SPA update

Thanks to EURO 2012 football tournament and the 6 hours of time difference, being up in the night gives me also time to update a bit both blog and Flickr.. so I posted, at the right date, more pics and words about a nice afternoon at a local SPA,  Shumyip Hot Spring Hotel in Chaohu.

Worth checking not only for the SPA pictures, but for the multiple funny thing of that day.. 😉

A little spoiler:

Soon to come – picture spoiler!

Next week time to post some more pictures from the last 3 trips:

Japan (respectively: Saku,
Komoro
and Takamine Kougen):

Big Buddha Temple in Xinchang (and wedding of Aikido friend form Hangzhou):

SPA in Chaohu:

Shumyip Spa in Chaohu

Nice Saturday spent at a natural hot spring called Shumyip Hot Spring Hotel (深业半汤御泉 Shēn yè bàntāng yùquán) located in Chaohu city, 巢湖. Given my ankle still suffering from the injure in Japan, I was happy to visit this natural hot spring. Apparently they had also a couple of special features for arthritis treatment. Even if I haven’t suffered yet of it this year, it is always good to postpone the moment!

It seems that in Chaohu city area there are several hot springs attractions, thanks to the several mountains and the big lake close by. The water is apparently very clean and they told us that it is naturally heated at temperatures of 50-80 degrees Celsius.

Despite from the heavy photoshop abuse in all the pictures with beauties in the pools, this page has nice pics of the spa.

The spa resort has both indoor and outdoor hot springs spa pools, counting Whirlpool, ultrasonic air bubble bath, horizontal massage bath, natural stone steam, Turkish fish spa pool, ore bath, Foot Massage pool, Hot Stone Gallery, semi-hot spring, chrysanthemum pool, Chinese medicine pool, mint pool, the beauty of spring (plus the herbal essential oils), herbal pool, coffee pool, the red wine pool, hot and cold waterfalls.. and several others (35 different offers, all included in the same entrance ticket!).

A nice and relaxing afternoon, despite the adventurous trip! To be done again!

FUNNY THING OF THE DAY – Double funny part: first the odyssey to reach the spa. We set up for the train, not many and not fast from Hefei. And the one we got the standing ticket for registered at once a delay of more than 40 minutes. Then instead of waiting we decided to cancel the ticket and go to take the bus: 1 hour for the train against 1.5 hours for the bus ride, but with bus available every 5 minutes! Or at least the schedule was this one! We got the bus and set in the queue and.. we waited about 20 minutes before getting on the oldest and dirtiest possible model of bus (with quite a few people cutting the queue: nobody complaining except us, that started an argument with one moron Chinese guy, that anyway got on our same bus).

The roads to Chaohu are amazing: it seems like a war zone or a post earthquake area, with the tarmac completely destroyed. In some points the bus drove over some holes that made all of us jumping at least 20cm over our seats! When reaching the town, a look outside the bus windows, especially when still approaching the center, made even stronger the feeling to cross an area where some natural disaster had occurred.. but in reality nothing like that! From the bus stop, only official-pirate taxi are available (real taxi but not using the taximeter – good we knew that the correct price was 15RMB for the place, so we got that price). Then on the way to the spa the driver tells us that the only way to get a taxi back is arranging it by phone (and that will cost 35RMB, booking and trip back to the station). I admit I was actually surprised though how precise was the taxi guy: he even arrived before the agreed time! We decided to get a train back to Hefei: better “roads” and slightly faster (about 1 hour). Of course, standing ticket!

The second funny thing about the trip to Chaohu is that actually Chaohu does not exist anymore: opposite than Wuhan, where 3 living areas have been put together to form a city whose name exist only on the map, Chaohu has been divided in 3 district now associated to other cities, the opposite of Wuhan!  Wuwei county will be merged into Wuhu city, Hanshanand Hexian counties for Ma’anshan city, Juchao district and Lujiang county for Hefei city.

The third &, forth funny things are in the 2 following pictures: in the bus, old and dirty there was a black hair dangling from the air vent on the ceiling!! And during the trip we noticed an airplane in the middle of a field.. do not ask me how it got there!!

dangling hair

the airplane in the field