2010年8月6日星期五

My trip to Suzhou and transfer to Nanjing




Well, we gambled on the weather and lost as today's rain and cloudiness is even worse than yesterdays! Not mush we could do about it so we marched off into the rain and wind to see a few famous gardens around Suzhou. After some breakfast we walked to the nearby Master of the Nets Garden (Wangshi Yuan), which is one of the smaller gardens but supposedly one of the best as well. It was an interesting garden because it seemingly mixed a traditional garden with a residence and it was nice and all, but days end would prove that although the Chinese gardens are very nice, they pale in comparison with the Japanese gardens I've been to. Next we sloshed through a downpour and took a bus to the Humble Administrators garden (Zhuo Zheng Yuan), which is considered by many to be second to the Nets garden. It's your more traditional "outdoors" garden with streams, ponds, bridges, and islands of bamboo forests. It was constructed in the 1500s, is quite large, and affords you the ability to walk and stroll around for an hour or so. Afterwards, we walked to the Lions Garden, which is interesting because it's a traditional garden but they designed it in conjunction with a labyrinth of man-made stone hills and walk-through caves, so you end up traversing the entire garden but in a twisting, ducking, round-about manner that makes the experience more fun than your usual garden outing.
Since bad weather really sucks the life out of garden viewing we decided to hop an early train to Nanjing, so we stocked up on train goodies and took a semi-comfortable train for about 2 hours, in the train we have met a Spanish Couple who were took the train to Nanjing for their travel China too. And we talked lots about the experience along the hours in the train. Finally we arrived and say goodbye to each other and I have found our hostel and I'll get up early tomorrow to see the Massacre Museum of Nanjing and then meet up with Kham for a few more sites before we get one last train to Shanghai - where she'll meet her sisters and I will take a flight to South Korea on Saturday.

没有评论:

发表评论