Having tried and been unsuccessful at getting tickets for the bus in advance (I tried with my minute Chinese, a English Chinese dictionary and a copy of lonely Planet China, the day before) we caught the bus to a traditional water town from the Ming era, located only about 35km from Suzhou. The name was pronounced “Jo-Jung” (Zhou Zoang) and it had been made a world heritage site a few years before.
The bus journey was uneventful as we drove through endless development of the SIP district that continues the whole distance from Suzhou to Shanghai (a 2 hour bus ride away). It seemed odd to me to plan and start to build so many things at the same time. Housing was not planned in the hundreds but in the 10s of thousands, and the meticulous plan drawn up of the SIP district was being followed to the smallest detail. The scale is bewildering, and the vision of the future is becoming a reality.
The day was cold as we walked through the new town with the usual cars and shops. We ate a pleasant meal in a deserted restaurant, which included our staple diet of egg fried rice (the only dish I can order in Mandarin) after a few purchases and much bargaining we arrived at the old water town.
The water town perches on the edge of a huge lake (one so big you would think it was the sea). The town is arranged in a square of wide canals bisected by smaller ones. The gaps between are filled with houses and shops connected by high arching bridges over the canals to let the boats pass. The people here tended to be older, and seemed to continue in what I suppose was the traditional way. Most there time was taken up with fishing, washing clothes in the canal and now making things to sell to tourists. In contrast to the people of Suzhou you would call the people of this town poor, but there is more to life than money and positions and the people here seem to be quite content. They happily bartered with us over prices while others played cards, painted beautiful scrolls of calligraphy or produced pictures depicting mountain landscapes that I am convinced that none of them have ever seen. The houses were all old and made from stone crammed together with narrow passage ways between them, Boats carrying tourists paddled through the network of canals to the tunes of Chinese singing (the ladies paddling the boats were singing not recordings - N). In the past I guess the boats would have carried cargo but now road and rail have put a stop to that. The whole place was breathtakingly beautiful, like a set from a film about ancient china, the houses probably dated from about 1400, and within the town there was no real sign of any change to the architecture since then.
We returned to the coach by way of bicycle rickshaw, peddled by a man who was old enough to have been my grandfather and although this made me feel guilty, especially up the hills, the elderly here are still hard at work and often in manual work of some kind. The older people don’t ever seem to take it easy, retire, or get “old”. I remember telling Nicole that he would probably outlive the both of us and I think I may have been right.