Today, Hangzhou's West Lake is a major Chinese tourist destination. We visited during the Golden Week surrounding National Day, one of 3 weeks a year that Chinese workers may take off. As mobbed as Hangzhou was, the grounds of Lingyin Temple are so vast, that at least two people found a quiet place to reflect.

The Lingyin grounds are home to more than 400 Buddhas carved into cliffs and caves, and one temple is said to be 120 feet tall - perhaps the largest religious building in China. The hills around the temple are crossed with stone ladder paths, some of which are very steep. Linda and I climbed the challenging path to the North Temple, near which a funicular railway provides a quick way down (or up, for slackers).

Linda had timed our visit for maximum myst effect. It rained almost continuously for two days, no drawback to the well-prepared, and we found ourselves hiking through fragrant plantations where the area's famous longjian green tea is grown as low clouds alternately hid and revealed the steep ridges above. Stay tuned for pix pages on .Mac...
Comments 10:35:55 PM    

Shanghai: Linda and I are just back from 10 days in Shanghai and Hangzhou. Pictured here is the skyline of Shanghai's Pudong district as seen from the Bund, the storied riverside promenade on the Huangpu River. It was a first trip to mainland China for both of us - and we are both just amazed at what we saw.

Shanghai is China's largest city, with a current population of some 18 million. As Linda wrote in an email, Shanghai makes New York look building-less, and Las Vegas look light-less. Skyscrapers stretched as far as the eye could see from the 37th floor lounge of our hotel in the central Jingan district. The skyline is dotted with cranes and scaffolds - I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that hundreds of new high-rises are under construction: I read that one of Shanghai's problems is dealing with 30,000 tons of construction debris that is generated daily.

Growth is everywhere: it took almost an hour just to drive out of Shanghai and its suburbs on a Los Angeles-like freeway system. On the 200 km drive to Hangzhou, I counted at least 12 new freeways under construction.

We hiked and jogged about 70 miles this trip, much of it through Shanghai's neighborhoods. Walking is a wonderful way to get to know a place, and we were just amazed by the juxtapositions of Shanghai's streets. Between gargantuan office towers, you find dense blocks of low-rise apartments and small businesses teeming with busy residents. The streets are always bustling: on a Sunday-morning 6 AM jog we by no means had the street to ourselves. More pix and thoughts tk...
Comments 8:28:39 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures