While most of Zhangye’s sights are outside of Zhangye proper, one is not. It’s the Da Fo Si, or Big Buddha Temple. It’s home to, you guessed it, a really big Buddha. It’s a lying-down Buddha and measure over 34.5 meters long. That’s over 100 feet. That’s a huge Buddha. More impressive is that it was built almost 900 years ago out of wood and clay and is still in good condition. The only exception is that there is about 900 years of dust on the “up side” of the lying-down Buddha. I mean, who would dare dust it? What if you broke something?

Big Buddha in this temple, takes up entire length, note size of people for scale

Da Fo Si grounds

In the afternoon, our trusty driver from the previous day returned and took us to Danxia. It’s a national park that advertises its “rainbow colored rocks.” I’ve been to the Badlands in South Dakota, so that’s what I was expecting. While there were definitely similar elements, I have to say that Danxia was definitely more colorful than the Badlands. I don’t know if all seven colors were captured, but I think a solid four made an appearance. Cindy thought they looked like pork belly.

Our plan to arrive at sunset was a relative success. The light definitely brought out the colors in the rocks, which would have been washed out a bit had we arrived during broad daylight. The park staff, however, were not as hip to our plan. The park requires visitors to be shuttled around to four viewing stations on park buses. There must have been a raging party that night for park staff because every one seemed very eager to get us out of their viewing station. Every time we arrived at one, the staff insisted we needed to depart on the next bus because it would be the last one. That happened for about 1.5 hours.

At around 6:20, we were reasonably certain that closing time was approaching and boarded the bus back to the park entrance. We passed several park staff sitting around, smoking, and getting ready to text each other pictures of their huge party.

Dinner. The dish on the right is thinly sliced pig ears in Sichuan pepper oil