Renegade Wife is often nice enough to search for interesting places for us to go. A little while ago she found one place which used to be an amusement park but has later been taken over by a Buddhist organisation who have turned it into a kind of temple or monastery. Many of the old amusement park buildings still stand however, but remain unused; in essence, it’s like an abandoned amusement park within the temple grounds. This sounded very interesting to us so we went to check it out.

  • You don’t have to go to Europe to find castles
  • The castle up close
  • Yini looking out from a castle window
  • On the upper floor there are plants growing inside.
  • Through the window you can see a King Kong statue in the distance.
  • The doors have been broken
  • The front side
  • Parking lot on the back side
  • Yini and the Copyright infringement mouse

The Buddhists who run the place also have a small cafe where we stopped by after exploring the castle. The cafe serves home made ice cream and hand ground coffee (you grind your own beans). There are no prices, you just donate whatever amount you think is suitable.

Yini grinding beans for her cup of coffee

After our coffee break we kept exploring, starting with the most interesting part, the King Kong statue and the area around it.

  • Old cable car station, inside is actually a shrine of some sort
  • Close up on one of the weird figures outside
  • The not so great’Great Wall of China’
  • King Kong wrestling some kind of crocodile.
  • The stairs inside King Kong
  • The floors are basically just landings connecting to the next set of stairs
  • At the top I came to this broken ladder but I had to go up so I made a somewhat risky climb to that little shelf
  • King Kong actually had movable eyes, here is the mechanism
  • The inside of King Kong’s head
  • Looking out through the mouth

The place was surprisingly big so we continued walking further down the road. We found a few different shrines and meditation rooms but also several smaller abandoned places.

  • A clutter of random statues
  • The cable car track, the rest of it seems to be buried by jungle
  • Some miniature houses
  • A small pond
  • A strange looking observation building
  • Inside were some chairs facing the Shimen reservoir
  • The top floor was almost completely empty. The ladder to the tower on the roof was gone.
  • The basement was designated as an antiaircraft shelter…
  • …but it didn’t seem like a safe place to take shelter

At this point we thought there wouldn’t be more to see but I walked a little bit further and saw that there was indeed something more, so we continued.

  • This weird looking building a with the Russian style domes on the roofs used to be a dormitory
  • View from the roof, it’s seriously damp down here.
  • The front of the building

By now we thought we must have reached the end but Yini spied what looked like a castle even further down the mountain which I really wanted to see. However, we only had an hour until they would close the gates and we still had to hike back up to the entrance. We didn’t dare chance it so we turned back, but I definitely have to come back another time and see the rest of the place.