite pretty. Lots of mist around, but it made the lake look nicer.

Hangzhou Hangzhou Hangzhou

I sent my front panniers ahead to Darwin from Shanghai – the bike looks much more streamlined now.

Me and the bike

Random river town along the way.

Zhejiang river town