Nobody told me about the food in Wuhan otherwise I would have come earlier. What a fantastic place is Hubu Xiang – full of stalls selling skewers of meat, seafood, fruit on sticks, fresh juice, frogs, chicken wings (and feet) and all manner of noodles.
I had a check online before I set out in the taxi and found that the local delicacy was hot dry noodles. That has to be better than Nanjing salted duck! So I jumped in a taxi and headed for the centre.
All life was in Hubu Xiang. It was crowded, not just with the usual beggars and pickpockets (the driver assured me there were plenty) but lots of toung people walking around with sharp sticks hanging out of their mouths and waving them around people’s eyes.
My mind immediately flicked back to the time in Fuzi Miao in Nanjing when I got stabbed by one of those skewers. It made a hole in my arm as well as my best coat. So I was hype-vigilant as I negotiated the skewer wealding students.
I found a very small cheap restaurant and had the best noodles I’ve ever tasted for 50p. They were indeed hot and served in a plastic tub and eaten with disposable chopsticks.
After that I couldn’t resist the strawberries on sticks for £1 and celebrated by spending another £1 having my boots cleaned by a very nice young woman on the banks of the Yangtze river.
There were a wide selection of street vendors selling sugar scultures, hand-blowing glass, making plasticine portraits of fee paying sitters and a man who had a glass case full of snakes which he was trying to sell to students.
The Yangzte was just like in Nanjing only a bit younger – the same dirty muddy water, a greyness hung over it and big lumbering freighters moving slowly under the huge metal bridge. There’s nothing pretty about the Yangzte…. not that I’ve ever seen anyway.
So now I am leaving Wuhan and I’d like to recommend it to holidaymakers. It’s the capital of Hubei Province and has a lot to offer, especially in the area of snacks and snakes.
..and the train journey from Nanjing is also quite pretty in parts – through tunnels and reasonably attractive countryside.