Suzhou

Trip Start Mar 31, 2010

109

Trip End Mar 31, 2011

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Flag of China Suzhou, Jiangsu, China
Monday, September 20, 2010

Our journey from Kaifeng to Suzhou involved 3 train journeys across the country to near Shangai. And what a day of contrasts it was. Our first train was an hour on a very grubby old slow train that had been going overnight and our 2nd class seating carriage was full of bleary eyed people, who stared at us curiously, and the floor piled high with the remnants of their dinners and breakfasts. We then took a more modern express train before changing finally to the newest top of the range 220mph train. We boarded in a station much like a Norman Foster airport and the train was impeccably clean and civilised, full of smartly dressed people who sat silently. The train had a speed display in the carriage and was doing 120mph within 2 minutes of leaving the station. It perfectly illustrated the difference between the poorer provinces inland and the coastal regions which feel like a different country - in a different century.
What is again notable looking out the window is that there doesn't seem to be a single square inch of the country that isn't planted with some sort of crop

Train

. We'd have thought a country this size would have had some wilderness, but there is none to be found, in the south at least.

Suzhou is a genteel city near Shanghai built around a number of canals. It is also famed for its gardens, with names like 'the humble administrator's garden' and 'a garden to linger in'. The gardens tend to be mostly centred around ponds and feature lots of landscaping and pavilions and so on, rather than much in the way of plants and flowers. They are very pleasant to walk around and we spend 3 days doing very little except going to the gardens and enjoying being able to walk along the canals without noisy traffic.

We also spend a good 2 hours queuing to get train tickets - as well as people wanting to take trains during the current 3 day mid-autumn festival, people are also booking tickets for the October National 'day' holiday, which is in fact 7 days of public holidays, while we are in Beijing, which is busy enough at any time, so we are expecting chaos.

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