Big huge massive monastery
Thursday, November 15th, 2007Okay, the reason I wanted to go to Puli was because I had watched this Globetrekker episode on Taiwan and it showed this massive monastery on it. John, who watched it too, thought I was on drugs – he doesn’t remember it at all. So, maybe it was on their or not, but anyway, I still wanted to go there.
It’s like a 45 minute bus-ride to Puli. We were expecting this small town. Nope, big town. I swear, this Rough Guide guidebook is crazy – it makes almost every town look tiny and they end up being kind of big. As usual, we had no accomodations, but after a couple of tries, ended up at this kind of diveish place – but it was convenient. Fortunately, the room we originally started with had air problems so we got switched to a nicer room.
Anyway, there was no way to get to Chung Tai Chan Monastery on mass transit which we could find so we grabbed a taxi – while we were going we saw this massive buddha on the side of the mountain. I mean, it looked massive from the road and we were very far away. But alas, when you get into a taxi going somewhere and you don’t really speak Chinese, detours aren’t really allowed. So we went to the monastery. It was totally amazing.
First off, it was huge. I mean, massive. Then there were all the different Buddhas. I mean life-sized statues of hundreds of Buddhas (all with offering plates in front of them!!!). And these huge guardians in front of the main temple. I mean massive – like 2 stories high. We are talking some SERIOUS cash flowing into this place. We were kicking ourselves afterward for not faxing them to get a tour – apparently there are more interesting floors if you make an appointment a week in advance. NEXT TIME!
And across the street was this park that had thousands of these little miniature buddhas. And with it’s own cleaning crew. We were so impressed with this place.
Amazingly enough – John was able to call the cab driver that took us to the monastery (he gave us his card) – which was kind of impressive considering the guy spoke just slightly more English than we spoke Chinese (we know: hello, thank you, black tea) – anyway, he came to pick us up and dropped us off in town. Besides the monastery – there’s not too much interesting about Puli – so we decided the next day to go back to Taipei by bus.
JohnCin