The Yuyuan Garden is located off the Yuyuan Bazaar. You step from one packed and busy bazaar into a relative sea of calm, which is very nice. The garden has an interesting history, which you can read from the Wiki link, and if you’re old, you get in for half price.
Yu Garden
Lindsey in the Yu Garden
There are various pavilions, pools, paths, carvings and rock formations in the garden, which is walled. Outside the walls you can hear the hustle and bustle of the old town.
Yu Garden
Lindsey in the Yu Garden
The stage
There’s one magnificent courtyard with a stage. This is still used for performing opera and similar entertainment.
There are many, many things to do in Shanghai, so it was a bit surprising that every Chinese tourist in the area (I estimate about 25,000) plus about 500 western tourists seemed to decide to visit the Yuyuan Bazzar at exactly the same time as we did.
At any one moment, you could take a photo of someone taking a photo of someone taking a photo. Surely, all of these photos don’t end up on blogs?
Yuyuan
Even the goldfish were into being overcrowded
Tourists everywhere
Tea house
We escaped into this cha guan (红茶馆), where we enjoyed some cha and some weird food to go with it. I had Oolong, and Lindsey had Pu-erh.
Tea with snacks
I managed to eat two of these eggs before wretching
These gooey things were much nicer
Then it was a case of deep joy when I discovered that being old allowed me to get into the Yuyuan Gardens for half price! Being young, Lindsey had to pay the full amount.
Someone told me that every new building in Shanghai must have a different design of rooftop. This results in a lot of skyline diversity. The Shanghai World Financial Centre is 1,614.2 ft tall, and Fat Mac told me that it is obviously the world’s biggest bottle-opener. I think this shows more about his focus than anything else.
1,614.2 ft bottle-opener
Apart from the breakfasts at our hotel, we enjoyed the food in Shanghai.
Just over twenty years ago, Pudong was a flatland of boggy farms. Now look at it. You need to click on each photo below to get the full effect.
Towers in Pudong
When completed, this tower will be the highest of all
To the left, the Jinmao Tower, in the centre, the Shanghai World Financial Centre, to the right, the new tower
Looking west, over to the Bund, from the top of the Jinmao Tower
View north-east from the top of the Jinmao Tower
Looking down, inside the Jinmao Tower, at the hotel reception, many floors below
Tea near the top of the Jinmao Tower
We had a relatively expensive cuppa in the bar one floor down from the top of the Jinmao Tower, and waited for the sunset and the super views. But I know that a couple of readers of this blog are much more interested in the toilets, so here they are, the toilets at the bar near the top of the Jinmao Tower:
A few years ago, I read that 20% of the world’s cranes were at that time in Shanghai, and ever since that time I’ve wanted to visit the city to see the results. Imagine – one in five of every construction crane in the World was involved in building one city – incredible.
You don’t get a full impression of a high-rise city on the way in from the international airport, and neither does it seem full of skyscrapers when you walk along the Bund. It’s only when you go up to the top of one of the towers that you begin to see how large the city is, and how many skyscrapers there actually are.
We did the usual things in Shanghai. We walked the length of the Bund, went up East Nanjing Road, visited People’s Park and the Yuyuan Gardens, then we went over to Pudong and took the lift to the top of the Jinmao Tower.
View over to Pudong from the top of our hotel
Night-time view towards the Bund from the top of our hotel
Oriental Pearl TV Tower, from the Bund
We saw quite a lot of dancing in the streets
A wedding on the Bund
A wedding on the Waibaidu Bridge
Another wedding on the Waibaidu Bridge
The Waibaidu Bridge, with the TV Tower in the background
So, you step off the plane after a cramped over-night long-haul flight from Amsterdam, with an additional couple of hours wait at Schiphol Airport and before that a short flight from Edinburgh, and although your watch tells you it’s 9 am China time, your body clock simply doesn’t agree, and the weather is hot and clammy and you don’t feel particularly good.
And it’s just so nice not to have to figure out how to get into the centre of the city yourself, but instead be greeted by a sign saying “Roderick Alexander MacLeod” being held up by a lovely smiling Emily from CITS, as arranged by Sanya China Travel, your tour company.
Emily and her driver took us the 30km into town to the Hengsheng Peninsula International Hotel, which was the only hotel we stayed in during our trip which wasn’t excellent. The room was fine, and the location was perfect, but the fitness and pool centre was ‘closed for development’ (it didn’t look as if it had been open for some time, and no work was being done on it), there were hardly any other guests, there was no WiFi, and as we found out the next day, the breakfast was just awful.
Our room at the Hengsheng
I’ll eat most things, including Chinese breakfasts, and for example I’ve enjoyed elephant biltong and baked Kalahari grubs, but the breakfast at the Hengsheng was dreadful. We liked every other meal we had during our China trip, apart from one which was a bit too spicy and full of bones (and it was our own fault for choosing it), but the Hengsheng breakfast was by far the worst meal we had in China. Whoever prepared it simply couldn’t cook.
Hengsheng breakfast
We later had a few meals on the train from Shanghai to Kunming, and although these cost only the equivalent of £2 and were not aimed at tourists they were far better than the Hengsheng breakfast. On my plate above is some dried up greasy bacon, some dried up salmon which I didn’t go near, a rubbery egg which was had possibly been cooked several hours previously, a dried-up mini-burger, and some pretty foul-tasting noodle stuff. The fruit (melon) was fine. The processed cheese in a plastic wrapper was standard processed cheese in a plastic wrapper, and not really what you’d select for breakfast. The bun was OK but the slice of bread must have been laying around for several days.
There was a choice of three weird selections of food, and you had to take one of the three – you couldn’t say, for example, ‘hold the salmon’.
The next day breakfast was just as bad, even though we chose a different selection. We also noticed that the few Chinese people staying at the hotel left most of their breakfast.
The second day breakfast at the Hengsheng was just as bad
At the end of our trip we stayed in the Hengsheng again for one night before flying home, and by that time the breakfast dining room had been switched to the ground floor, and the breakfast was MUCH better. So maybe it was just a temporary thing.
Well, we’re back home after our trip to China, and what a great vacation it was! We flew to Shanghai where we spent two nights, then it was on a train for two nights from Shanghai to Kunming, then a brief flight to Dali, then by car to Lijiang, then we trekked through the Tiger Leaping Gorge, then on to Shangri-La (Zhongdian), and finally to Deqin County before working our way back by car and plane.
I took loads of photos of people, houses, temples, landscapes, mountains, food and toilets, and will be posting some of them over the next couple of weeks, along with hotel reports, etc.
Without exception, the people we met were friendly and helpful, and in some cases very amusing (some Chinese people seem to have a strong sense of humour). With only one exception, the food was great. Some of the places we stayed in were superb.
We arranged the trip through Sanya China Travel, and were very happy with the service they offered and the arrangements and suggestions they made. Their documentation was good as well. My first enquiry was to China Connection Tours, but they didn’t get back to me with a detailed costing. Sanya China Travel, on the other hand, always responded quickly to my questions and suggestions, which is why they ended up with our custom.
There are, of course, various ways to travel in a country like China. You can go on a group tour, and we saw several of these in action – essentially, they are bus tours, and the itineraries are so busy that you hardly get a moment to savour the surroundings. You can tailor make your own itinerary using a tour company to make bookings and arrange pickups etc, which is what we did. Or you can travel independently, which is fine if you have lots of time, which we didn’t.
Sanya China Travel booked our flights and trains and our selected hotels, arranged airport pickups and drop offs, and provided an excellent guide and driver for the final week to see us through the Tiger Leaping Gorge and on to Deqin County near the border with Tibet. They also provided a detailed itinerary, advice on travel, and arranged access to some sites and venues. Other day trips and venues we arranged ourselves, so that there was a lot of flexibility. It couldn’t have worked out better.
I discovered that yak meat makes me very flatulent.
I took a lightweight Samsung tablet, and in most places there was free WiFi, enabling me to keep in touch via email, etc.
I knew that Facebook was ‘unavailable’ in most parts of China, but also found that Twitter, WordPress, Blogspot and YouTube were also banned. As a great deal of commerce is now conducted via those sites, I wonder how it will affect the economy in China in the future.
I found that even if I mentioned Facebook or Twitter in emails, my browser either slowed down or crashed.
There’s still an immense amount of building and construction going on in the country, with great emphasis on transportation and communications infrastructures.
Below is a short clip I made using the Samsung tablet, on the road from Deqin to Zhongdian.
I tried out the lunch buffet at Saigon Saigon yesterday. I was a bit late, having been distracted by the latest issue of Mojo, which I bought and then read in the Virgin Money Lounge. Here’s one of the tracks from the Mojo CD – Trombone Dixie, by The Superimposers, a UK band.
So by the time I got to Saigon Saigon at 3pm some of the buffet was slightly dried out. The food was similar to Jimmy Chung’s, but with a bit less choice, although they had seaweed. I think I just preferred Jimmy Chung’s.