Hello all,
Just back from a day of touring Nanjing. Today we went out with a representative from Bond and he paid for all of our tickets and our meals. We went to two locations but saw six sights within those locations.
In the morning we went to the Nanjing City Wall, the gate we went to today in comparison to the one on Monday was that this one was right by a lake.
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| This is the builder's identification, so that if something went wrong they knew who to blame. |
After we walked along the wall for a few minutes we went back towards this temple pictured above and went in, it is called Jiming Temple. While we were in this temple we ate at a completely vegetarian restaurant that was okay, not great just okay. Afterwards I went into the worst washroom I have seen yet here in China. I know not to expect western toilets but these ones had no doors, the walls were half height and there was a shared trough running along the back wall that everyone's business went into. And I was right at the end when it automatically flushed. Here are the pictures from within the temple, no toilet shots I promise.
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| The people here are trying to throw coins into the top of this thing (lack of proper word), the reason they do this is for good luck. |
After leaving this Temple we drove over to the Zhongshan Mountain National Park, here we saw four different sites, all of which involved a lot of walking. Here is a little bit of quick trivia on the mountain. It covers 31 square kilometers, its highest peak sits at 448m above sea level and is called "a mountain of curling dragon." The first stop was the First Emperor of the Ming Dynasty's Tomb. The walk up to the tomb was quite long as it represented the walk his son had to do before visiting his father's final resting spot and showing his respect. Along this walkway there are stone statues. Here are the pics;
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| This tomb is one of the World Heritage Sights. |
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| This little girl was so cute up on that camel. |
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| A general. |
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| A scholar, with a sword. |
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| Ruins of part of the palace. |
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| We rode these little buses from one location to the next. |
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After we finished at the Tomb we took the bus to Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Mausoleum, we were told that there were over 300 steps to get p to the mausoleum. We decided to have a break first. Here is where we rested.
After a short break we made our way up the steps. It was really crowded and the steps were short so it was actually easier to skip every other step (meaning I only touched 150 in total).
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| Maggie and I agree because of the flash this pic looks like one of those at Niagara Falls when a picture of the location is behind you and it's obvious you are superimposed. I was really there, the camera just decided that it wanted to have the flash go off. |
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After the Mausoleum we rode another bus to the Ling Gu Temple where we walked up another 200 steps, this time they were spiral and we were climbing up a pagoda. I had to take a break half way up because I was getting dizzy and my knee wasn't liking the continuous semi-twist.
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| This stone tortoise is outside the Ling Gu Temple. The descriptor next to it says that archeologists are unsure why this tortoise was built or what is its connection to the temple. |
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| This dog stayed perfectly still while I took the picture. |
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| This is the pagoda with over 200 spiraled stairs. |
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| The view, today was a really hazy day, but I was assured the city is on the other side of those clouds. |
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| You'd think I was the only one there, this is on my break half way up and I was the only one on that level at the time. |
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| Gargoyles |
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| Look out below! |
So here's our day. It was actually pretty nice, just a lot of walking.
