Going to the Longjing Tea Village

Well, we finally got out of the Lingyin-Feilai Feng Scenic Area. It was still early in the afternoon and we wanted to visit one more place hopefully before the sun sets. We chose to go to the Longjing Tea Village. Now, it was a bit far from the Lingyin Temple area and we needed to transfer tourist buses along the way. Not really a big deal, my friends asked the people standing near the bus station for instructions on how to get there. That was probably a mistake since it revealed that we were not from Hangzhou. This probably gave touts the cue to hound us.

When we boarded the bus, the lady tout was hounding my friend to allow her to bring us to the tea village. We knew we would be able to get there so we tried to ignore her. My friend was still polite enough to turn her down, another mistake. Rule of thumb here is to pretend they don’t exist, but if they smell that you know they exist, just pretend you don’t speak Chinese, unless you really don’t. Alas, the tout already knew that she spoke Chinese and continuously bugged her. I was totally ignored as I spoke to my friend in English all the way, which made me off limits.

We got off at a bus stop, hoping to lose her. However just like a spy who has a network of other spies, another lady with the same uniform started to hound us. This really flustered my companions as I could only watch in amusement how they try to lose her. So what did we do? We took a cab, hopefully the driver wasn’t another one of her colleagues. While the driver was friendly enough, he did try to sell us a tour package, I totally didn’t speak to the driver at all. My companions tried to discourage him but he offered to wait for us at the Longjing Tea Village, saying that it was difficult to get back to town from there. Although I knew that there was a bus that comes every half and hour, though my friends weren’t very sure about that.

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