Here's what we would have seen had we been able to go..
Instead, we slept in until 11am, then checked out of the hotel and headed towards Yen Tu again. We managed to make it to the Lower Yen Tu pagoda, which was still about 50 cobblestone steps up the mountain side before it started to pour again. My mother stayed in the bus as soon as she walked to the cobblestone stairway and said she couldn't do it because of the uneven flooring. I sprinted up the steps, past everyone who had raincoats and umbrellas and then was huffing and puffing like a smoker when I finally got to the top (no offense to smokers).The picture above is one that I found on Google because my pictures turned out so blurry with big raindrops in the center. :) It was so serene in there and I felt like I was intruding on a very calm, peaceful place with all my heavy breathing. I took some pictures of the inside of the pagoda and then went back down.
We've stopped at a couple of nice pagodas in Vietnam and I'm sure that there will be plenty more. Although the French came in and introduced Catholicism a long time ago, there are still many many followers of Buddhism and from what I've seen, there are more pagodas than there are churches here.
I've been going to the Chinese pagodas (or temples) in Toronto for almost all of my life and I find that they are all pretty much the same - open to the public, very welcoming and serene. They are also very beautiful structures architecturally - the ones here in Vietnam are a lot larger and some even have several courtyards. Here are some pictures of the pagodas we've seen so far...
