A cruise on West Lake in China
The West Lake in China is undoubtedly one of the nicest tourist attractions of the country. The beautiful man-made lake, declared by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in the class of lakes, is located at Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province.
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It is embraced by hills on three sides and noted for natural beauty and cultural deposits.
On Monday, April 18, 2016 participants attending the Anglophone-African Think-Tanks forum 2016 were bused to the lake side to have a feel of the evergreen environment.
At about 12:30pm, the participants and another group from the small commodity seminar had arrived at the lake.
The West Lake welcomed us with a very serene atmosphere and good imageries that certainly would make a tourist love to visit the place as many times. Indeed the tour served as an eye-opener to the Chinese government’s interest in boosting tourism.
The trip was sponsored by the Ministry of Commerce, China, for the participants as part of a tour of some selected cities in the country.
After a cruise on the lake for about 30 minutes we were later dropped at a park to explore on our own for two hours.
Without a facilitator or an interpreter it became a bit challenging to ask many questions about some of the areas we visited as most of the people were Chinese and could hardly express themselves in the English language, which was the medium of communication for the participants.
Even the names of the places were written in Chinese and therefore made it difficult to understand. However before we were left alone to have fun, a young interpreter with the team, Sage, as we affectionately called her, narrated a story associated to the lake to us.
Lake story
According to her, once upon a time a white snake spirit called Bai Suzhen and Xu Xian; a male mortal fell in love at first sight and got married immediately. However an evil monk called Fa Hai attempted to separate the couple by imprisoning