I believe I said something about an obvious main entrance on the map. Well.... I may have been wrong about that. Or, if I was right, I wasn't right just yet.

There's a plan to start work on the cable car in the next year or two and Bafengya is not, as I had thought from it having signs near 50km away, actually a developed tourist site.

I don't know this yet when my hotel owner arranges a round trip drive for me at what seems like a shockingly expensive 200y, but I shove a mask and my passport in one pocket, spare camera batteries in another, and decide to grin and bear it.

When the driver starts up the road I came down the previous day and turns up an even narrower, steeper, twistier, turnier mountain road than what had scared the crap out of me as something I might need to bike down, I realize pretty quickly that this is the other end of the road I didn't take. 

However, at least until we get to the so called parking lot I think part of the reason I'm paying as much as I am is clearly because we're going in the back way and avoiding the ticket booths.

We take a few minutes rest in the parking lot, just long enough for me to convince the driver that I'm merely hyperventilating in terror and not having an asthma attack or any dangerous breathing problems.

It's probably a good thing that I freaked as much as I did while still in the car as this gave him sufficient warning to know what I was going to be like on the trail.

I'm not really afraid of heights. Mostly. When there's a safety barrier to convince me that I'm not going to fall off the mountain and keep on falling, I'm fine. But there are no safety barriers, no lines, and the path is narrow enough that there would be a problem if we met someone coming the other way.

He talks me through things like looking at my feet when the horizon gets to being too far away and encourages me when I crab walk sideways with my back pressed to the cliff. He mostly doesn't even laugh out loud when we get to the temple (which has safety barriers) and I all but run to the comforting reassurance of solid stone between me and oblivion.

Was the temple worth it?

I'm not sure. There's a caretaker, a Mr. Feng, who has lived up here in one of grottoes which currently lacks art on a small stipend from the government for nearly 20 years now.

When Mr. Feng is distracted and I get to actually take the time to enjoy the art, it's worth it. And, if I'd known that the distracting of Mr. Feng was the only way to get photos of most things, I'd have worked harder to get quick snaps during the period when he and my driver were sharing a smoke.

Apparently 20 years older than the Maijishan Grottoes that I didn't go to, Mr. Feng tells me that the art is all completely original except for this bit here with the obvious repairs, and that bit, and this fresco, and this whole wall of mid-relief figures that might have actually been smashed up during the Cultural Revolution but might just be the usual habit of blaming the Cultural Revolution¹ for things that aren't around any more in the same way that "the currently worsening epidemic situation" (nearly double digit cases on the Mainland yesterday!) for not doing things you never wanted to do in the first place.

I quite enjoyed Mr. Feng's rendition of the Chinese National Anthem and dutifully recorded it to share with my TikTok followers. After the third time it is delisted for the nebulous infraction of "violating community standards" before it even manages to reach 2,000 views, however, it is obvious that other people not only do not enjoy Mr. Feng's singing², they also think that I'm intentionally being disrespectful by posting it.

China can't stop me from eventually posting it on YouTube though.

The hike back to the parking lot from the Grottoes is a lot easier than the hike there. For one thing, I'm mostly not looking straight ahead into the abyss, and, for another, I've snagged a plastic bag that someone discarded and am distracting myself from the abyss by picking up litter as I go. 

It's a fairly standard thing for me now whenever I go to a site that people have ever heard of to do a video excoriating the so-called nature lovers that, in visiting before me, did not take to heart the precept "take only photos, leave only footprints".

The drive back down the mountain is also a bit easier than the drive up was. I still end up hyperventilating but, as I know when it's going to eventually end, I've got the presence of mind to repeatedly tell myself that the only obviously repaired or replaced safety barriers are in the places that clearly had landslides so it's really really really unlikely that we are actually going to smash through a barrier and fall off the cliff.

I then get the driver to drop me off for a late brunch (dunch?) in town where I dawdle for a good hour until I'm sure that my knees will be completely steady and able to take the final kilometer or two walk back to the hotel.

¹ I've seen the CR blamed for the destruction of old but otherwise perfectly intact things that were replaced two or three years ago because they were old and ugly and a reproduction would look so much better.

² Which is very enthusiastic and clearly done with love. Just not done with any skill.