Mt Wudang to Wuhan, part 3

Okay sorry about the bevity of this next post, theres far to much going for me to give you all a blow by blow as I'd like. And now with a small chinese lady in our lives, we're not in charge. So I'm going to compress a lot here. I give the full meal deal when we get home.

After the tea plantaion, we headed back up the mountain , on the other side of sword river gorge. We stopped just after the hotel we stayed at that night at Purple hevean temple. This is were the taoist nuns live. They safe guard kung fu, medicinal arts and music here. Victor sid that the Feng Shui is really good here...I said I'd love to try some but was still full from lunch...hehe. We are here to watch a taoist ceremony but it's not going to happen so instead we walk around and visit...more shirnes..one to herbalism including a little exhibt on ancient herbalism and how/what they did...really cool to see these old twisted roots. Then to the big shrine room where theres a massive stature of Zhenwu the dark warrior. The dark they speak of here is the priciple of Wu...the great poerful emptiness which contains all potentialities...cools stuff. On either side of the statute (which is 30' tall) are racks of odd pole arms...halberds and scythes and a thing that looks like a 20 siteded die on top of a pole...very cool. I cant help but be impressed with the amount of worship and devotion that's gone on inthis hall...1000 years at least. The beams and rafters are coated in chanting and incense. All of a sudden we hear chimes and bells and Victor says they are practising taoist music. We get to watch as they do and I tape a whole bunch, cant wait to hear it.After we leave the purple cloud temple, we drive up up to the mountian villa hotel we had originally planed to spend the night before in and get a nice room with a breeze. P and I sleep 9 hours..our first real sleep f the trip. We are awoken by a rooster. P sleeps more and I got to the top patio/roof of this place. There are 20 people there doing taichi with the foggy sunrise. We have a good breakfast with Victor and Mr. Sho and then hike to the south cliff palace.This is a temple/palace carved into the cliff side looking up at goldentop..where we were before. Too much to describe here. I made another incense offering for our parents in the shrine to zhenwu's folks. We tossed a coin at the luck bell...clang..clang and hiked back. Drive down the mountain as Victor is going to host us with his family at a lunch in town before we catch the train. On the way down, he sings carpenter's tunes..I have this on tape and will be the "must see" video of 2005! BTW the chinese love the carpenters like the frrench love jerry lewis...we dont question, we just nod and sing along. When we get to town and visit his book storeWe meet his wife and son and theres a crazy frenchman named marc there. We all talk about the mountain to eachother in our own languages and still fully understand. Then off to lunch. The was fun but it's the source of our TD. It's one of those wonderful auspicious traveller's lunches where at one point we we're all talking to eachother in french, english and chinese ( p started to sign ) and after much beers we headed to the train station
I could go on about the train trip more but I'll just say that I HIGHLY RECOMMEND a train trip in china. Ours was 6 hours from Wudangshan to Wuhan, mostly in the light. We had a soft sleeper car and share it with a woman who slept on the top bunk most of the trip. Soft sleeper is nice, a private comparment with 4 nice bunks, a table and even a volume knob to turn down the insane chinese pop and talk radio that was blaring when we entered the car. We drank beer and watched the rice paddys roll by. Over the Han River and down to Wuhan (Wuchang district) on the night of the 27th and to sleep. I'm going to drop the wudang stuff now and next posts will be about adoption. Hopefully by the end of the next post we'll be caught up.