Funfua as the most beautiful town of the good old China, nicknamed the Chinese Venice

The town is very touristy, but like in the Jandzyadze nature park (where the Avatar blockbuster was shot), tourism here is 100% local, Chinese. I’ve been traveling through Hunan province for a week, but I have never met a single European. It’s amazing, because the places here are amazingly beautiful. The Lonely Planet guidebook has given the town a modest third of the page, including its map. The feeling that the authors themselves have not been here, otherwise they would have devoted much more to it -

You can get here with a change in the district center of Jeshou, where I actually settled, making the city my base for traveling around the region. Buses depart from Jeshu Railway Station every half hour, travel time is an hour and a half, and the journey costs 25 yuan ($ 4). In Funfua, you will be dropped off at the bus station, from where you can walk to the old city for about half an hour, or half as much on the A-1 city bus, which costs 1 yuan.

By the way, as in the case with most other attractions in China, the entrance to the old part of the town costs money. Yes, on all the main streets leading down (I mean the photo below), ticket servicemen are on duty and strive to sell you a ticket for 150 yuan ($ 25), which is godlessly expensive for the mere fact of walking around the city. I preferred to get into the old city for free, going over the bridge and then going down some narrow path bypassing someone’s courtyards.

To say picturesquely is to say nothing, here the exotic just rolls over -

By the way, if you think that the weather is not lucky (rain and fog), then I will “please” you: the fact is that these places always have such weather. The highest humidity and rains most of the year.

How do you like bridges across the river -

And by the way, the bridge in the form of pebbles below is not a tourist props at all, but the most natural old bridge. People have been jumping on posts for 300 years now. And let the columns periodically blow down floods and set new ones, but the idea has not changed over the past centuries -

There are many tourists, very many -

A ride on a gondola costs 50 yuan ($ 8), but to be honest, they won’t take you especially far, it’s more interesting to walk along the coast, along the walls of houses that almost rise above the water -

I walked right here, between the houses and the water. The distance is an average meter, sometimes a little more, sometimes just twenty centimeters. The main thing is not to slip, you will not drown to drown (there is a depth to the waist), but the water did not seem especially clear to me. I believe that the sewerage of the entire block merges directly into the river. Here, of course, is not Bangladesh with a terribly dirty Ganges flowing through their capital, Dhaka, but also not at all sterile. And also the darkness of rats, they rush here and there and a couple of times jumped out almost under their feet. They are so fast that they didn’t have time to take a photo -

And this place reminded me of India, the embankment in Varanasi, the truth is much cleaner. Although not, it is more like Udaipur, which in my opinion is the most beautiful city in India -