My second visit to the Shaolin Temple (part 3 of 4)

(Note this is part 3 of 4 of this post.)

See if you can pick out Simon and Julie.  And check out the giant portion of noodles.  Just imagine that I fly halfway around the world, go hiking in the remote mountains of China, and I happen to stumble across the Chinese version of Simon and Julie!

Once lunch was over, and I was about to set off back to Shaolin, they got quite animated and insisted that I come on the return hike with them.  "I have to get back to Dengfeng," I said.  No problem their bus could drop me off, it was on their way.  So I joined their group (!) for the hike back down.

One thing that's bugged me about China is the amount of littering that goes on.  In fact I wasn't worried about finding my way back to Shaolin because I could just follow the trail of litter.  Well anyways not only did Simon and Julie pack up all their ow garbage, they scoured the site ad picked up all the other garbage that was laying around as well.

It's hard to tell from the photographs, but close to the trail was a very precipitous drop.  To me it looked very high and dangerous.  I was glad that the trail was a good distance away from the side and there were lots of trees.  Well guess what?  All of a sudden we took a side detour and headed straight for the edge!  We came out of the trees and suddenly everyone was carefully scrambling their way down the side of a cliff!  "Are you guys crazy?!?  I'm not climbing down that!"  I tried to explain that I had a fear of heights and falling to my death but they just laughed at me.  "Oh it's not dangerous."  Forget it I'm going back to Shaolin.

Anyways they were insistent again, and with some coaching (and my eyes closed most of the way) I managed to navigate the Cliff of Death.  (Yes this si where I thought they were trying to kill me.  Actually it probably wasn't that bad.  I never actually looked over the edge (due to fear) and they were all acting pretty casual over the whole thing.  But these are the same people who built the Hua Shan trail after all.)

Anyways after that it was still a pretty steep trail, but not frightening at all.  Of course by that time they figured that I was a complete chicken so they were taking very good care of me.  "Be careful!"  "Hold this tree here."  "Duck, watch your head."  Etc.  Lol now they have this opinion of all Canadians!

We came down a crevasse and scrambled through a bunch of tunnels in the rocks.  Pretty cool.