Travel By Photo – West Lake Top Scenes Continue….

On the second day of HangZhou tour, we have first tasted the top quality LongJin green tea in hinderland of West Lake. After that, we continued to visit another one of the West Lake top 10 scenes, Fish Viewing at the Flower Pond (花港觀魚). It is a park with lots of flower species and a carp fish pond within.

Again, we were being ‘lectured’ by our local tour guide, Ah Mei, with some information on the park. One of the theme park is Peony garden. There was a ‘photographer-look’ chinese lady popped-up from nowhere and offered to take a group photo of us. With the ‘coorporation’ of our ‘friendly’ Ah Mei, we were being lined up in 4 rows and captured as a group 🙁 (the lady dissappeared after that but shown up again during our dinner with a stack of souvenir photobook with our group photo in it! Many of my fellow tour members bought it for RMB30 each, but not me!)

Fish viewing? There are a lot of flaming-red-coloured Carp fish in the fish pond…. for visitors feeding… though carp fish could be seen in Malaysia as well. So, nothing to shout about….

For rest of the afternoon, we went to cruise, West Lake cruise ride, in a very special chinese boat, with authentic chinese architecture cabin design.

We rushed on to the boat to get a perfect front seat and thought that we were smart 🙂 When the boat started sailing, strong and freezing head wind was hitting us cruelly and we realised that we were not really smart! 🙁

From the cruise, we could see most of the West Lake 10 scenes on board: Autumn Moon over Peaceful Lake (平湖秋月), Leifeng Pagoda in the Sunset (雷峰夕照), and Evening Bell Ringing at the Nanping Hill (南屏晚鐘), though we missed the perfect timing which were all happened later…. The cruise took about 45 minutes to sail round the West Lake. Though the weather was still misty and cold, we still enjoyed the ride absolutely.

Instead of sight seeing, my ladies had some fingers seeing… 🙁

After fighting the cold for the whole cruise, we felt hungry and had some snacks along the way back. What you could see from the photo is some famous local snacks in HangZhou, corns, Tao Foo (beans curb), herbal egg, all in dark colour! ( because they were all being cooked in chinese herbs soup!). 🙂

We left West Lake for the last time of our HangZhou tour…..,

walking pass those willows for the last time………,

saying goodbye to a row of fishing boats………..,

and crossing the lake with the scenic Su Causeway…. “Err, excuse me ladies, do you mind? I’m taking a photo…”

What was our final night activities in HangZhou? We went shopping at the upmarket shopping district of West Lake! The shopping complex is located just behind the Shangri-La Hotel, which is at the West Lake shore front. Across the side road, we found a Ferrari concept store!

I wrap up this final day travel log in HangZhou by displaying this night scene photo that I took hand-held for 1/8 second in front of the shopping complex, with my baby travel camera, Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28. Good night and stay tuned! – Travel Feeder.

Photos were taken with Panasonic Lumix FZ28

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.