Wondering with Wind

As planed, we went to Suzhou, Jiangsu province last Sat. We took a 8:58 am bullet train, China Highspeed Railway (CHR) at Shanghai Railway Station and arrived at Suzhou in 40 minutes. It stopped at Kushan (昆山) for 2 minutes. The bullet train is the best option to travel between Shanghai and Suzhou: 26RMB/person, safe, fast and reliable schedule (no traffic jam).

I’ve been to Suzhou once 8 years’ before. In my memory, it is a lovely small city. I had a great time walking around from one garden to the other.

But this time when we walked out of the Suzhou train station, it took us around 30 mintues to figur out where to take a taxi or a bus. Taxi drivers refused to take us to nearby place, and finally we were in a bus but the route on the map is not correct and we got off the wrong station and had to take a 3-wheel bike. At around 11am, we arrived at The Humble Administrator Garden (拙政园) historial street. Suzhou Museum, Lion Forest Garden (狮子园) and Humble Administrator Garden are in this neighbouhood.

We started from the new wing of Suzhou Museum, which is designed by Guangzhou born American Chinese architect Ieoh Ming Pei. Mr. I. M. Pei spent a few years of his childhood in his family’s estate, the Lion Forest Garden in Suzhou, now a World Heritage Site. Suzhou Museum is the second architecture designed by I.M. Pei in Mainland China besides of Fragrant Hill Hotel (香山饭店)，a four star hotel in Fragrant Hill in Beijing. I was attracted by the big name of Pei and visited (took a look) Fragrant Hill Hotel (香山饭店) in 2000 when I was a student. I didn’t have the “wow” feeling at the design but I bet it to be a nice place to stay for leisure and relaxing. The other mater piece by I. M. Pei I desire to visit is the Pyramids of the Louvre, in Paris.

A quick image tour of Suzhou Museum:

from the outter garden, the building is the entrance main hall.

The interior garden, the building is the back of the main hall.

A modernlized “art of the window”. In Classical Gardens of Suzhou, there are always a scenery out of the each window. Typical scenery elements include: a Taihu stone, some bamboom, a small pond, a tree, a Chinese orchid, etc.

In the hallway.

A modernlized and abstracted version of “Fake Hills”(假山). The traditional “Fake Hills” are made of stones from TaiHu Lake. The natural shape of the stone insprite people’s imaginary. Lion Forest Garden is famous for the thousands of “lion-shape” like stones.

Similar to Fragrant Hill Hotel, the Suzhou Museum adopts the typical colors of the whitewashed plaster wall, and te dark gray clay tile as primary colors. These are the color you will see in Suzhou city. I like the modern design, but not really the whitewashed palster wall. Why? It is too difficult to maintain. The museum is less than 2 years’ old but I can see the rain washed stains on the wall. The air condition is just not good. But the facilities inside the museum are world class, except the descriptions on the exhibits are too short, only titles.

The other wing of the musuem is Prince Zhong’s Masion, originally a part of the Humble Administrator Garden. It is a fun exeperience to walk through a door and go back to several hundred years’ ago. Strongly recommend if you want to see something different in Suzhou.

Lunch

We spent about 2 hours in the museum (20RMB) and went to a nearby restaurant called Wumen People (吴门人家， 苏州平江区潘儒巷31号), a top 3 reviewed restaurant in Dianping.com.

Tiger Hill

In the afternoon, we visited Tiger Hill (虎丘). Tiger Hill is famous for a mystery of a tomb of King of Wu (AC 514-496). The park is in the northwest edge of old Suzhou city, but keep in mind that Suzhou is small and it only took us less than 20 RMB to get there from the museum in the east of Suzou. Visiting Tiger Hill in a national holiday was a disaster: too croweded. So my good impression on Tiger Hill was gone.

I adore this! It was written by a calligraphy master named Yan Zhenqinq (颜真卿) (AC 709- 785) in Tang Dynasty. In fact, only “剑池“ are original, “虎丘” were rewritten by Zhang Zhongyu (章仲玉) in Ming Dynasty. It is said the the tomb of King Wu is under the cliff befine the sign. (60 RMB/person, free audio guide with 400 RMB deposit, 2-3 hours)

Canals of Old Suzhou

Good news.: one big change of Suzhou since my last visit is the improvement of water quality in the canals. Suzhou was described as Venice of The East (v.s. the west Venice in Italy) by Marco Polo in 1276. Today, the interconnected system of water of 2500 years’ history is back to work and green again.  48 points of interests are linked and accessible by water, including ancient city gates, bridges and gardens. A way to see the city but avoid the crowds and traffic. We visited a friend at his condo where a cannal/river is running next to his back yard.  As a proud Suzhou resident, he kept encouraging us to move to Suzhou!

 Dream Vacation?

I would love to visit Venice of Italy and Amsterdam of Netherlands to see the “water city” of West.

You don’t want to miss these three “weird wonders” next time you visit Beijing:

The best view point of The Egg is on the top of Jing Hill (Jingshan, 景山). It is designed by French architect Paul Andreu. My friend Michelle Hu took the first two images.

Photo Courtecy of Dante Busquets

The Bird’s Nest is the National Stadium for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. It looks like an under-constructionnever to me

CCTV (China Central Television) Head Quarter is still under construction (left photo by China Chas on Dec. 2, 2007, thank e-architect for the right image.). It is designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren.

Updated on Jun. 12 2008:

I went to the Bird Nest last month during “good luck Beijing” Sohu open, a game design to test run the National Stadium Bird Nest.

More images here.

Bodhisattva Water Cave is the best known cave in Yangshuo, China. The whole cave is about 3 km long, runing through three mountains. The bottom level of this 2-level cave is an underground river which is about 2.5 km long. Two things to do in the cave: mud bath and fishing/swiming. On above adverstisement/description of the cave at the entrance, it is claimed to be the MUST VISIT in Yangshuo area.

View of the inside of the cave. The name “Bodhisattva” comes from the Buddhas shape stone in the cave. In fact, there are much more other strange sharped stones in it!

I was cheated to crawl through this extremely narrow hole when the cave guide said we have no other way going futher! It was painful on the other side of the cave, but such a relief when I made to this side. Even a smile on my face!!! We walked without crawling when we were back!

Mud? Chocolate? We were fighting. It took me about 1 week before I can’t find any more mud in my hair! You can borrow clothes like these from the cave guide if you don’t want to ware bikini or wash or throw away your own nice T-shirt and pants.

Hand in Hand with my cavers! We come, we see, we conquer! I have to endorse our cave guide who took great pictures for us in such back condition and keep my DC clean. The tempreture was hot high enogh in April for us to explore more of the underground rivew or the waterfalls. We didn’t see any fishes, and nore of us would swim here. - All above images were took in 2003.

This is an image from George. Check out the story of their recent trip to Yangshuo.

Our recent trip to Sichuan, a western province in China, was my first “vacation” in China. Well, I had a road trip with college friends 10 years’ ago in Xinjiang province. But that wasn’t really a vacation (if you know what I mean). This time, we only had 4 days in the destinations: jiuzhaigou, songpan and huanglong, so our desired experience was to see the best natural beauty of these places. Not culture, not people, though they are something unique and special to experience, we just don’t have time. These tips are most usefully when you are in our similar situation, who have some budget concern (don’t want to be ripped off) .

#1. Where to Go?

What? Having said that the destination is Jiuzhaigou doesn’t mean you can go to Jiuzhaigou directly. You can fly to Jiuzhaigou or take bus or hire a private driver or drive yourself there. There are flights from 6 cities in China to Jiuzhai-huanglong airport which is built in the altitude of 3200+ meters. Chengdu, Chongqing and Xi’an are the major connection city to Jiuzhai airport. So you can plan in advance to visit one of these cities before flying to Jiuzhaigou.

There are more than 20 flights every day departed from Chengdu v.s. 6 from Chongqing. In theory, you can get cheaper tickets by fly in from Chengdu. But in peak season when Chengdu is a HOT destination, the theory doesn’t work. So I got at least 20% cheaper tickets by flying in from Chongqing.

If you are taking bus (120RBM/person) or hire a private driver by road (around 800RMB one trip), the trip from Chengdu to Jiuzhaigou takes about 10hrs (without traffic in Chengdu downtown). From north such as Langmusi, it this the same hours due to bad road condition according to Man Man Zou’s Jiuzhaigou Park and Chengdu trip in 2006.

#2. When & Where to Buy Air Tickets?

New online travel sites/service providers are helping to get cheaper and cheaper tickets for consumers in China. So don’t be surprised if your tickets are 80% off. It is not a spam! I will strongly recommend Kooxoo.com for ticket booking. It is a meta search engine like sidestep. Its competitor is Qunar, found by 3 American. I prefer Kooxoo for its clean simple interface design.

I booked my tickets about 3 weeks before departure date at a quite satisfactory rate. And later a travel buddy told me she got a 20% cheaper ticket a week later. So it is not always the earlier the better. Travel agents say 14-day-advance is the best. My other friend claims that 2-day-advance is the best (in non peak season week days). I will test her theory.

#3. Where to Stay?

I made at least 20 phone calls to hotels to quote hotel room rates and book hotel. That means there are very limited data about hotel rooms in jiuzhaigou on the Internet. I collected the phone numbers from the websites that ask for an extremely unreasonable price of hotel rooms. At last, we stayed at a hostel recommended by a lot of young travelers. Because most of the hotels won’t tell me the rate until check in which made me feel very “unsecured”. They usually reserve most of the rooms for tour operators or travel agents. If you book through elong or ctrip (Chinese expedia and travelocity), you can get a confirmed, but very HIGH rate.

We arrived at jiuzhaigou on Oct. 7, the last day of national holiday. We shared a private car with a couple from Songpan to Jiuzhaigou. They didn’t book any room, but easily find a nice hotel room in walking distance from the park entrance. The biggest learning is: in 99% of cases, you don’t need to book your hotel rooms in advance if you travel to a place like Jiuzhaigou. Go there and shop for hotel room as you shop for gifts.

My previous posts about this trip:

4-Day Trip to Jiuzhaigou, Huanglong, Songpan of Sichuan, China (Part I)

My coming & dream travel destination: Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan, China