Photographed at Cangyan Shan
Outside of Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China
June 23, 2007
at flickr

Our interest in visiting this temple that spans a gorge was our primary reason for visiting and spending time in Shijiazhuang, a city that didn’t have much to offer the foreign visitor. The Lonely Planet indicated that it would be a 2 hour bus ride from and back to Shijiazhuang, but it turned out to be far more complicated.

We had to take a two hour bus ride to even make it near this canyon. We got off the bus at a tiny town bus station only to have to board a second bus, a mini-bus. Travels around Southeast Asia and other parts of Asia have familiarized me with the common practice of convincing people to board, saying they will leave immediately, but refusing to leave until they are able to find enough passengers to fill the vehicle. As (bad) luck would have it, we were among the first to board and ended up sitting in the far back seat of this small bus that was slowly filling with locals.

Waiting was one thing, but to constantly be told that we were departing “right away” while the driver was laying down in the front of the bus with his shoes off and his feet propped up was just too much. On top of that, it was sweltering outside without even a semblance of a breeze, which made the inside of the bus stifling, even with the windows wide open. It was the kind of heat where you feel like you can’t breathe and the only relief you find is from fanning yourself, but it’s so hot that any sort of movement on your part is too much exertion and makes you that much hotter and makes you sweat that much more.

We finally departed with a bus full of people squeezed far too tightly together for comfort. People were even sitting on tiny, custom-made stools designed especially for sitting in the aisle. Once we got going, we discovered that the high school girl sitting next to me (the third person of four on our three-person bench seat) was studying English and was interested in talking to me. She was sweet and we managed to have a good conversation half in Englisha and half in Mandarin before we arrived at her stop and she had to shove her way off the bus.

Four hours after departing the city, we arrived at Cangyan Shan, already sweaty and exhausted. After a relatively easy-going hike and some stair-climbing, we arrived at this amazing temple, called the Hanging Palace.

The Hanging Palace spans a gorge, connecting two sides of a canyon. This photograph was taken from a bridge that also spans the gorge. Both may be familiar to you, as they appeared in the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The Hanging Palace and surrounding canyons were well worth the trip in retrospect, but this was probably one of the hardest-to-get-to places we visited on this trip to China. After our time there, it took us about two and a half hours to return to Shijiazhuang. We paid a taxi to take us all the way back, but once we reached the outskirts of the city, the driver insisted that he wasn’t allowed within city limits, so he dropped us off to wait for yet another bus at a single-sign bus stop on the side of a busy road with no sidewalks. Making it back to our room that evening was quite a relief.

Posted: April 22, 2008