3 Day Simingshan Tour

Chinese celebrate May Day by having up to seven days holiday. ALL of China takes off at least three (and often seven) days. It seems all of China's buses, trains, aeroplanes, taxi's, hotels and restaurants are over crowded for this entire time. Well, they ARE!

The best way to get about during this period seems to be by bike. When I was informed that Chinese biking veteran "Aaron" was organising a three-day tour around selected parts of Zhejiang, and he had one slot remaining open and it was specifically for a foreigner, I jumped at the chance. I e-mailed him, asking if he remembered me, and asked for an invitation on his bike tour. Of course he remembered me – Aaron has an excellent memory for faces and names – and he said he would be more than pleased for me to come along. All I needed to do was to meet him on the evening of 30th April at a restaurant in Shaoxing, around seventy kilometres from where I live.

                               
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Life in China

After an adventure and a half catching a train to Shaoxing, I met him, and enjoyed a splendid Chinese banquet. The Chinese certainly know how to eat: their diet is so incredibly varied that there simply must be something, somewhere, that anybody will enjoy. The banquet took three hours to consume.

                               
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Our Route
Day one – RED
Day two – YELLOW
Day Three - BLUE

The next morning we rode of to Shangyu, about 30 km’s in a straight line, but a tad over 60 km’s by the route we rode. None of the riding was arduous, although I certainly felt the hills a little more than I should have: I haven’t been riding in about ten months, and I could feel it. We mostly rode through paddy fields, tea plantations and forested areas, and past the graves of long since deperted emperors.

                               
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Paddy Fields

                               
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Bamboo Thicket

China has had many, many dynasties, many capitals, and innumerable emperors. Their graves and tombs litter the countryside like old gold-diggings in western America and Australia. They’re everywhere.

                               
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The site of a past emperor’s resting place.

                               
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A Bridge at Shangyu – note the three “lanes”. Centre for motor vehicles, next for bicycles, and the outer for pedestrians.

After stopping for a lunch of fried noodles in a local restaurant we moved-on up through a range of hills named “Si Ming Shan”. When I asked Aaron what was this in English, he replied “Four Brightness Mountain”. I wasn’t sure if this meant one mountain named “Four Brightness”, or, four mountains referred to as “Bright Mountains”. I asked Aaron for clarification and was surprised to learn that he didn’t know either. He said that the name was so old that its original meaning was lost in time, and it could be either meaning, or another meaning we hadn’t thought of. It is in these ways that one is constantly reminded that China has been settled for a long, long time.

                               
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Restaurant for Lunch. This had windows

                               
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Fried Noodles

                               
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Noodles in Soup – not as filling as Fried Noodles

                               
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Looking at the (almost) accurate map