Awoke in pleasant bed in hotel room. Down to one of the hotel restaurants, the Chinese one, which is on two floors of the hotel. We get a private room here. Cool.
Another huge menu, full of stuff I wouldn’t eat. But there’s so much in the menu, that Sabrina never seems to have a problem finding some truly delicious things for us.
Sliced lotus root, stuffed with sticky rice, a regional specialty. Marinated bean curd cakes. Crispy bean curd skin rolls (rather like phyllo). Pork with steamed bun baskets (Dongpuo pork, another regional specialty). Steamed green leaves with sauce. Beef strips in spicy soup (inspired by a Szechuan dish that we eat often in Waterloo, but it’s very tame here in HangZhou.)
All excellent. I’m amazed how restaurants here can have fresh ingredients in stock all the time for such a huge array of dishes. And they come out so fast after you order. Always with a wonderful presentation too. All of this for Â¥112, under $20. A meal fit for an emperor.
Amazingly, we managed to finish most of it.
Today we’ll be heading to LinYing area, which features a large number of Buddhist statues carved into the rock faces of a mountain named ‘Peak Flying From Afar’, because the mountain was said to have flown here from India, and one of China’s major Buddhist temples.
Another white-knuckle taxi ride brought us to LinYing. Very crowded with tourist groups, the vast majority of them Chinese.
The first sight is a group of caves, with walls and ceilings featuring carvings of buddhas (called louhan in Mandarin). The caves like to drip water onto expensive things like cameras. And tour guides like to use megaphones in your ear in the enclosed space.
After the caves, there are a number of buddhas carved on rock faces around the mountain. These can be reached by a network of narrow treacherous stone steps carved into the mountainside. As if narrow and treacherous was not bad enough, they also feature heavy pedestrian traffic running in both directions, which leads to some tight squeezes with a nasty drop on one side. The whole deal would last about a day in Canada before it was shut down for emergency safety upgrades.
It is considered good luck to touch the hand of these buddhas. Women touch with their right hands, men with their left. The touches of millions of people have polished the hands of the buddhas smooth, revealing veining like marble. Rocks along the path have also been worn smooth from serving as handholds.
We found ourselves on a path that seemed to be heading further up the Peak Flying From Afar. We kept following it, very tiring in the heat. Had to stop a couple times to rest. But eventually found ourselves at the top. Not much there, just an outcropping of rocks, and some characters carved. And refreshment vendors, probably making some good coin.
When we got back down, we crossed a stream and went into the temple complex itself. This a fairly large and fully-operational Buddhist temple. There are many temple buildings as you move up the valley wall.
One of them was the Hall of 500 Louhan, containing 500 sculptures of minor buddhas. They all start to look the same after a while, but some still stand out. Like the one with the really, really long left arm. Or the guy who pulls open his chest, and there’s another guy living inside him, kinda like the character in Total Recall. Sabrina was trying to find ones that looked like me.
At many of the temples, people would hold burning incense in their hands and bow in the four compass directions. Had to be careful of these people, lest they light one’s hair on fire. That would make a smell much less pleasing to the Buddha than the incense.
When we finished the temples, we headed to the exit and caught a taxi back to the hotel. We intended to stop only briefly, but fell asleep instead, so tired from climbing the mountain.
After a nap, we ended the night by walking down to the lakeshore again for a drink.
In Shanghai and HangZhou, the sidewalks always have a lane of tiles that have raised ridges on them. These are so blind people can feel their way along. At hazards or changes in direction, the ridges turn to bumps, which feel different under the feet. It seems like a clever system, but unfortunately a blind person following these will almost certainly be killed the first time he tries to cross an intersection. Even with traffic lights and perfect vision, you have to watch your ass every step.
Stopped at a store to see if I could find a small tripod, which would let me do a nice panorama of the lights around the lake. No tripod to be found, but did see a lot of cool high-tech stuff. Inductive cooking surfaces that look like they belong on the Enterprise. Some things I took to be high-tech dishwashers, but are actually dish sanitizers. They use UV light to sterilize your dishes. I guess nobody uses dishwashers here, because it’s cheaper to hire a servant to do it.
Spent the last couple hours drinking beer and tea on the lake shore. All the local beers here seem to be the same very pale yellow as I had at LauWaiLau restaurant yesterday. And similarly low alcohol, around 2% by volume. I guess that’s just the local style. I don’t care for it all that much, really.
I think I might be catching a cold. That would suck.