Cliffs of Shaolin

Here is where things got interesting. You see, we were supposed to go from Xi'an to some other city that I can't spell or remember really. Namely because we didn't end up making it. Supposedly there was a monsoon, meaning our flight was canceled. The result was that we got the chance to go to the Shoalin Temple a day or two early. The total time was 4 days of training at the temple, which was awesome! The training at the temple I"ll most likely talk about a bit later. But basically it was we got there at about 8:30, trained for a couple hours, broke for lunch, and then came back around 2:30ish to train for a few more hours every day. In between we had about 4 hours. The first day we decided to go to the cliffs of Shaolin.

To get there, we picked up a random man with a van that just happened to be willing to drive us where ever we could manage to explain to him using mainly hand gestures. The trick was, there was 8 of us going, and, the van wasn't really that big.
The results were amusing. Nevertheless we managed to get where we intended to go, and it was a gondola. We took the gondola up the cliffs and mountains to the top, where there was a trail. The trail was supposedly 12 miles long, one way, at the end was another Buddhist temple. Sadly we didn't have time to make it all the way there, but we did marvel at the beauty of the area.

According to Master Williams, the one who led us here, there are warrior monks from the Shaolin Temple that *run* to the temple and back every morning. Yes, 24 miles, pretty much a marathon, in some pretty hilly (pretty sure uphill both ways) path along the side of a cliff. I'm not sure I believe it, but I want to.

Anyways, not much more to say about these cliffs, besides that they were amazing, and 2 of our group members was afraid of heights lol. I hope you enjoy the pictures! There are a lot of them, because they were pretty cool.