We were out of hotel at 8 a.m. today. We traveled about three hours south of
Guiyang and the first stop was at Tiantai Mountain Dragon Temple. It is an old temple that is at the top of a
mountain and also doubled as a fortress. It started out as stairs and
continued as stairs all the way to the top! Someone said that going up and down was about
2.5 miles. It was a difficult climb and
my knees are angry at me for doing that.
This was fairly early in our climb up to the Dragon Temple.
A Ginko tree that has been around for a while. They tie red ribbons on as wishes on the tree.
The Dragon Temple from the bottom of the hill, but not where we started. We had to go up about 50-75 steps first and then start on the trail to the temple. Little did we know...
One of several gates we went through on our climb.
A mural of the seven tenets of Daoism (I think).
We were only about half way up at this point.
A view of the surrounding mountains from the top. The rounded tops are interesting.
This was inside the temple. They coat the wood with tung oil to keep the insects out of the wood. That was the reason for the distinctive odor in the room.
Finally, the TOP!
Our next stop was to an ancient Han ethnicity village. We walked around the old streets that were
full of vendors. We did some shopping
and eventually stopped for lunch at a restaurant. Evidently horse meat is a specialty of the
people in this area, so we were given a plate of horse meat for lunch. It had a little strong taste, but it was
okay, rather dry actually.
As we were going through the village, we stopped in front of a shop that was selling batik clothing and pictures. I was fascinated to see how they did it. They draw the outline of a design on the fabric, apply wax with a paint brush to the areas they want to keep white or some other color and then dye the rest of the fabric. Most of the tablecloths and pictures they had were dyed with indigo, but there were some others that had a little bit of yellow or red on them.
After lunch, we walked around some more and we were shown
some of the really old stone buildings that are still standing and being lived
in. Then we went to see a small opera
show they have there. I guess when you
have been to the bigger shows, the little one wasn’t all that impressive.
One of the old stone buildings in the Han Village. The slit in the wall was made so they could shoot arrows through for defense.
Narrow walkway through the ancient village. These walls are over 500 years old.
Another view of the village lane.
Outside of the cave where one waterfall came out.
We had to hurry after that to get back to the bus and go to
the next venue. This was a cave that you
ride a boat through and see all the lights that they have rigged up in the
cave. It is really pretty, but what kept
going through my mind is that our National Parks service would NEVER allow us
to do this in our caves at home!
The opening of Dragon Palace Cave. Some areas of the cave only had room for one boat to go through at a time.
Colorful lights added to the cave.
Where the water from the cave comes out.
While we were waiting for our guide to get the tickets for the boat ride, we were treated to a concert from this group of people from the Buyi (pronouced boo-ee) people. Each of their instruments were hand made and all were a little different.
When the boat ride reached the end of the cave, we were
supposed to turn around and head back, but for some reason, our driver didn’t
do that and we docked the boat and they told us to get out of the boat, so we
did. We walked along a pontoon walkway
to the other side of the cave and waited for the rest of our group. After a long while, our guide comes to find
us and said that we weren’t supposed to get out of the boat! We got back in the line to get back on the
boat and that was longer than we had time for and we were supposed to do so we
could get onto the next thing we were going to see.
This is Tiger Cave Falls that we weren't supposed to go see.
Finally, we got back to the boat dock and then we all lined
up for a group photo. So many Chinese
started taking pictures of us and then we started inviting them to join with us
also for a big group photo. We had about
30 people come join us, all just laughing and having a good time joining these
Americans!
Take a ride through the Dragon Palace Cave with us!
Our next stop was a lake that has a perpetual swirl in it.
Our guide called this "Whirlpool Lake", but it was a really slow swirl that drains
somewhere in the middle and from there they weren’t sure where it went to. We also walked to see a Budda in a cave. David and I saw the Budda, but we were so
tired we just sat around the outside entrance and waited for the rest of the
group to come out. A group of three men
stopped and asked if they could take a picture with us. Of course, asking is in the form of holding
their phones out, saying “hello” in either English or Chinese and then pointing
and saying “Photo, photo?” We agreed and
pretty soon we had about 10 people that stopped and wanted their picture with
us also, each one or two at a time. The
last was a woman who stood between us and then they all left.
Whirlpool Lake. You can't see the swirl in this picture for how slow it was. We could only see it because there were some leaves on the water and you could see them moving slowly in a circular pattern.
The guide said it was time to go and so we started out well
ahead of the others and as we passed through the town, we smiled and said “Hi”
to a lot of people and admired several babies.
We arrived well ahead of the rest of the group, so we sat on a wall and
two girls, both we had said “hi” to earlier but got no response except a shocked
look that we interpreted as, “They speak, they are human!”, came up to us. We tried to speak some Chinese to them, but
they either didn’t understand Mandarin (which is possible in these back-country
places where they learn the Minority language) or we had a really bad
pronunciation. Eventually the one girl
loosened up with us enough to remember some of the English she has been taught
in school and answered the question, “How old are you?”
We were gathering quite a crowd of towns people around us at this point
and they had a lot to say to us that we couldn’t understand, but they seemed to
enjoy just being there looking at us.
The rest of the group eventually came, so we said good-bye to them all
and left.
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