Southeast Asia: Day Five - Lama Temple

After breakfast in our apartment and getting our bags packed and ready we started out on our last day in Beijing. We got into a taxi and headed to the Lama Temple. We got our tickets and entered through a gateway of yellow leaved trees to a beautiful temple.

We walked through the entrance to even more beautiful buildings with the red, gold, and blue. We walked through many temples with all the intricate designs everywhere.

Everybody was burning incense as a prayer and the smoke would deliver this prayer up to the heavens.

Sage found this pot full of beautiful flowers.

After exploring for awhile we went to the temple with the fifty foot golden Buddha. We walked in and the statue just went up and up forever to the temple roof. We had to be careful to be very quiet whenever we found a temple that the monks were in class or meditating.

We walked back out to treed path and left the temple then decided to look around at some of the shops across the street as there were no taxis. This was our big mistake. After we were at least a block or two down the street we couldn't get a taxi. We tried for awhile but every taxi we hailed down did not speak English and when we showed them the card with our hotel address in Chinese they still wouldn't take us. We figured they just wouldn't fit 6 people so we headed down another street in search of a bus. That was difficult too as we couldn't understand their written language and we couldn't use google maps because China doesn't allow it. Instead we ended up at an entrance to a big office building with security outside. We got some help from one of the staff and they called two four seat taxis for us. We started on our way home after an hour delay. Dad and my taxi was following the other taxi on the way back but we got separated at a red light and our taxi driver got a little lost but soon we got back to the hotel. We all went up to our apartment for the last time, put on our backpacks and then jumped back into a van taxi to head to the Beijing airport for our five hour flight to Bangkok, Thailand.

It was getting dark when we landed in Thailand even though we went back an hour so we got to see the city lights all the way to our hotel on the river. It was hard to wait to check in but they gave us all coconut candies and guava juice which were delicious. Soon enough we were in our rooms and off to sleep.   

Total taxis: 5

Total planes: 1

Total miles walked: 4.2 miles