Anji – bamboo capital of the world [安吉竹乡]
After a failed attempt to organize a team building trip to Anji [安吉], I decided to go there by myself two weeks ago, actually with Ctrip tour [携程]. The Anji region is famously known in China as the capital of bamboo, but since China produces the best and most of the bamboo in the world, we could extrapolate Anji as the bamboo capital of the world as well. I believe there is no other places on Earth where you have a larger scale and higher density of bamboo plantation than here.
During the weekend trip, I went to 3 places:
- South Eastern Hundred Herbs Garden [中南百草园]
- Tian Xia Yin Keng [天下银坑]
- Hidden Dragon Waterfalls [藏龙百瀑].
The first place isn’t so interesting to visit, except maybe for corporate annual celebration or team building. The second place is actually quite small, but it hosts 4 movie shooting attractions. The one that interested me most is the movie site of The Banquet [夜宴]. I had to climb on a special spot to take an overview shot of that “house”, but it was worth the trouble, I’m quite happy about that.
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The third place is actually nice, small mountain with waterfalls of various sizes and shapes at various height. But for someone who has seen many times the world’s biggest waterfalls, the Niagara Falls at Canada, I wouldn’t say that I was impressed by this one, at all. Once I arrived on the top, the view is actually quite interesting, a faraway green mountain chain with a small road between them. That road actually has a very fancy name, just like many touristic sites at China, it’s called Nine Dragons Street [大溪九龙街].
Overall, I was very impressed by the scale, density and omnipresence of bamboo everywhere in Anji. The bamboo are so large that I cannot encircle it with both palms together. Unfortunately many bamboo are engraved with tourist names on them, while others are marked in black pen with their date so that the farmers can cut them off eventually and sell off for making furniture or bamboo plywood. So it was not easy to take pretty photo of them…
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