Day 19: Shanghai - Yuyuan Garden - Oct 8, 2009

As a change we took one of those high speed bullet trains for our 40 minute trip to Shanghai. These trains apparently can go up to 360 km/hr, but as we weren't going far it never got the chance to build up enough speed, so the fastest speed I saw was 169 km/hr - still pretty impressive.

In Shanghai I carried my heavy bags up a set of stairs for the last time - yeah!! The next time my bag will move will be by taxi to the airport :-)

At the hotel we met up with the Canadians from our tour who are also staying here in Shanghai for a couple of days. Three of them decided to come along with us to go to the Yuyuan Gardens. It turned out to be a bit of an experience as our tour guide stopped in a shop to make a phonecall and told us to go on. A fifteen minute walk turned into almost two hours of wandering around the streets of Shanghai (yes, we had a map, and yes, we were asking people for directions). Eventually we asked another tour guide (one of those ones waving their little flags) to phoned Tomic and be re-united with him.

The Yuyuan garden is set inside a mighty bazaar and just finding the entry point is a feat. The garden covers five acres with pavilions, lotus pools, corridors and artificial mountains, One of the most impressive features was a stone dragon that snaked across the top of a wall.

We then took taxis to the east side of the Huangpu River and took the 45 second, super fast elevator to the 88th floor of the Jin Mao Tower for a brilliant view over the whole of Shanghai. The nearby Oriental Pearl TV Tower is a great sight to see with its futuristic shapes. But also brilliant was looking down the middle of the building to the golden lobby of the Grand Hyatt hotel - that would be an amazing place to stay at.

In the evening some of us took a river cruise to see Shanghai's lights and this was just as beautiful as the cruise the night before in Suzhou, but in a different way. It was gorgeous looking at all the lights on the European style buildings of the Bund on one side, and the lights on the modern buildings on the east side. I again took too many photos, so I hope that some of them capture the atmosphere. I've taken 1900 photos so far, but there are plenty of duplicates to delete.