Putuoshan, Shanghai

Putuoshan is an island off the coast of Shanghai. You can reach it by an overnight ferry or you can catch the train down south a bit and then a speed boat, which only takes about 5 hrs all up.
The island is like one big and beautiful manicured garden filled with ponds, temples and statues. This is a living Buddhist community and tourists would be evenly matched by the number of Buddhist monks and other Buddhists paying respect in the temples.
The temples themselves along with the giant Buddhist statues are really inspiring. This is a little picture of what I imagine China was like centuries ago. It’s a mountainous place with lots of little trails and steps, very like the scenes in every Kung Fu movie where the pupil is learning their trade from the master.
I didn’t book a hotel before hand and had no trouble finding a place. Like everwhere else I like to avoid tours and I wouldn’t worry about organising anything before arriving. (Of course I don’t know what its like at different times of year and I have throughout my carrer as a tourist slept on the odd beach)
The natural beauty of Putuoshan is such a relief after Shanghai, paricularly the yellow sandy beaches. And the food, oh my god that incredible seafood; well yeh it’s really good! Such a cliche that, for instance, the Indian food we get here is nothing like the food in India etc. But the Chinese we get here is closer to McDonalds than the stuff they serve up in China. Imagine a little pet shop out the front of every restaurant you go to. You can’t speak to the people, because NO ONE in China speaks English, so you just point at the animal you want and half an hour later it turns up on your table cooked the chefs favourite way.
In Putuoshan the restaurants are filled with aquariams. A lot of the fish or water bugs in there I could only recognise again by their taste. I love this kind of eating except that it is really hard to ever have the same dish twice.
The difference between Putuoshan and the rest of China is brought into stark juxtoposition when you round the final bend at the north of the island and are brought face to face with one of China’s lagest navel bases. Super techno machines like destroyers and submarines and aircraft carriers sit only a mile away from Buddhist statues. Signs all over the place warn you that your camera will be taken and possibly even worse things will happen if you photograph it.
Really gets you thinking. The Buddah and the missile. Like the art of kung fu vs the Chinese army. I’d back Bruce Lee..