Later that evening we flew to Hangzhou where we visited several nice parks including West Lake, Yellow Dragon Cave, and a tea plantation.
HANGZHOU PHOTOS HERE
YELLOW DRAGON CAVE PHOTOS HERE
We visited a Dragon Well tea plantation. Tea is made from the camellia shrub and the fresh, new, soft leaves are picked for tea. After picking it is dried in a metal basin over low heat while someone stirs it by hand. I'm not a big green tea fan but I learned this about green tea:
- One pinch of tea is good for one cup/glass
- You can make four rounds of tea with that one pinch
- The second and third cups are best
- The earlier in the season the tea is harvested the better it is
- Tea quality is judged by light color, fresh/sweet smell, and small leaves.
They brag that this tea is 'organic' and doesn't have any pesticide on it so you can eat the tea leaves. However, once again, the rush to tourism may ruin that purity. This plantation is in a beautiful, deep valley and dozens of tour busses spewing diesel exhaust visit daily. One can imagine how 'pure' this tea will be in a few more years.
Hangshou is obviously a more modern town than most we visited. We went to one shopping avenue that was mostly for tourists both Chinese and foreign. There were shops catering to the Chinese tourists with calligraphy supplies, herbal medicine, and local specialty foods. The shops here were a little more like the older style but most of the city was not like that. In this city most of the shops we saw were much newer with good lighting, glass fronts with doors, and more upscale merchandise.
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