Home of the famous dragon tea
On our last day of a 3 day trip to Hangzhou, we had only 2/3 of a day to spend, since our flights were leaving around 6pm. First, we planned to the Xizi Wetland National Park, but then we changed our plan to see the place where the famous Longjing Tea is grown.
The trip started a bit scary. After we got into the taxi, my wife mentioned to me if something is wrong with the car, because it was abruptly steering to either side from time to time. I told her it may be an old car and she should not worry. After a while, we noticed the driver was falling asleep for seconds all the time and was really not in a condition to drive. Since we were “in the middle of nowhere” and just about 2.5 kilometers from our destination, we tried to keep him awake by playing loud videos on the phone (this is normal in China). Finally, we went out of the car alive, sweating and a little shaking. (I have to admit in 95% of all cases, DiDi (Premier) drivers are really good, so this was an exception)
As explained above, we stopped a little earlier and walked down to the Longjing Village. On the way down, we went up a hill on the left side of the road, where we ended up on a cemetery (at least we believe that’s what it was) in the middle of a bamboo forest. It wasn’t too exciting, so we went back to the main road.
A few hundred meters further down the road, we arrived in the actual village. The village is in a valley surrounded by hills on which the tea plants are grown. There are several paths through the tea “fields”. We went up the first one and were already really amazed by the views. We went up to the top of the hill but there was a forest blocking the way.
Luckily, March/April is harvest season, so we could see many women there harvesting the tea.
We went back all the way down and along the “main road”. Of course, on each side, there are small tea shops and places where the farmers dry the tea leaves. It was really interesting to see for us, but for the locals, it was at least as interesting to see us, as foreigners have become a very rare sight in China since COVID.
At the end of the road, we found the “Imperial Tea Garden”, an area with nice traditional buildings and some shrines. Hiking up the hills further, we eventually ended up on the very top of the hills where we could see the west lake on one side, the skyscrapers of the city on the other and the river on yet another side. The view was a bit foggy, but nevertheless, it was stunning to see nature and a futuristic city in one view.
We also met 2 girls with whom we had a very rudimentary conversion in chinese, but we were happy we could at least understand a bit and tell them were we live in China and from which country we are and how long we have been staying in China…lets hope in another year our chinese skills have improved further 😀
The hike took about 2.5 hours and we finally ran out of time. Before we headed back to the hotel/airport, we bought some strawberries from local farmers, which were really delicious.
2GIC 