Heng Shan.

Recently we traveled to a mountain in our province called Heng Shan. It is one of the 5 holy mountains of china. When you get there you stay in hotel rooms that are above restraunts. Kinda like a bed and breakfast. It was a little weird when we first arrived because the taxi driver dropped us off at his friends hotel place. We were like man, this always happens to us, but we were able to bargain the room down from 100 kuai a night to 70, so we thought oh well it can't be that bad.
We spent the first day exploring the town, The town is full of mainly insence shops and temples. When you walk down some of the roads near the temples you can also see carpenter shops that are full of wooden buddahs not yet painted. You can sit there forever it seems and just watch the men squatting usually ( a normal chinese stance, when you have no chair around. ) and they are just using there small tools to shape these huge tree trunks into massive buddahs. I wish we could have taken a picture, but theres always a respect issue that you must up hold when your in another culture. I have been told by one buddist that it is bad to take photos of buddahs in temples because its disrespectful. I thought about her words when I was watching the men and thought how horribly disrespectful it would be to take a photo before they even made it off the essembly line. I will just have that memory in my mind forever instead and have to remember the street forever. It was really interesting to also see the female monks or nuns, walking around with there interesting hats and long socks and black pointy shoes. This trip has made me want to know more about the religions in Asia. While we were in Tibet the people and monks looked really different from the monks here. Chinese buddism is alittle different from tibetan buddism and this trip has really sparked my interest to read up on those differences. While climbing the mountain we visited many temples and we wondered if they were daoist or a mixture of buddism and something else. Really interesting buddahs and like nothing I had seen before.
The next day we decided to scale the mountain. On the way up we walked through many beautiful scenes. There were little pagodas and waterfalls. It took us 5 hours to get to the top. Each few meters there would be a temple to see and pray at. They had huge insence burners and some people even threw firecrackers inside it.
When we finally reached the top I thought I was going to die. Hiking up huge marble stairs until I almost passed out. When we got to the top there was a huge temple on the very highest peak. People had started kowtowing up the walkway to it as far back as 400 meters. Really amazing to see even the oldest people getting down and doing this while chanting and singing. As we walked all the way to the temple doors, you could see the clouds rushing all around us. At first I thought it was the insence smoke, but no this air was really moist and you couldnt see more then 20 feet in front of you. We scaled down the mountain after having a banana and a snack. When we got down to the bottom I once again thought my legs wouldnt move, a feeling I had when hiking at another place last fall. When we got back down to the restraunt we told the owners that we made it to the top. They all had jaws dropped and eyes open wide and said to each other "Foreigners are strong and crazy! Chinese people dont even do that and its their mountain!!". So we had a good time there, We hope to maybe go back and see it when the weather is better. Maybe the clouds will clear and we can see more. It is said you can see Dong Ting Lake for the top peak on a clear day. However many thing are "said" in China.