Travel By Photo – West Lake Museum, Tea Farm & Bicycle

Good Morning HangZhou! We had our breakfast at hotel early in the morning at 8 a.m. I had mine fairly quick as I saw something interesting outside of the windows. It was Monday morning. A working day. I saw local people passing by our hotel on their way to work, by bicycles! There is even a dedicated bike lane for bicycles and motorbikes. ‘On your mark! Get set! GO!!’ This was what I saw in front of the traffic lights…

It was quite cold and misty in that morning, probably about 10°C. Other than those traditional bicycles running by two legs, there are also many motorised bicycles on the road which are famous in China lately, as seen in both photos above and below.

I took a lot of photos of this unique scene, even some ‘panning’ shot as above though not distinctive enough…

We continued our West Lake exploration after breakfast at 9 A.M. Worth making note that I started to miss my Nescafe at home. China’s Nescafe tastes different and milder than Malaysia and their hotels (might just our trip) serve terrible coffee!

We visited the West Lake Museum in the morning. It showcases the history of HangZhou and West Lake where all China’s premiers were undoubtedly love West Lake. Especially Emperor QianLong from Qing Dynasty who loved West Lake and HangZhou so much that he visited HangZhou 4 times, unofficially, and described HangZhou as the heaven on earth!

Other than the history, the museum also explains the geographical aspect of West Lake, types of wildlife species, culture, local products, tea speces and all visitors would want to know about West Lake and HangZhou.

We spent an hour in the museum. On our way to the couch, I took this shot of a row of bicycles for rent. You could find this everywhere around West Lake walkways and causeways. Very good practise, visitors could rent one of these from the booth next door which cost you RMB2 per hour and the first hour is free!

Before lunch, we visited the hinderland of West Lake, eMei Jia Wu’, ‘Mei ‘ family village, the home of world infamous Long Jing (Dragon Well) chinese green tea. It has showroom where a ‘cook’ was frying the freshly picked tea leaves, by HAND! I tried to touch the wok after that… It was real hot. I think was about 80°C! The reason why they are so ‘primitive’ not to use any tool is that hands of the sifu only are sensitive enough to control the heat of the wok and then the quality of the end product! (another marketting gimmicks? :) )

This was the first place that we were brought by the tour guide to mainly shop for green tea and its sub-products! It was also my first experience of such venue. They were so professional to give us a brief introduction on Long Jing chinese tea leaves, to let us to try the tea and off course, to sell the tea.

Stepping out of our couch, we could see many travel buses were already there, bringing hundreds of visitors to the tea farm and factory. ’Dragon Well’ tea plantations were spotted on the hill some distance away.

Long Jing or Dragon Well Chinese tea leaves have an unique fragrance which could be smelled once water is being poured into the glass with tea leaves. After few minutes or so, you could start tasting the tea. According to the introducer, half of the leaves would float while the other half would sink. ‘When you drink the tea, eat the leaves as well…’

These are some photos of the tea plantation along our way out of the factory. We spent almost 2 hours there. Most of my fellow tour members bought back some tea leaves, thanks to the brilliant sales lady and her brilliant introductory talks on all the health benefits of green chinese tea, including toxic clearance demonstration! (Jean bought a few packs too, for me, a smoker )

I finally found some sunshine when we were about to leave Mei Jia Wu and took both the above photos. Though weather at noon was still freezing cold and the sunlight was only for a short while, you could still see the colour difference in photos if compared with overcasted shot. Our 2 days in HangZhou were both overcast. This was the only moment we saw sunlight! – Travel Feeder.

All photos were captured by Panasonic Lumix FZ28