Electric park
(Electric car driver at the Xixi wetlands park: Hangzhou, China)
It took Ying’s mum and I some time to cajole one of the drivers to take us across the wetlands park. Each trip on the electric car cost 5 yuan (just shy of 50p) and since it was a sweltering day for October, almost everyone was snoozing with their blinds down. We stood around, hoping to eventually embarrass someone into grasping the steering wheel but it took several minutes of waiting before this gentleman decided that we were customers after all. In any case, there was actually no other way of us reaching the other side without the cars, so it left us powerless.
Here he is animatedly telling us, or rather Ying’s mum, as I cannot understand a vast amount in Mandarin, about the park and what we are looking at. The short journey yielded much swamp, a boat complete with fishermen and some delicate stone bridges built over the waterways. You can possibly see a region of pale fur on the right hand side of the image – this I realised with a glimmer of nostalgia is the ornamental grass so popular in British gardens during my childhood. For those that recall (at least in the North West of England) it adorned many front gardens as a focal point, a few strands caught in the middle of a border or as a round flowerbed. I can remember asking my mum as we drove down Warwick road why we couldn’t have some eight-foot grass in our garden. At the time I believed she was spoiling my fun, yet now I see it looks rather odd as a garden centrepiece as well as rendering our traditional English walled garden utterly ridiculous. Thank goodness she never indulged my childhood landscaping concepts.
As an aside, I never did discover why the trees were propped like this, all of them were the same, but I think we forgot to ask. Any ideas, just stick them down here!
Thanks to this man, he is one of the kind people we met during that trip.
If we were not in a hurry, he suggested that we should go for a ride in
the west region of the park.
Again, this is a very good picture, of both the man and the scene of Xixi Wetlands Park.