There are no taxis in Hangzhou

My parents have left Shanghai now. I can now bring myself to write about a painful period we went through during their visit. Being a dutiful son, I had arranged a get-away from Shanghai in the form of an overnight stay in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. I arranged the aforesaid trip smack-bang in the middle of the May 1st Golden Week Holiday period. I'm such an idiot.

The photos I took during our 2 day stay in Hangzhou don't really explain the full story.

It all started soon after we left our apartment. I was running late, and made my parents actually run to catch the train. Bad start. Our train travel to and from Hangzhou was slow. To get to Hangzhou, there were seats were only available on the slow, all-stops train to Hangzhou on Wednesday. Couple the slow ride with intermittent stopping to let other express trains pass, well, it was frustrating.

Leaving Hangzhou Train Station wasn't as bad as I thought it may have been. Hangzhou is renowned for its shortage of taxis, and I soon learnt, a major shortage of taxis during peak tourist periods. In fact, in our attempts to hail taxis during our stay in Hangzhou, we usually snared one in less than 10 minutes (which is pathetic in relation to Shanghai, but ok nonetheless).

By the way, it was my first trip to Hangzhou (I can hear your gasps dear readers). I was impressed. By engaging my now well-developed sense of 'imagine that the thronging masses aren't there and interrupting your view or enjoyment of INSERT ITEM HERE', I enjoyed the nature that Hangzhou offered. You can definitely see how Hangzhou is renowned as one of China's best tourist destinations.

Like most visitors, I found Hangzhou to be really really pretty, really really green, and at that time of year - really really crowded. We spent our first afternoon in Hangzhou enjoying the beautiful landscaped parks and walking trails around the eastern and southern banks of the West Lake (Xi Hu). This wandering was interrupted by stops at perhaps the most well-located Dairy Queen and Starbucks franchises I could have ever thought to encounter.

We saw the easily accessible sights of Hangzhou. The West Lake is the most prominent, but we also managed to see quite a lot of the Hangzhou Botanical Gardens, and a quick visit to a Lingyin, a small village with the famous Lingyin Buddhist Temple. So famous that we thought the thronging masses was too much to bear so we pretty much turned around and went back. Well we tried. Our bus broke down. A replacement arrived. Throngs of tourists weren't happy, there were heated exchanges all-around, and also armpits heated by the humid conditions.

We had a few hours to kill. We went looking for some of the 'famed' warehouse shops to purchase clothes and such items. No luck there. We finished our explorations inside a massive shopping centre to find that rain had arrived and had promptly melted 95% of Hangzhou's taxis. We had 4 hours to get back to our hotel and then to the train-station. No problem. No. Big problem. Taxis were thin on the ground to start with, then add moisture to a large group of people who'd all rather catch a taxi in the rain, and then throw in some strange administrivia were Hangzhou's taxi's can only work in certain areas and have to refuse fares to far-away locations like our hotel (10 minutes from The West Lake). It was chaos. I chucked a wobbly at the situation. Dragging your parents around a foreign city isn't pleasant. Fighting to hail cabs in the rain is tough. Getting 3 out of 3 taxi drivers that you manage to hail to refuse your fare because they can't go to a certain place is tougher, but talking to bus drivers to ask if their bus goes anywhere near our hotel (near Wulin Square) and not getting a response was ok, but the last straw. I got pissed off. Not happy Jan. I was in a foul mood, and I'm told I wasn't pleasant company.

We gave up hailing a taxi with less than 1 hour before our train was due to depart. We started walking to the hotel. We made it half way when a miracle happened. We got a taxi, the taxi driver initially said he couldn't take us, but I told him about our predicament. He said he'd help. He rocked. We gave him a massive tip for getting us to the hotel, fighting off the other hotel guests while I collected our belongings from reception, raced through Hangzhou's rain-affected traffic to the Train station about 10 minutes before it was due to leave. An absolute miracle.

Our home-ward train was delayed by almost 2 hours. Argh! So unlike our train ride to Hangzhou, the only delay we faced was the train actually turning up in the station. At least on both occasions we used a train, we'd remembered to hang onto our train tickets for collection as we left the train stations. So unlike our first lesson on China's train system, we didn't encounter any problems such as those described (at length) by Banterist.

Overall, it wasn't the smoothest of trips - but that's ok. You expect that when travelling in general, when your guide doesn't speak the local lingo well, you're trying to impress upon your paternals your decision to move to China was well-thought out, and in particular when you encounter the masses of tourists (ourselves included) intent on maximising their enjoyment in one of China's most well-known tourist destinations. I could go on, but I really must stop. You get the picture. Everything improved after this point. Well, no it didn't. The lowest point was after we returned from Hangzhou when my Mum cried because of my anger. Hangzhou was the catalyst for me expressing all the shit I had been through and subjected to in the last few months at work, outside of work, things I have been doing, things I haven't been doing, and on top of that getting the big 'disappointment' talk from my Dad. I was so angry days after returning. Angry at a lot of things. Angry enough that just being angry made my Mum cry. Shit. I felt bad. I still feel bad and pissed off. Bloody Hangzhou.

Tags: accommodation, China, Hangzhou, travel, Xi Hu