[芒市的金塔] Descent from the Golden Temple.

so here we are on the top of the
mountain visit melissa whom you may have never heard of before may have never seen before my channel uh through this fence there's a porch on the edge of this entirely modern entirely fake government built Buddhist temple it is a lovely boys temple in its way but a boat is voted as real as Disneyland if you think Mickey Mouse is a real Mouse then you think this is a real Buddhist temple put it that way but they've disseminated some of the features of traditional terrible Buddhist architecture which is a nice change from what went on here during the Cultural Revolution of the Great Leap Forward and we can see this from our apartment you see this from most of the city downtown school that's true yeah so you can see from the university which on the other end of town that's true anyway we're slightly the breath we've just come up this on or a staircase and now for your entertainment I'm gonna film us as we descend uh this is all regrow this is not old-growth forest is the opposite of a growth forest but still it is really nice we get the sound of a lot of birds overhead oh ok not this summer day here our fellow travelers coming up the stairs this is Sunday so it's relatively busy here mostly just people getting exercise but a few people might be making the pilgrimage up to the Buddhist temple to get the view yeah well that's the view of some extent sorry if you can see through the bamboo here it is enough of a mountain that I guess your commanding view of the city is turning around other videos before showing that view anyway I don't have anything to Mar logon as we as we descend the stairs but it was remarked to me by some of my viewers I'd like to see some more views of the home before we leave town we're leaving town in just a few days so in terms of wildlife you know we could go across the street while hey Wildlife using the term very loosely across the street we have the sea I'm thinking of the language the mayor ah yeah kong-chi peacock I couldn't remember the English words remembering every other language from English for peacock but yeah there's a special Park full of peacocks here I don't know do you think the peacocks are actually kept in captivity there do you think they can't leave I mean they they're not slighted Birds I can't fly away but right so it's it's it's a free it's a free-range peacock farm in effect yeah but yeah I don't know and the peacocks I think they're almost all male or all the ones we saw right you know the brightly coloured peacocks are male and the female peacocks are kind of drab Brown so ya know what the deal is there anyway not quite uh not quite as do not quite a factory farm but there's a peacock like as they call it as a as an attraction across the way I mean I can hear some birds overhead now sometimes we hear the keening of insects Chiquita's and what-have-you this is by no means intact or old-growth forest pretty much all of China was deforested aside from some little little patches of forest we have here on the edges next to me and mark that reminds me you know I had a very memorable conversation via a translator with a guy who was ethnically Chinese so he's what they call Han Chinese here part of the Chinese majority and during the Cultural Revolution he ran away and joined the tribal peoples living in the forest so he in effect assimilated himself into some tribal peoples living the forest just to escape servation because the starvation in his area was so widespread and so terrible probably also violence communists on communists warfare which he didn't die when he could tell he didn't want to talk about he didn't want to say any more with that so we didn't press him but it was a really interesting story he said you know he had learned to survive he learned to survive with nothing but a pocketknife and he used a tellingly a disused bomb fragment you know like a leftover bomb blasting cap to cook rice in see they build a fire and put this I think the idea was this was translated from Chinese but he put this piece of metal from a bomb fragment over the fire to get hot and I think he would put the rice inside a coconut scene the coconuts contain liquid they have coconut milk and the rice would cook inside the coconut then he'd hack it open and eat the coconut rice so much but yeah he described this as a straight-up you know struggle for survival against against starvation yeah really interesting guy met him and his whole student family that was back in back in Jing home but yeah in many ways that reflects part of the feeling of the place here I don't know how local indigenous people feel about it for a lot of the Han Chinese they do feel that they're local to wherever they've been living for a couple of generations you know they feel they're from here and represent this place even if ethnically and linguistically and religiously they're not in any way from this place oh just one of my students this year is from Jing home which is the next County South and you know she talks of herself as you know Jing Hong native but she's Han Chinese in her whole family is and she is I think she's going to make the effort to learn modern tie and then maybe from modern tie she'll learn to speak the local language here that don't die language or the Jing Hong Tai language I suppose but I got very different sort of cultural attitudes towards assimilation and whatever the alternative to assimilation might be there's a large jungle walk that's actually a statement from the donor the company that donated money to build this to build a stairway to beautify this park the so there's a golden temple that we just saw at the top Hilton is also the silver temple and you know there are they're kind of government built projects this silver temple which remains incomplete and kind of abandoned it does have posters up saying the sort of local charitable society that was in charge of it but I don't know if oh I know that's why the golden temple is finished and the silver temple never was you know the difference between being backed by the you know the government properly being backed by some kind of small cherub wages here it's been cool lately I mean not to talk about the weather but if you've been watching our channel you've seen us wearing more and more layers and we're more clothing on camera as opposed to just sitting around in t-shirts with a fan on we still in all our videos the fan blowing on us continuously because it was so hot this is a this is a tropical area but it's at the cool end of what what counts us in the tropics we got some propaganda posters here we also passed a few grave sites which I didn't but like everything in Ching Hong we get some reminders from the government of time anyway it's hot and I've here to grow mangoes it's hot but it's cool enough to grow strawberries and this is the this is the coldest time of year I suppose I remember before you came over babe I remember struggling to do push-ups with my gloves on because you know it was so cold my fingers would get numb trying to work out and try to do push-ups the apartment so it does get cool here but definitely never gets down on the point of frost or snow nothing that would cause the nothing that would cause the rubber trees or the coffee trees or the mango trees to to shutter anyway here at the bottom of the temple road the bottom of the staircase looking up the Buddhist temple we have a monument to those who died fighting against the Japanese yen World War two sino-japanese war concluding with World War two and then below this there's another staircase leading us down to the road that leads us back to the downtown core of the city and that's a wrap