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I (Gavin) persuaded Gail to stop in Zhengzhou on the way to Shanghai, because a couple of hours out of the city is the Shaolin Temple - the home of Kung Fu!. Getting to Zhengzhou was easy enough but getting out of it turned out to be a nightmare, as its a major train hub and all the onward tickets had been bought or snapped up by touts for the next few days. The only option was a 10 hour standing ticket overnight to Shanghai, so after half a day mucking about we bought a flight on the internet for the following day for 36 pounds.
We missed the Shaolin Temple buses that day, so booked the 6.30 am bus the next morning. After an hour and a half on the bus we thought we had arrived but it was actually some tombs and not the temple. We followed the crowd and went into the tombs and got charged 20 yuan each on the way out, we think there was some sort of kick back going on with the drivers. We got to 2 km from the Temple and the bus stopped again at a restaurant for breakfast, again sure this was a kick back so stayed on the bus with about 10 others, seeing we hadn't got off they took us the rest of the way.
The interesting journey had cut our time at the temple, plus we had no idea on how we would get back to Zhengzhou, as the bus we had come on didn't return till 4pm, our flight was at 5pm, 30km from the city. We found another way back with an earlier bus via Dengfeng, so headed into the temple.
Inside it was like a big Kung Fu academy where groups of students (mainly young kids) were training. We watched a Shaolin show with fight simulation, acrobatics and students breaking objects on different parts of the body. We checked out the Shaolin Temple, which was one of the better temples we have visited but Gavin was far more interested in the Kung Fu so we went to catch another performance before leaving.
We made the flight.
previous travel blog entry
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