Suzhou and the Grand Canal

I don't know of anyplace but China where a trip to the countryside means going to a prefecture with over 4 million residents.

Perhaps I just misunderstood the description.  In any case, at $65 for this optional 11-hour tour that included another multi-course lunch, I'm not complaining.

The long drive on the freeway took us past gigantic, modern factories where many of the products we consume in the United States daily are manufactured.

Other than jets, we saw few items manufactured in the USA while in China.  They import our produce, but mostly they just bank the trade deficit in US treasury bonds to possibly use to buy our real estate and corporations later.

Suzhou has been an important economic center for over two millennia.  By the year 100 AD, Suzhou, which was established about 600 years earlier under the Zhou Dynasty, had grown to be one of the ten largest cities in the world.

The longest man-made canal in the world, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, passes through Suzhou.  Originally beginning as segments in the 5th Century, the canal was connected during the Sui Dynasty around 600 AD, a considerable achievement considering elevation changes.  They used double slipways, ramps similar to what are used to launch small boats at some docks, but that system obviously had significant challenges.

In 986 under the newly established Song Dynasty, Qiao Weiyue, a naval engineer as well as a politician, invented the pound lock, which made these elevation changes consistently efficient by flooding a chamber about 50 paces long from the high water side to gradually raise the boat.  This technique for navigating elevation changes on rivers and canals is still used today throughout the world.

China's 1104 mile Grand Canal is a Unesco World Heritage Site for good reason indeed.

We boarded our "sampan" river boats in what really does seem like a throwback to less hectic times in an old low-rise neighborhood.

It proved to be a pleasant float, though I have to say its "Venice of the East" moniker sets travelers up for disappointment.

This is not some Las Vegas or Hollywood version of freshly painted sets meant to look like an idealized Chinese canal.

It's not Venice with striking, romantic architecture around every turn.

The views along the river were never like being on Pirates of the Caribbean or the Jungle Boat Ride, but rather plain, aged walls with occasional bushes or maybe a housewife working.

Our battered old sampan had a guy apparently fighting pneumonia at the till. Eventually his lungs did clear out long enough to belt out a couple of unfamiliar Chinese folk songs in a strong tenor voice.

The four ladies from our tour with whom we shared our sampan couldn't have been nicer, allowing us to move to the front of the boat to get some better photos.

They cheerfully sang a couple of folk songs themselves.

When we reached the end of the ride, we found ourselves in a quaint village with shops and restaurants, where we had free time to look around.

In addition to stores selling traditional Chinese dresses and other souvenirs, there were stands selling innovative takes on modern snacks, like fried chicken served in a waffle cone and a deep-fried, spiral-cut potato stretched out on a wooden skewer.  We didn't buy anything ourselves, because we knew a huge lunch was scheduled on the agenda, but a mother and daughter on our tour shared a taste of their giant spiral French fry, and it was as good as McDonald's fries.

We even saw a cat cafe --- where cats roam around while you eat, not where you eat cats --- which caught our attention because our granddaughter Emma had been planning to have her birthday party at a cat cafe.

After the usual delays for people who unexpectedly needed to go to the restroom after the meeting time, we walked to meet our bus which took us to a rather non-descript restaurant where they again had good food.  The one odd dish was chicken that really seemed to have most of the meat taken off before the bones with mere scraps were sautéed.

Once again, however, there was plenty of food in our family style meal, so we could focus on eating only what we liked and still eat our fill, and while this time there was only one beer, it was huge.

But our last full day in China was far from done...