The 3 pagodas. The largest was built by the Tang Dynasty over 1200 years ago. The smaller ones were added just 700 years ago and form a symmetrical triangle with the larger one. Recently lots of new temples have been added above the pagodas to honor Buddha and Quan Yin. We cheated and took a tram ride up the mountain, climbed a bunch of stairs and had a great view of the temples, Pagodas, clear lake and mountain. We walked down and went thru most of the temples. They sure used lots of gold leaf! Quan Yin received a large share of the gold leaf. She is sort of the Buddhists version of our Virgin Mary. Quan Yin, The Goddess of Mercy, seemed to be very important in this area, our Dali hotel had a picture of her that was literally 6 stories high on one wall of their lobby. This area also had some of the biggest prayer wheels we had seen (SO FAR). We turned the big prayer wheels, which was the beginning of a temple ritual that we followed throughout the rest of our temple and monastery visits.
Next stop was a walking tour of Old Town and its walled gates and a stop at a tea shop. In Hangzhou, you check the packaging to make sure the tea is from this seasons leaves, in Dali the older the better as in 7-20+ years. They preserve it by pressing it into a mold it so that it resembles, in color and texture, a giant round tobacco plug. It is called Pressed Pu-erh. Most common shape is of an ancient Chinese coin about 6 inches in diameter. But they come in other forms ranging from mini-pumpkins, to huge disks, and calabashes five feet tall. They were very expensive and are a traditional gift to impress your boss.
We rested up at the hotel, which had a nice mountain view, and then caught a leaky (but free) bus back to old town for some retail therapy, massage and dinner. This town is where we started having trouble with suitcase overflow. Silver was very reasonable as well as many other items. On the bus we met a humorous Austrian couple that were taking a video of the leaky roof. They were on a different tour but we ran into them a couple of times in old town, which was strange because the area was large and very crowded.
