We slept pretty well on that barge down from Souzhou. In the morning, we hung over the sides of the boat checking out the scenery with some new friends, a few very friendly Chinese university students we'd met the night before. After arriving in Hangzhou around 6am and checking into a cheap hotel for a very refreshing shower, we headed over to the huge lake in the middle of town. It wasn't long before we got into a bit of a row with a boatman who took us out to the middle of the lake, then decided he wanted to shorten the route and double the price we'd agreed upon. Many thanks to the anonymous, spunky, and bilingual Chinese girl who bailed us out of that argument when we got back to shore!

     Anyway, most of the pictures below are from a park on the outskirts of town that featured a huge temple and dozens of enormous stone carvings, both recent and ancient, of various Buddhist imagery. We returned to the lake a little later, determined to try our luck again, and wound up having a nice cruise on the boat you can see in the last picture.