If you plan to travel to Hangzhou and from where explore some sightseeing places, there is a good place you can start – the govenment sponsored tourist service centre near Yellow Dragon Sports Centre.
Day tours depart from the Centre every day to surrounding scenic spots, such as the water towns ZhouZhuang and Wuzhen, or the historic and cultural city Shaoxing, or the thousand-island lake. Tour price ranges from 200-300 RMB (inclusive of entrance ticket, transport fee and guidance fee).
They also organize 3-day tours to Yellow Mountain. The tour also departs every day. Price, inclusive of main entrance ticket, transport fee, guidance fee and hotel accommodation, ranges from 540-900 RMB, depending on the kind of accommodation you choose.
Be prepared that the tour groups accommodate mostly local Chinese. If you can’t speak Chinese, it is hard for you to mingle with them. But if you want to make use of the opportunity to observe the local custom or interact with the local Chinese, it may well be worth it. In particular, if you come to China to learn Chinese, it will be a good opportunity for you to practice Chinese and listen to lots of Chinese, as the tour guide will speak in Chinese only.
Also take note that the staff manning the information counter or ticket office can hardly speak English. Be prepared for a tough time if you can’t speak Mandarin.
One reply on “Travel around Hangzhou – A good place to start”
Hello there,
I was surfing the internet and i came across your blog on China’s Hangzhou.
My family and I just came back from a 7 days Shanghai trip which covered Hangzhou,Xitang, Wuxi, Nanjing and Suzhou. This is our first overseas trip and i am really speechless and overwhelm by the beauty of China. Let me introduce myself. I am a Chinese housewife with a loving husband and three beautiful children, living in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. We were in Shanghai from 14th February to 21st February 2007 and we celebrated Chinese New Year in Nanjing. It was really beautiful (although it rained almost everyday but we were not complaining) and the we loved the cooling weather there so much even though we expected snowfall in Hangzhou.
We wouldn’t spent much time in Hangzhou and we were on a tour package but i would love to visit Hangzhou again in the near future. We can’t speak Mandarin but we had a fun time learning to understand and speak Mandarin from the Hangzhou local tour guide, who happened to have studied Bahasa Indonesia for eight months, therefore she patiently translated to malay with indonesian accent. Still we had fun, learning and speaking mandarin. Even my eldest daughter (who is 20 year old) managed to learn some mandarin which got the local guide to notice who said that when she first saw my daughter who could’nt speak mandarin but upon leaving shanghai, she was able to speak a little bit of mandarin.
We have learnt alot from our first China trip and its very valuable to us. So, the next trip will be to China too and looking forward to visit Guilin, Kunming, Guangzhou and so on.
I enjoyed reading your blog and will continue to read it. Thanks for creating such a lovely blog.
Belinda Ngoo
Malaysia