This is it, guys! We’re up on Huangshan and it’s magical!
50 photos below!
Tag: photos
From time to time I transform into a camera-toting tourist and take pictures. Then I post them using this tag.
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.
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:
To Huangshan
Our shopping in Longquan finished, we left town after lunch to drive to Huangshan City. See below for 22 photos of bridges, tunnels, mountains and some amazing clouds on the way.
Longquan Old Town
We wanted to do some shopping before we departed Longquan. First, we visited a shop that was literally downstairs from our hotel in the same building. After that, we drove to an old section of town and walked down an old street with mainly houses in one direction and some shops in the other direction.
See below for 32 photos from our time in Longquan!
Longquan Sword Factory
Swords are the other thing that Longquan is known for, so Mom, Dad, Siqi, and I visited a “sword factory.” Didn’t look much like a factory to me! It was a bit like a theme park, and would normally have involved demonstrations by craftspeople. Unfortunately, nobody was making anything, I think because it was supposed to rain and they weren’t expecting many visitors. To be fair, they didn’t get many visitors, so we walked around and enjoyed the gardens, the architecture, the displays, and the shop in remarkable peace and quiet. Entry was free. And we didn’t get rained on. I call it a win.
See below for strangely few photos of swords but lots of photos of a sprawling complex of Chinese buildings and gardens.
Longquan Celadon Museum
I went with my mom, dad, and husband Siqi to visit the Longquan Celadon Museum, which tells about the history of celadon, a type of green-glazed porcelain or stoneware.
Off to the museum we go to be tourists!
See below for 14 more photos of our visit to the celadon museum.
To Longquan
For quite a while, I’ve been wanting to go to Longquan, a city of 252,000 people located about 4.5 hours southeast of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province. Why Longquan? They’re famous for kilns that make Longquan celadon porcelain:
Longquan celadons were an important part of China’s export economy for over five hundred years, and were widely imitated in other countries, especially Korea and Japan. Their demise came after they were overtaken in their markets by blue and white porcelain from Jingdezhen. (Wikipedia)
I’ve seen celadon all over Asia (in shops and museums in Singapore, Japan, and Korea), and it’s pretty stuff. I wanted to see where it came from. So that was the first destination on our family road trip.
See below for 21 photos taken on the road to Longquan.
Xixing Ancient Town, Binjiang District, Hangzhou
Siqi and I went with his parents for a walk in Xixing Ancient Town. It’s a historic neighborhood surrounding an old canal that used to be important. A couple of old houses have been renovated and decorated as trendy coffee shops, and we saw a few people posing for photos on an old bridge like tourists, but it’s largely still a pretty quiet residential neighborhood (according to the Wikipedia page for Binjiang, inhabited since the Spring and Autumn period, which ended in 481 BCE), complete with unmentionables and other laundry hanging out to dry. There are a few signs in Chinese and English describing the landmarks.
See below for 18 photos from our stroll.
Continue reading Xixing Ancient Town, Binjiang District, Hangzhou
A Stroll by Nan Hu
It was a Saturday. Siqi and I took a walk near where we live.
Looks pretty dense and urban, right?
Yes and no! Yuhang District is developing so fast it makes my head spin. And there were already a lot of these tall housing blocks in the town of Yuhang before the latest wave of tech company offices and transportation infrastructure got built. But Zhejiang Lab, where I work, was plonked down in the middle of a bunch of farms on the other side of Nan Hu (South Lake).
I commute from one side of the lake to the other five days a week. It takes about 20 minutes by car. Siqi drives me or I summon a car and driver using an app, which costs 15 to 25 rmb (3 to 5 Singapore dollars, 2 to 4 US dollars).
Now that they’ve opened up a bike and pedestrian path beside the lake on the east side, we can actually try to enjoy living near this lake. Eventually I think they’ll build a path that goes all the way around.
See below for 13 photos from the peaceful water’s edge.
