About the Author:
Keith Jones is the founder of Baja Jones Adventures, Jones Adventures, Tigress Tours in Thailand and Butanding Tours in the Philippine Islands and has led thousands of people to Mexico and other interesting locations around the world. He specializes in gray whale tour, blue whale tour, gray and blue whale combo tour, giant panda bear tour, walk a tiger tour, shark tour, African safari tour, African gorilla trek, arctic narwhal tour and Magdalena Bay whale watching tour. He also writes about Baja travel and gray whales. Keith Jones is the author of Gray Whales My Twenty Years of Discovery.
Location, North of Wolong at a local village Buddhist Temple, May 20,
2006:
Following lunch
today we drove up the mountain road to just past a local village Buddhist
Temple. Most of the group members, including our
guide May, were a bit dubious about this roadside walk. They didn’t see what walking down the main
road would accomplish. But everyone was
willing to let me show them my vision, even if walking down the side of a
country road seemed tame and ordinary.
I believe they
changed their minds as soon as we started our walk, with most everyone in the
group suddenly “getting it”. The local
people, many dressed in bright blue and black traditional mountain village
clothing, materialized along the road like some TV magic trick. What had been a quiet and nearly empty
village street, soon was bustling with local people sitting or standing in
front of their homes and businesses, mostly just to watch us walk by. As I expected, most of the adults were camera
shy, but the kids were real characters.
Our group of 12
strolled along the road, continually moving off the asphalt out of the way of
passing traffic. Once the children
caught sight of us they began acting out as we moved by them. I think
everyone understood what a treat this walk really was by that time. Walking slowly along the roadside allowed us
the opportunity to peek into their lives for just a moment and to look into
real local people’s homes and shops. We
saw people working in their yards, in their garden plots and in their
businesses. It really opened their
special world to us. The too we got a
glimpse into what a tough life these mountain people have.
Walking
downhill the group was spread out through the village as the first of us
approached the colorful Buddhist temple, where our two small vans had driven to
wait for us. While most of the group
stayed near the roadside at the temple, I walked around to the back or downhill
side. It turned out that the rear of the
structure is really the showcase and the entrance to the building, while the
front doesn’t look like much.
The local temple
nun and volunteer keeper of the Temple keys opened the temple for us. She told us the temple is 72 years old, the
same age as she is. This old and rugged
looking temple has no monks and no abbot.
The two volunteer nuns tend the building, while those local people who
are Buddhist come and worship, but without a spiritual leader. It has become the practice within the Chinese
Buddhist religion for the monks to gravitate toward the busy money-centric
larger temples. These small local
temples all across China mostly abandoned by the monks.
Before she
opened the doors for us, I saw her walking up the road carrying a basket of
wild vegetables that she had just picked. That basket weighed around 40 or 50
pounds. Eating at the Panda Inn, we
learned to recognize the different varieties of local wild vegetables that she
had meticulously gathered during her morning of work, because the chef prepares
one or two of these wild vegetables every day.
Back at the Temple, imagine, if you can, a
72 year old grandmother (maybe great-
grandmother) doing stoop labor in a steep
and rocky mountainside field, working all morning long to collect 40 pounds of
strange wild vegetables, plus a few heads of cabbage or turnips, then walking a
mile up hill carrying these 40 pounds of vegetables that she has just
harvested. All this at an elevation of
6,500 feet!
This 72 year
old woman couldn’t be taller than 4 foot, but she is a real dynamo. Her back is ramrod straight, without a hint
of osteoporosis. Her brain is still
sharp as a tack. She was delightful and
witty to talk with, even if she was barely taller than my belt buckle. Her face and hands are brown and wrinkled
from many years of working outside beneath the harsh UVs of this high mountain
environment.
Our visit to
this local village Buddhist temple was a unique experience. She told me that we were the first Western
visitors to view inside the temple since it was built 72 years ago. That is why she came and opened it, when she
saw us walking down the road toward the building. The temple is a special and interesting
structure, surrounded by a gigantic carved stone fence that has been sculpted
into the shape of a dragon 200 feet long.
Inside, the
temple is dimly lit with a pungent and smoky atmosphere of burnt joss
sticks.
Thinking they
were scented incense I purchased 3 bundles of sticks from the ancient
woman. The cost was 1 Y (.12 US) per
bundle of 15 or 20 individual joss sticks.
In the center
of the temple is a large copper pan full of ash from burnt joss sticks. There were a dozen small cushions scattered
around on the floor. These are used for
kneeling upon. There are three large life
size or bigger sculptures in the altar area.
They represent the key figures in village and Temple history. The ceiling
and roof of this structure are high above the floor, maybe 20 feet above us,
maybe more than that.
The lighting,
the very authentic ancient Buddhist décor and the smoky atmosphere combined to
make me the feel that I was in the midst of a somewhat mystical
experience. It was an experience that I
believe epitomizes my personal travel philosophy. Unexpected, unique, not an uncommon type of
experience for my groups and is the reason our trips are special no matter
where we travel in the world. This brief
encounter is one that I will cherish for a long time to come and I think many
members of our group share that feeling.
No comments:
Post a Comment