Shanghai was lots of fun to visit, but the pollution’s fairly heavy, and I’m not sure I’d want to live there. At the suggestion of a friend, we went up to the 87th floor of the Shanghai Hyatt, to the extremely fancy bar, for cocktails. The best time to go is around dusk, to watch the city lights take effect. I was wearing jandals (that would be “thongs” for my Australian readers), and was told that I could only stay until 18:00. No worries though, we couldn’t afford to stay too long anyway, at 90Y per cocktail, plus 15% service charge. Outstanding views though, well worth it.
A bit tricky getting out of the city, heading out through the French Concession area. They don’t hate bicycles the way they do in Qingdao，but they don’t make it too easy. Bikes aren’t allowed on the main roads, so I needed to tack back and forth around the main road leading out of town, trying to keep it in sight. It actually wasn’t too bad getting out of the city, it was as I got out to the industrial areas that I got a bit lost, with a few deadends, and bemused locals wondering why I’m riding down the road that they know has a massive roadblock 500m down the line. Eventually found the G320 highway that I wanted, and I was rolling.
It was good to be back on the road, and back into places where tourists are quite uncommon. It was starting to get quite annoying in Shanghai walking around the main tourist areas, and being constantly asked if we wanted to buy “watches/bags/shoes/jackets/DVDs.” You stop saying “no” and just ignore it. When wandering around the fakes market, we had one guy following us for about an hour. It all got a bit creepy. I didn’t think much of the quality of the fake watches, so gave them a miss. But perhaps I should have bought one, my Polar watch stopped a day after leaving Shanghai…
Next big stop was Hangzhou, which is a very nice city, one of the premier tourist sites in China. The mist that was hanging around probably made the West Lake even more picturesque. The hostel was in a flash part of town, right next to the Lake, over the road from the Porsche dealership, etc…not cheap though. It was just as well we did lots of walking on the first day, as the second day the rain kicked in, so we just stayed inside most of the day, watching “Band of Brothers.” Digital TV in this province is cool. One other note is that most hostels have a huge selection of DVDs (all copies of course) that you can pick and choose from, to watch in the evening, or on a rainy day.
Walking back from the Wushan Lu tourist centre, with all sorts of stalls, statues, etc, we came across one of the most outstanding sights I’ve seen so far in China. A man was up a tree, madly shaking the branches. I couldn’t quite work out what was going on – was he trying to shake something out of the tree, like fruit? No, it wasn’t a fruit tree. Watching for a while, I worked it out – he was shaking the branches to try and shake out the leaves that would be going to drop off over the next few days. They were then sweeping up the leaves. Rather than wait, they were trying to accelerate the process. Of course, this was being done at 9:00pm, in the dark, no safety equipment, not even a ladder. Ah, China.
Back on the road now, heading southwest towards Hong Kong. Not sure exactly what stops I’ll make along the way, will just keep on riding, see how things go and what I find. With a bit of luck, the light rain/drizzle will clear up soon enough.