Sweet fruits

After our trip to the museum last Saturday was rather unsuccessful, we caught the hiking bug on Sunday.

This time we headed towards Taihu, the third largest freshwater lake in China, five times the size of Lake Constance. Part of it belongs to Suzhou.

Taihu is very famous for its crabs. Tour buses full of people come here during the season just to eat crabs. Our colleagues warned us: 'If you want to eat crabs, only eat the good ones! Everything else are just floating crabs, they are briefly held in the lake and then sold as expensive Taihu crabs'.

Another specialty here are the Pipas, which grow and are offered abundantly. The Taihu Pipas are supposedly the best, as they are bigger than the others. And they really taste good (unlike many other local specialties that are offered)!

But back to the hike: at the ticket booth for the mountain, the lady wanted to put us on a bus that would take us directly to the observation point. When we explained to her that we wanted to hike up, she just said: 'that's 20km, that's too far!'. But according to Simon's map, it was only a maximum of 10km. After the first 3 km, the distance puzzle was solved: after 2km, there was a sign that said 'still 5km to the top'. After about 500m, the next one: 'still 4km'. We don't know in which unit the distances were measured, but it definitely wasn't kilometers...

Despite the confusion with the distance, it was a very beautiful hike, passing by Pipa trees through a Mediterranean-looking landscape.