They were both interesting though they were primarily used as sales pushes as a lot of these side-trips on excursions tend to be. This is not to say that we wouldn’t have bought some of the items on offer if we’d had the money because the stuff being produced was stunningly beautiful and we got to feel a quilt that was so soft we were within a whisker of making the arrangements to pay for it and have it shipped home.

Yuan Long Silk Factory, Beijing

Yuan Long is just to the north of the large parks in which the Temple of Heaven – our favourite place in Beijing – can be found.

While sales might have been the ultimate goal of the visit we still did learn a lot.

Tian Hou Silk Factory, Shanghai

The buildings and signs of local life in and around Zhujiajiao were fabulously, authentically, traditionally Chinese. Much like our visit to the Beijing Hutongs the contrast with modern life in China was both wonderful to experience and exactly what we’d come to see on our Asian cruise.

While taking one of the photos of the rivers running through the water town I got talking to a young American couple also taking loads of shots of the scenery. It turned out that they took stock photography and sold them as a means to fund their travels. When we returned from our cruise I checked stock photography sites for several months to see if I could see anything on them that they might have uploaded but never did which was a shame.

One of our stops in Zhujiajiao was at a rice museum which showed an example of the Chinese windmill used in its preparation although I’m not entirely sure how any longer. I really should get into the habit of making more notes to accompany the photos of the places I visit.

Zhujiajiao is a water town comprising of several rivers breaking up the land into islands and 36 stone bridges joining them back up again. Getting around the town can be done on foot, by bike (if there aren’t too many other people around), or, as you could probably guess, by boat. Our excursion would naturally include a water taxi ride.

Just outside the walls of the town while we waited for our coach to return and pick us up were signs of more typically modern Chinese life.

Hanging around in a tour group while plenty of people went about their daily lives also gave me a great chance to sneak in a a few photos of the local Chinese people in and around Zhujiajiao.

With Shanghai being so large and Zhujiajiao being on the opposite side of it to where the cruise ship was docked the coach journey back took quite a while but did allow us plenty of time to see the sprawling city and the vast amounts of construction taking place. The disparity between what we saw from the coach windows and what we’d experienced in the water town was immense. In the video below you can see the Shanghai World Financial Centre in the distance.

You can see more photos of our trip as well as longer video clips here: Zhujiajiao, Shanghai, China.

Video temporarily removed.

This is a short post documenting a few activities that took place at the conclusion of our excursion while docked at the port of Shanghai (at Waigaoqiao) which had seen us take a tour of the ancient water town of Zhujiajiao.

Our honeymoon cruise aboard Diamond Princess took place in November, so while it was still just about light by the time we’d reached the port and boarded the ship at the end of the long drive into the megacity, it wasn’t long before darkness fell. The early part of the evening – following a quick freshen up, of course – included a stroll around the promenade deck to see what the port area looked like from the ship. Cruise ports in general tend to fall within one of three categories:

• No port at all to speak of; you take a tender boat to and from the ship
• A dedicated cruise terminal
• Docking facilities shared with some other purpose

Of the latter category those other purposes can be ferry or fishing uses, or, more typically, commercial and industrial ports, and Shanghai at the time was most certainly an industrial area. The views from Diamond Princess were not only dark but fairly bleak, harshly-lit, concrete and steel.

Over the years that we’ve been cruising we’ve discovered that we’re not really interested in going to see evening shows. In fact, if you’d asked me if we ever went to shows I might have said only once, because the only one I could remember was a Madness tribute act aboard a P&O cruise ship. However, when I stumbled upon a few photographs for the evening of this Shanghai port stop I realised that we had actually attended a performance on this very first cruise of ours; I’d almost completely forgotten about it, which is not to say that it wasn’t good. The pictures below – excusing the quality, once again – show the skills of the Chinese acrobats who’d boarded the cruise ship to entertain the passengers. I certainly took enough photographs to indicate I must have been impressed at the time even if, perhaps in comparison to all the other amazing sights and experiences of this trip, the memory of what we’d seen that night swiftly faded into the background.

After the acrobats had performed and departed the ship, and after Diamond Princess had left the port of Shanghai, and after we’d had some food somewhere in there, we ended up in Skywalkers Nightclub. On these Grand-class cruise ships operated by Princess Cruises Skywalkers is quite probably our most-visited spot on the vessel. We will typically finish every evening with a couple of hours of listening to music, maybe strutting our stuff to a tune or two, people-watching (if we’re not the only people around; which happens more often than you’d think, and happened an awful lot on this particular cruise), and, naturally, grabbing some late drinking opportunities. Jack Daniels and Coke would be my go-to drink for this cruise, and with us often being the only people around in venues at night we soon got to know many of the staff and they got to know us too, to the point that I would frequently walk into somewhere like Skywalkers or Explorers, catch the eye of a waiter, nod, get a smile, and get a drink in short order without even having to say a word or show my cruise card. What’s not to love?

The following day would be a sea day as Diamond Princess made her way towards the Japanese city of Naha on Okinawa.