Day 6, Tuesday afternoon
Boat ride on the Grand Canal, Suzhou

Photo by Gene Field

After leaving the silk factory, we headed to a dock on the Grand Canal to board our boat for the afternoon cruise. Suzhou is known as the Venice of the East because of its many waterways. The Grand Canal is the oldest and longest man-made waterway in the world. Parts of this canal between Hangzhou and Beijing date back more than 2000 years. Several million workers were required to construct and connect the many sections of the canal. Disuse and disrepair, flooding and silting have made parts of the canal unnavigable, but there are sections still in use and much traffic can still be seen on both the major and minor waterways. Other modes of transportation helped make the need for this form of transportation unnecessary.



Photo by Gene Field

Our canal boats had bright yellow roofs, windows all along the sides and single seats along each side. Our tour started in an area where the canal was fairly wide and then we eventually went down narrower arteries. There were many homes along the canal strung with red lanterns, some had laundry hanging out to dry, and all looked very different from the high rise apartments that so many people live in now.

Photo by Gene Field

After going quite a ways down one narrow canal with older homes on either side, we stopped just past an arched bridge and disembarked for a short time to wander around an area of shops and homes. We walked over the arched bridge and into narrow alleyways of vegetable stalls, outdoor food stands, two men playing a board game, shops selling all kinds of goods, and even a barbershop. This was the only time we were able to walk around and experience the feel of a small neighborhood.

Photo by Gene Field

For many years, the houses along the canals were not considered choice housing for various reasons: damp and humid, no toilets in the homes, no air conditioning and mosquitoes. Some were only accessible by boat. Now these properties are more in demand and harder to get as some of these problems are overcome and waterfront homes are popular.

The Grand Canal boat trip was one of the most enjoyable tours we went on while in China. Besides the scenery, the feeling that we were in a very old part of China, and being able to wander around on our own in an interesting area, for some reason we did not have a tour guide on our boat to tell us what we were seeing. So one of our own took over the mike and gave us her own version of the tour. She was great and we had many laughs.

After the boat trip we boarded the bus again and headed south for Hangzhou, a two to three hour trip. Along the way we could see the countryside. The homes here were quite different; some were three stories high with the bottom level open - maybe for storage. There were various crops growing but no large scale farming. Every so often our bus had to stop for a toll station. And once, about half way through the trip, we stopped at a roadside rest stop with a little convenience store which we all went in to buy goodies and other items.