Venice of the East

We left the hostel and caught the bus for the train station, from where plenty of trains for Suzhou leave, according to our hostel, just as the hostel in Shanghai had told us there was no need to book. On the bus we suffered a crisis of confidence and got off when we were sure we must have already gone way past the train station without realising it; because we hadn't caught the bus from the station, we weren't sure how close the bus would actually pass. No idea where we were, we had to resort to flagging a taxi again, but this time I was able to show the driver the Chinese for “train station” using the dictionary I had downloaded to my phone the previous day. The taxi continued in the direction the bus had been going for only a couple of hundred yards before arriving at the station. If only we'd kept our nerve!

At the train station we had difficulty being understood again, but I was becoming quite practised in copying Chinese character and I wrote out where and when we wanted to go. I had read that the dialect in Hangzhou is quite unusual, and people from neighbouring towns can't understand each other, but I was still surprised that saying “Suzhou” or “Shanghai” was not enough for them to understand where we wanted to go. After a few attempts I established that the next train to Suzhou was hours away and it was full, and the next train had only standing room remaining. Finally there was a sleeper that costs much more and got us in too late. Even the Shanghai train was full and the next one had only one seat free. So much for not needing to book because there are plenty of trains! We phoned the hostel from a kiosk to ask them to translate that we wanted the girl working at the kiosk to write down “Please take us to the East Bus Station” where we thought we could get a Suzhou bus. The girl at the hostel could not understand why we weren't getting a train and, very annoyingly continued to insist that there were plenty of trains. Nonetheless she did as we asked and we were soon armed with the necessary written request for a taxi.

The next bit went without a hitch and we got a taxi then a bus to Suzhou without any delay. Our arrival in Suzhou was met by lots of pushy taxi drivers, trying to charge us 40 Yuan to the hostel. But we had good directions to the hostel and, swatting the taxi drivers aside, we got to the bus stop where we only had to pay 1 Yuan to get us to the hostel. Of course, on the bus we were in the position again of not being sure how we would know we were in the right place, but then we noticed that the bus stops were named and, although we couldn't read it, we were starting to become quite good at recognising Chinese characters and were quite pleased when we successfully got off at the right stop. China was becoming a bit easier.

At the hostel it all fell apart again: they had given our room away. The booking form on hostels.com, through whom we had been booking most of our accommodation, had a drop-down box for approximate arrival time, which I filled in sometimes, but Joanne had always been leaving at the default, which is 11am. Apparently they had given our room away at midday and it was now 7pm. Joanne was furious: nowhere else had they paid any attention to that information and, after all, our booking was for that night and we had paid a 10% deposit online and you forfeit the whole first night's fee if you don't turn up, so they would have been paid twice for the room. The receptionist just kept insisting “but you are very late”, finally grudgingly saying that they had a single room we could have instead and I followed her to look at it. The bed was actually as big as some doubles we had slept in and this room was ensuite, whereas our room was with shared facilities. I started to cheer up, but when I insisted that we would not pay any more as I felt they should not have given our room away, suddenly everything changed: the manager appeared and apparently phoned the woman who had been given our room, then they explained that she had agreed to take the single room since she hadn't paid any deposit but we had. “You are very lucky” the manager said to us, patronisingly. I'd have thought getting your room when you've paid a deposit was more to do with rights than luck!

Our room in Suzhou

It wasn't a good start to Suzhou and we were very grumpy when we discovered that the cafe attached to the hostel was very expensive, and the street outside our room was very noisy at night. However the room itself was very nice, with a big four-poster bed.

Boating down the canal

Staying in Hangzhou only one night and all the stressful travelling we had done over the last few days had taken its toll. It felt like we had been trying to do too much in China and we couldn't really be bothered doing anything at all in Suzhou. We needed a rest after the terrible time we had in Japan, but China was nearly as difficult and we were just getting a bit sick of everything being so hard. We hadn't been spending enough time in one place so I'd had no time to read, little time to blog and I was far behind, and we'd had no time to play cards or backgammon.

Big pagoda

We forced ourselves to visit a pagoda not too far away but we didn't really want to and the ones we'd seen in Vietnam were much nicer. Again the shadow of the Cultural Revolution was visible in the pagoda: China has clearly not been valuing history and the pagoda was in a terrible state, yet it is one of the tallest in China and much bigger (of course) than anything Japan had to offer. Although Suzhou is promoted as the “Venice of the East” it is impressively ugly from above so the view was more like insult to injury rather than the reward you expect for climbing nine storeys. At the foot of the pagoda, though, was quite a pretty garden. Suzhou is known for its canals, hence the Venice comparison, and also its gardens.

Garden visible from the pagoda

The rest of Suzhou from the pagoda

Inside the pagoda

Incense. Everything is bigger and better in China.

The gardens next to the pagoda

[Sorry about this - I'd have made some of them thumbnails if it still worked]

Resident in the gardens

The gardens

A breather

We agreed not to try to hard and just rest a bit in Suzhou. While we were in the supermarket looking to save money on food, it started to rain. We felt pretty depressed and the walk back was treacherous: we first noticed it Bangkok when it was raining, but all over Asia the use paving stones for the pavements rather than tarmac. It looks very nice, but wet they become incredibly slippy, especially in flip-flops, which it typically what one wears in these countries. Since then we had spent many a walk cursing the stupidity of using such a material. It seemed only a matter of time until one of us sustained a flip-flops and paving related injury.

The fish counter at the supermarket. It's a tank.

The meat counter at the supermarket

Deadly paving stones

That evening we walked around our area discovering that it really is quite pretty. Venice is pushing it a bit, but it is nice.

Suzhou at night

The next day we chose one of the famous gardens to visit: Garden of the Master of the Nets. It is actually more of a stately home, incorporating a garden complex. There are loads of small buildings, each for a different mood or season, each looking out onto a different garden. The place is relatively small, but such a maze that we spent quite a lot of time there. Some of the gardens were beautiful, but many of them contained mostly rockeries. I had noticed these first in the garden in the Forbidden City; Chinese garden seem to feature quite a lot of rocks, but not interspersed with flowers as I would think of a rockery: just piles of stone, serving a function more like that of statue in a western garden.

Garden of the Master of the Nets

Funny stones in a part of the Garden of the Master of the Nets

The Spring Drawing Room (or something...)

Bonsai!

We finished off the day by wandering around the canals near our hostel to see what it looks like during the day. Our hostel was actually in a really nice area and we regretted not staying longer in Suzhou, probably missing our Hangzhou to give us the extra time. But instead, we had to leave, catching a bus to the train station in time for the sleeper train to Xi'an.

Suzhou's attempt at Venice

More Venicey stuff. Sort of.

Public toilets in Suzhou

Suzhou's Rialto Bridge?