Qian Dao Hu

The Lake of A Thousand Islands, or Qian Dao Hu, is in a remote part of the extended Hangzhou city and takes about 3 hours to get to by bus. I went there over a long weekend with a friend, because everyone had told me it was a worthwhile trip. The township gets its name from a lake which forms part of its coastline, which has many small islands. However, they say in reality it is closer to a few hundred than to one thousand islands.



We arrived in mid morning and while taking lunch, 2 Chinese girls began to converse with us. They then offered to show us around town a little, an invitation we eagerly accepted because we had no idea what was what. They took us the the edge of the lake and showed us to a place where we could book day tours around some of the many islands. Then we walked back though the city to the other side of town where there was another coast of the lake. This area was like a large city square surrounded by shops. At the time, there were people but it was not crowded.

The girls left us, and my friend and I walked for a while only to run into one of the girls for a second time. She invited us to her house where her mother made boiled pork for us. Later that night, we went back to the city square with her. Now it was buzzing with life. People were renting out roller skates and there was a lot of other activity. My friend partook in this while I saw to some emergency work in an internet cafe. One of my classmates needed some help in writing some documentation for a few projects we were working on.

Later that evening, we went to the lake's edge and watched a beautiful fountain show. Fountain shows are quite popular in China but this was probably the nicest I have seen. They used lights underwater to colour it and had remote-controlled spray heads to achieve interesting patterns. It went on and on without repeating for quite some time.



The next day, we took a day tour around the lake to a number of the more major islands. They catered well for tourists of our calibre and provided a lot of interesting things to look at. There were monkeys, snakes, ostriches (which you could ride for 10RMB) as well as a mountain cable car that went up to a look out, each on their own island. It was very beautiful and had some of the clearest water I had seen in Chinese lakes.



The following day, which was our last, we went to the other side of the lake to see a activity park. It was ridiculously expensive so we just walked around before hitching a boat ride back to the main island. On the way home, I fell ill with a cold. I think there is some sort of trend here. Perhaps if I go traveling I should not return home, to avoid sickness.

Please view my extended gallery of this trip.

Qian Dao Hu