China/Hong Kong: Seven Star Crags
Two hours on the bus to the Plum Monastery-- a tiny little temple where we were beset by trinket sellers outside-- and then the nearby Seven Star Crags. The trinket sellers latched onto Gina like vultures, while the less-interested Kristen got much better deals. Decorations of peanuts and a bunch of turtles were really the only interesting things; a tree you are supposed to walk around three times was there, but I couldn't properly understand why it was significant.
The day probably would have been more interesting, but at another tourist-trap restaurant, one of the ladies in our tour group collided with one of the waitstaff and had to be taking to the hospital for examination, so we spent several hours hanging around in the parking lot of the restaurant. Weeee, fun... lots of time making funny faces, telling stories, and sitting on the hard concrete steps or wooden benches inside the lobby.
The Seven Star Crags and the swamp-turned-artifical-lake surrounding them were the next stop. A temple of fertility is on the grounds, next to the Dragon Cave or something that we all went in. I was hoping for a nicely restored cave full of ancient writings. . . instead, I got a fully modernized in-fresh-red-paint-and-colored-lights travesty. *sigh* There wasn't time to walk to the top of any of the crags, although I was tempted to. Then I remembered there are far fewer caves and far more crags on this trip, so I skipped the Tianzhu Crag. I wish I hadn't. The bridges crossing the various islands in the lake to the crags were somewhat artistic, and the initial view-- the trees sitting in beds of green marsh-- was awesome. The relatively mild weather in March also helped; it was almost ideal, compared to, say, May through August, which is probably sweltering.
Dinner was perhaps the fanciest restaurant we'd seen so far, predictably the food was almost the least impressive. The displays of abalone, birds' nests, and traditional delicacies were designed to impress; unfortunately the food wasn't (although all the awards on the wall made me wonder if we were just eating the wrong things...). The bus took us through several relatively new, Western-style, ritzy areas of apartments and homes on the way back.