Wutaishan - Day 1

I took advantage of a reading week before finals to take a trip to Wutaishan, China’s most sacred Buddhist mountain. Although it is geographically close to Beijing, the geography is not conducive to transportation, and so getting there required me to either go through Datong or Taiyuan. I decided to go through Taiyuan, as it had more frequent busses to Wutaishan, and I was able to take an overnight train. I bought a soft sleeper even though I don’t think they are much more comfortable than hard sleepers (they are actually the same hardness – hard). But, I like the privacy they offer as you can close and lock your door as well as turn of the lights, which you can do in hard sleeper. I was in a compartment with three Chinese businesspeople that were quite considerate of me. When I went to bed but they wanted to keep talking, they turned out the lights, which was nice. Overall, I slept quite well and arrived in Taiyuan feeling reasonable. When I arrived, I immediately went to the ticket office and purchased a ticket for the return journey. My line-up moved really slowly, and I had to switch. To my horror, they had run out of sleepers on the train leaving two days later, and so I ended up buying a hard seat for the night! This would not be a pleasant journey. After buying my ticket, I caught a cab to the bus station, where I just managed to get the 8:40 bus to Wutaishan.

According to my guide book, the bus ride was supposed to take 3-4 hours. Of course, I knew my guidebook was not reliable in terms of time when the 5 hour bus ride from Taiyuan to Beijing to eight hours. This bus ride was no different. In addition to sitting in the train station parking lot for an hour after it left the bus station, many of the roads were under construction, and we had to divert onto dirt roads which were horribly muddy due to the rain. On the bus, a man moved back to talk to me. He was rather difficult to understand due to his accent, and our conversation didn’t get very far. It took six hours to get there. Once we got out of the valley and started moving into the mountains, the scenery became quite beautiful and the pollution decreased. At the top of a particularly windy stretch of road that included many switchbacks we reached the entrance to the Wutaishan scenic area. The bus driver told everyone to get out, because we had to pay an entrance fee before going further. There was another foreigner on the bus who didn’t speak any Chinese, so I told him what to do. I managed to guess that he was from Austria due to his accent. He was quite impressed. The windy descent continued pas a few temples until we finally reached Taihuai village, which is at the foot of a valley, and contains mostly hotels.

At the bus station I spoke to the Austrian and suggested we stay together, which he agreed to. After getting off the bus we were accosted by some people wanting to have us stay in their hotel. Since the Austrian was quite cheap, I decided to go cheap myself after they said the room would cost approximately 100 kuai for the two of us. I’m actually glad we went with them, because they had a car that drove us into the center of the village. Their hotel was a few rooms next to a restaurant. While not great as a hotel, and having hot water only in the evening, it was cheap, and clean, and had a somewhat decent bathroom. Often in Chinese hotels, the room will look great until you open the door to the bathroom, and see the horrors that lurk within. We bargained them down a bit and took the room for two nights. It was already three in the afternoon, but many temples awaited us.

The hotel was located right next to a hill with a temple at the top. I like climbing hills so, ignoring the people who wanted us to ride their horses up the hill, walked up. At the top there was tacky sort of temple next to the cable-car station, the preferred route of most of the Chinese tourists to get to the top. Further up was a bigger temple, called the Dailuoding Temple. There were lots of people there, but the temple was nothing too exciting. From the top of the hill there was a lovely view of the town, in particular, the Great White Pagoda that towers over the town. Afterwards, we went down the hill and headed across the river towards the pagoda. Before getting to the temple with the pagoda, we first saw two other temples. A large temple, called the Xiantong temple was the more impressive one. It had a huge Ming Dynasty Hall called the Beamless Hall which was made of bricks. This is the first time I have seen a temple building built entirely of bricks, usually mostly wood is used. In addition, behind the Beamless hall was a large copper pagoda, which had a nice design, but looked a bit tacky due to the golden paint. Following this temple, we finally went in to the temple featuring the giant pagoda. There were lots of prayer wheels in the temple, and we even saw a service taking place, in which many yellow robed monks were chanting. Inside this temple there a special courtyard dedicated to Mao’s visit to Wutaishan in 1948. I find it quite ironic that they are celebrating Mao here when he was responsible for the destruction of many of the temples in the area! I quickly stopped by one final temple before going to dinner with the Austrian. We ate vegetarian, because the Austrian didn’t eat meat, but even so it was quite a satisfying especially since I hadn’t really eaten all day. As we were both tired we went to bed a little early at around 9:30.