So many blog posts to catch up on! Kicking it off with a quick report of my experience last weekend in Qiandao Hu—Thousand Islands Lake—with my coworkers.
Nice view from my hotel window
As the name implies, Qiandao Hu is a (man-made) lake full of islands, near Hangzhou. Eleven of us left the office early on Friday morning and took a van the 5ish hours to Qiandao Hu. Checked in to a nice hotel and headed straight to lunch, then to “piao liu,” which was translated on my itinerary as “drift.” When we got there it looked more like whitewater rafting, with two main differences from what I’m used to—there were only two of us per raft, and there weren’t any natural rapids, so every few hundred meters there was a man-made chute that one raft at a time could squeeze down, plummeting 4 or 5 feet into the water below. Tons of fun…everyone got soaked.
"Piao liu" rafts