Kung Fu Fighting!!
Trip Start
Aug 24, 2008
1
13
129
Trip End
Jul 07, 2009
Luoyang, Shanxi, China
Thursday, October 23, 2008
So we went on the local bus to the Longmen caves, similar to the Yungang grottoes but in a much nicer location, by the side of a river. The caves were smaller than in Yungang, but there was more detail on the carving. There was also a giant Buddha which the Chinese were all praying to. There were mountains and forests around the river, and because the weather was quite misty it looked quite spooky. The sun was setting too, which added to the atmosphere. We crossed the river and looked at the caves on the other side. There was also a temple on the side of a hill so we climbed up a large number of steps to get to it. It had a pond with turtles crabs and fish in it called the Longevity Pond. By this point it was quite dark, but the temple was all lit up, and they had also lit up the caves on the other side of the river, and we could see them from the temple. The light reflected in the river and it looked very cool. I also liked a room in the temple which had lots of tiny Buddhas lit up and also some lights in the shape of flowers which looked very pretty. It was very dark by the time we went back into town for dinner of beef in oyster sauce.
The next day we caught the bus to the Shaolin Temple. It was so misty we could only see about 5 metres in front of us. The bus pulled up and the conductor shouted "shaolin" at us so we got off to find ourselves in the middle of nowhere, unable to see anything but white because if the mist. We wondered how we would ever get back to Luoyang, but we walked down the hill and found the Shaolin Kung Fu training centre. There was a queue so we joined it. The doors opened and there was a stampede of Chinese people into a theatre where we saw a Kung Fu demonstration. I don't know why they pushed and shoved so much because David and I waited until the end and still got front row seats. Anyway we saw the monks do crazy things like smack metal sticks over their heads and pop balloons by pushing pins through sheets of glass, without breaking the glass. They also used swords and sticks and moved their bodies into crazy positions. It was very impressive.
Next we went around the temple itself, which was nice, but similar to other temples we have seen. By now the mist was clearing so we could see that we were surrounded by mountains. We took a cable car up the mountain and sat at the top admiring the rock formations and the forests. The Chinese all pointed at my shoes, thinking I was mad for climbing a mountain in slip on shoes when they were in trainers. We descended the mountain and on the way back to the bus stop saw many people from the surrounding Kung Fu schools practising Kung Fu all around. There were hundreds of them all hitting each other and waving sticks about.
When we reached the bus stop the mist had cleared and we saw that when the bus had dropped us off we were not in the middle of nowhere at all, but near a car park and lots of Kung Fu schools, but we couldn't see them because of the mist. We took the bus back to Luoyang and the next morning caught the bus to Xi'an.
