Day 5:
We left Kaoshiung on Friday morning and took a short bus journey to a Lingzhi retail centre. Well, needless to say, we didn't buy anything from there because we are obviously not Lingzhi consumers and we were glad to be out of that place and soon headed for Fo Guang Shan, supposedly the centre of Buddhism in southern Taiwan. What I will admit is that that place has a LOT of Buddha artefacts.
This is the first thing we saw after entering Fo Guang Shan. It's a statue of Kwan Yin (the Goddess of Mercy). It's said that if you make a wish upon a coin and throw it into the pond, in the process hitting the bell, your wish will come true. I missed the first time round but made no mistake in the 2nd, as to whether my wish came true, I still don't know, but I will on the 27th.
Have you seen such a HUGE statue of a standing Buddha? I haven't, although I have a feeling that the statue of the sleeping Buddha in Thailand is bigger. By the way, the fold across my torso isn't due to the extensive amount of lipids I possess, it's the fold of the fabric.
Then again, have you ever seen so many statues of Buddha in one place? Perhaps. But I haven't. This is less than half the total number they actually have!
This place supposedly houses 500 Arhats (I doubt it but there's a LOT). Obviously, it'll take a photographic genius to capture all 500 of them in an upclose position so I've made do with a smaller angle and so shall you.
Other than take photos, we did some praying and stuff like that but since no photography was allowed in the temples, let me just mention, just for the record, that they have a HUGE statue of a tianlu/pixiu made of jade in the temple. HUGE I tell you. HUGE!!!
Then it was off to lunch, which was in Tainan, which meant an arduous journey for our butts. When we finally reached, we realised that the food wasn't going to be very savoury. We had yam (prefer the Singapore version), oyster omelette (Singapore's version is still nicer), oyster porridge (what the hell?!?!?!), guan cai ban (Shilin's version was nicer and still I thought it was overrated), something that resembled Soon Kueh (except that Soon Kueh is nicer), prawn rolls (the only extremely nice thing about lunch) and beancurd (cold, with red bean soup, which I don't like. I like my hot beancurd with ordinary syrup which we eventually found in Taichung for... SGD$2 when it goes for 50cents here).
Post-lunch, it was off to the train station. We took this dreadful-looking train where passengers look like they would fall over any second to a COW farm.
See what I mean by cow farm? COWS!
Of course, cows weren't the only things they kept, they had horses, rabbits, chickens, turkeys as well as other types of poultry.
I have to admit though, the cow's milk was nice and we came back with 6 packets of milk candy, 2 bags, 1 pencil case, 2 keychains and 3 milk ice cream (I decided to skip it).
By the time we came back from the farm, it was almost 4pm and the sun would start to set in an hour's time but we were still a good 3 hours from our pit stop (sounds like the Amazing Race now).
Hence, the guide made some calls and managed to arrange for an additional stop on route to the hotel. An orange farm!
Please don't be mistaken. This isn't a Sunkist kind of orange farm, it's the mandarin orange kind of farm. The weird thing is that the green oranges were actually pretty sweet! We tried their freshly squeezed orange juice, for which they used 90% green oranges and it came up to be the sweetest orange juice I've had in years (I hardly consume it, you see). No sugar added.
We got to cut oranges from the trees and bought some, which was rather cheap. SGD$2 for 2kg is cheap by Singapore standard, I should think.
And so we continued on the journey, stopping by this temple which an earthquake in 1999 reduced its original 3 storeys to its current 1 storey. It simply crumbled and collasped. No pictures as the flash couldn't capture the entire scene.
From the temple, after an additional 90mins, we FINALLY reached the hotel. Our hotel was situated in a hot spring village and hence had access to a hot spring. After dinner, we had a hasty decision to use the hot spring and jumped into their man-made hot spring spa (supposedly filled with water from the spring).
I am proud to say that I was the first person among my family to dare to jump into the hottest pool, as well as the first person to endure the coldest one for over 5 minutes without jumping out. Although I must say I was the last to even enter the coldest pool. In total, we spent slightly over an hour in the hot spring. Nice experience though.
That basically marks the end of Day 5. =)
