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This means we got to swim against a rolling backdrop of verdant hills beside the canoes of men and women who may well be on TV come November, standing on the podium at the Guangzhou Asian Games. As we swan between islands, an old woman in a rustic yellow and red tugboat urged the athletes on with jingoistic slogans about patriotic pride.
During our trip, the hordes of tourists we had been expecting, such as the crowds who skirt Hangzhou's West Lake at the weekend, failed to materialize. The sun-baked streets were bereft of traffic, and time slowed to a snail's pace. In short, it was the perfect serum for city slickers who feel the urban jungle closing in all sides.
The lake is actually a vast reservoir in Chun'an County formed by the construction of the Xin'an River Hydroelectric Power Station in 1959. The flooding of the Chun'an basin submerged mountains, farming settlements and villages, including one 1,800-year-old historical city, forcing hundreds of thousands of locals to relocate. In its wake, it left 1,087 mountaintops poking above the water.
Most of them are uninhabited, overhung with wild foliage. The water is said to run down into ravines up to 100 meters below sea level, but the average depth is closer to 35 meters.
Shanghai diving operators such as Big Blue (tel: 021- 6291-2110) arrange trips to prowl the lake's bottom. The next trip is scheduled for August 20-22 at a cost of 4,300 yuan, including equipment hire. Exploring the buried city requires an advanced diving certificate as it sits at a depth of between 27 and 30 meters in near-freezing climes of 10 C. The certificate can be obtained during the trip for an extra 1,000 yuan.
Qiandaohu also includes China's biggest state park, or "Oxygen Bar". While the reservoir is billed as one of China's cleanest water supplies - Nongfu mineral water is sourced here - the 982-square-kilometer park helps provide six times the state average of green cover.
Meanwhile, the basin nurtures more than 1,700 types of plant life and 2,100 species of wildlife.
While these make for interesting half-day trips, no visit to the area is complete without hiking, or chair lifting, your way up Plum Blossom Peak, some 10 kilometers from the town center. Here, you get sweeping vistas of more than 300 islands.
If you look carefully, you may even spot an Olympic rower or two, a huge cruise liner, or the odd foreigner reveling in the lake's bounteous waters.
Tourism development began in the 1980s and took off in 1998. Now the figures are healthy enough that officials have stopped aggressively promoting the area and its myriad islands. These include Monkey Isle, Ostrich Island and Fairy Dragon Isle, some of which are inhabited by their namesakes or crawling with snakes.
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