We today travelled to the Buddhist Grotto at Baoding Shan. The site began with a series of small retail outlets, including cages containing chickens and rabbits,We were driven to the start of the Grotto accompanied by Peter, our tour guide who was a rock carver by trade. Peter took us around Baoding Shan grotto. The grotto is comprised of hundreds of statues carved straight from the rocks hundreds of years ago by the Zhao Zhifeng between 1179 and 1245. Among the highlights of this Buddhist site include the Cave of Full Entitlement with twenty life sized Bodhisattvas, the twenty-metre-long Reclining Buddha and carvings depicting the role of parental kindness and filial piety in Mahayana Buddhism.
On our return we were fed at a local restaurant where we were each given plastic gloves before trying their delicacy of black chicken legs including their feet. ‘The food again was a challenge to our taste buds and included some interesting surprise dishes, including Lotus flower roots.