Category: travel

Hengshan Garden Hotel, Shanghai

How do you choose a hotel when you travel? I wanted a nice hotel in Shanghai, somewhere reasonably central, not too expensive, and not too modern and soulless.

I figured I could skip the research phase of hotel selection and just book the hotel in the French quarter that I remember staying at before, in 2010—if I could figure out which one it was. Luckily, in 2010 I took a photo of the hotel sign!

Still, booking was not as straightforward as I assumed it would be. The hotel had been bought by the hotel next door, so the name had changed, from Hengshan Picardie Hotel to Hengshan Garden Hotel. Upon arrival, we discovered they had closed down what had been the main entrance on the corner. In fact, not just the lobby, but also the rooms we stayed in weren’t in the original building I remembered. Still, the experience was fine overall.

See below for 10 photos of the hotel, then and now.

Continue reading Hengshan Garden Hotel, Shanghai

Impression West Lake

Someone at some point recommended seeing the Impression West Lake show, and my parents expressed interest, so we made a plan to go and went. Siqi drove us to the Yellow Dragon Stadium complex and parked, and we all walked to the ticket office, had dinner at a noodle place nearby, watched the show, and went back to the car.

See below for 20 photos from our walk and the show.
Continue reading Impression West Lake

Back to Hangzhou

On the way back to Hangzhou, we detoured to two places that had been recommended to us by the hotel guy in Huangshan City.

First, we tried to visit Ancient Huizhou town. We drove there, parked, got out,  visited the washroom, went in the ticket office… and decided we just weren’t up to it. It was just too sunny and hot for walking around. So we got back in the air-conditioned car and left. In the parking lot, I got some photos of car license plates that I needed for my collection of photos of car license plates, so that was good.

Then, we went to another tourist site, a place with yellow mud Hui-style houses. Same problem, but worse: we would have had to take a shuttle bus into the tourist area, which would have made it hard to leave if we got tired of walking around. We called it quits and headed back to the highway to Hangzhou. But we enjoyed the scenery on the little roads on our detour, and the mountains along the highway looked pretty cool too.

See below for 16 photos from our drive from Huangshan back to Hangzhou.

Continue reading Back to Hangzhou

Liyang Old Street, Huangshan City

The driver we hired picked us up in a van at the park exit and took us back to the neighborhood of our hotel in Huangshan City, a vibrant retail area called Liyang Old Street. We went back to the hotel for a rest, then went out again later for dinner. See below for a handful of photos, including another of our hotel’s cats!

Continue reading Liyang Old Street, Huangshan City

Walking down Yellow Mountain

We went back to the same cable car partly the same way and partly a different way. There were stairs up and stairs down… lots of stairs. There were more other tourists walking around. We saw a lot of porters, which I think means the path we followed was either the shortest or the least interesting, because porters would want to take the shortest and/or least crowded path from the cable car station to the hotel. We also saw a lot of water rushing down the mountain. And we got a few more glimpses of mountains and trees in the mist.

Continue reading Walking down Yellow Mountain

Cable car up Yellow Mountain

We arrived at the entrance to the Yellow Mountain park in the afternoon of a cloudy day. There was no queue. We presented our (digital) tickets and ID. We presented more tickets and ID again to get on a shuttle bus. The shuttle bus (30m) took us to the bottom of the Yungu Cableway. Mom, Dad, Siqi, and I got a gondola to ourselves. We soon found ourselves not just among mountains, but inside a raincloud. Still, even though visibility wasn’t the best, the scenery was amazing! See below for 13 photos of our cable car journey up Yellow Mountain.

Continue reading Cable car up Yellow Mountain

Mild Spring Boutique Hotel, Huangshan

Our plan for visiting Yellow Mountain was:

  • arrive in the city and stay overnight at Mild Spring Hotel
  • be transported to Yellow Mountain (leaving the car and most of our luggage behind)
  • enter the park, walk to a hotel inside, and stay there overnight
  • walk back out of the park, be transported back to the city, and stay in Mild Spring Hotel overnight again
  • leave to drive back to Hangzhou.

Transportation to/from Yellow Mountain and the overnight hotel stay inside the park were booked together as part of a package. I chose Mild Spring after looking at various hotels online. This one seemed to have an interesting character… and I was right! I’m happy with my choice and would definitely recommend it to any English-speaking foreigners looking for a place to stay in Huangshan. The only caveat is that your car/van/taxi can’t pull up to the front of the hotel directly, because it’s in a rather interesting retail pedestrian zone (called Liyang Old Street). Fortunately, the staff can help bring bags over from the street or parking garage if necessary.

There are way more and way better photos of Mild Spring Boutique Hotel on Booking.com, Tripadvisor, and Agoda. But here are 19 of ours:

Continue reading Mild Spring Boutique Hotel, Huangshan