We discovered one evening that there was Taoist temple not to far from our hotel and decided to visit there the following morning. The map had the temple up on the nearby hill that did not look too hard to climb so we set on our way. The winding road took us through small farms on both sides, a few rundown shacks and a number of shrines honoring the dead. Out of curiosity we stopped to read the inscription on one of them. It belonged to a concubine of some emperor. There was more detail on her lineage and progeny that we understood nothing about. As the road went uphill we found more such shrines big and small, many dedicated to concubines. There was an old man in a hut pulling nails out of a wooden board. It was unclear if he was salvaging the wood, nails or both. A stray dog lay curled up in sleep under a grapefruit tree laden with fruit one of which had dropped right next to where the dog lay. After the while the road ended abruptly.
The map showed the temple to our right but what we saw was tiny patches of farmland where a variety of greens and vegetables were growing. We trusted the map more than the reality we saw in front of our eyes and wandered into the farms expecting to see some path to the temple emerge magically. A farmer coming down the hill observed us quizzically and correctly assumed that we were lost. We did not speak any common language and the translator app failed to pick up his dialect. We showed him the point of the map the temple was marked and assumed he was able to read the words.
He kept pointing to the path left and repeating "there" - the only word we could understand. He steered us away from the farms and to the path that was going to get us to the temple (or so we thought). We ended up at a different place, away from the farms and the road but no temple anywhere. Retracing our steps back to where we first veered into the farms, a woman headed down to the village with her harvest stopped and smiled at us. We tried to explain to her the best we could about the temple which we had no idea if she understood or not. She gestured us to follow her and we did thinking the temple was on her way to wherever she was headed.
Along the way he passed the old man toiling away on the wooden boards, extracting nails. The dog was still asleep by the fallen grapefruit. Nothing had changed in the scenery and nothing had changed in our state either. We were exactly where we began and only time had passed. The woman had brought us to where our journey had started at the bottom of the hill and gestured for us to go back to town. She thought we needed to find our way back having wandered into the farms on the hill. Did the temple exist as all in map or life we don't know.
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