HANGZHOU WEST LAKE & LONGJIN TEA VILLAGE

This weekend we headed to Hangzhou to go and stay by the West Lake. We caught the train from Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station which is always an experience in itself. The station is huge and very busy, but it is clean. The train system itself is incredibly efficient with modern, fast trains that always run on time. 

The train travels at 170km an hour and it takes 1 hour to do the journey. As you look out of the window the landscape is fairly bleak with lots of industry, construction and high rise apartment blocks. It is only as you arrive in Hangzhou that you see more green on the landscape and hills on the horizon.

We stayed at the Wyndham Hotel and had a beautiful view of the lake. We walked around the lake on Saturday afternoon and it is lovely, but slightly ruined by the sheer volume of people and traffic on the perimeter, not to mention the array of tacky souvenir shops and food stands.

On Sunday we went to the Longjin Tea Village to see the famous green tea plantations. The village and surrounding area are extremely beautiful and we were lucky to visit at a time when the leaves were being picked and dried ready for sale and the cherry blossom trees were in bloom..