As planned for one of our Easter Holiday activities, we went to Wollongong today. It’s supposed to be nice one day trip, but let me tell you a better story. It’s about how the whole visit had turned to a hilarious show of some person’s stupidity. And that person, is ME.

First thing is that very inadequate map that I had brought with me. I took the New South Wales Country Road Atlas from the office before the holiday, thinking it would take me everywhere in NSW, as it’s the map that I used when travelling in the region at the work. I carefully had a look at the page of “Wollongong” beforehand, and saw Nan Tian Temple located at the pretty much the western edge of the map. Thinking such a big temple and a visiting attraction for tourists, as long as we get into Wollongong, I assumed that we will find no trouble to find this temple.

Guess what? It took us maybe two and half hours to get to Wollongong, but we didn’t see any obvious sign on the road. When we were trying to spot any possible hint in the city, I also realised that the road to get to the temple on the map was missing (or beyond the map limits).

I had never been so stressed in my life. I don’t know where we were, where to go and in which direction that temple was. I had to get off the car to ask the locals for the direction. For the time being, I was like a crazy chook, running up and down from one place to another.

Another hour later, after we got into Wollongong shire, had driven many winding mountain roads, asked a couple of people, almost torn the map page off the book, and been to the rear gate of the temple, we finally saw the main entrance of the temple…Yeah!

At the front, my husband stopped the car and suggested me to take a photo of the grand entrance. Sure! I got off the car, took out my camera, turned it on, ready to shoot. Guess what I saw from the monitor screen?

“NO MEMORY CARD” ……..#$%^&*()”:>
I nearly fainted, and almost in shivering I walked back to the car and at that moment I was pretty sure that now I was going to the hell.

This is just so great! I forgot to replace the card back yesterday after I downloaded the photos. I bet the memory card was still in my computer’s card slot.

The following stay in the temple was pretty boring anyway. I pretended that I can still take photos with my mobile phone. We saw a couple snakes sneaking across the little walk tracks at the back of the mountain.We walked down the alley and smelled the lunch coming from the vegetarian cafeteria. We took off the shoes and got inside a few halls and watched the Buddhas. We hung some wish cards to pray for healthy and happy life. We looked the treasure exhibition room. I throw 2 dollars into the little pond in the carbon oxygen filled GuanYin sculpture room. We checked the souvenir shop, and I observed other visitors’ facial expression.

Back to 10 years ago, we used to visit temples, pray for good things to happen, pay respect to all possible gods, donate money and light a 400 yuan incense. I read a lot of Buddhist books when I was in my mid 20s. But funnily enough, I actually had never into any particular religion and became a follower of any belief, but I have been always quite into the general concept of religion and spiritual related topics.

Now, 10 years later, I couldn’t even kneel down. I think I was a bit over it. I noticed that comparing to the same temple that we visited 7 years ago, this place is getting nicer and nicer, as well as richer and richer. You can see that the temple owns so much money to spoil a religion. It’s not hard to come up to my conclusion – Everything is about the power, and indeed, what else is there???

I was doomed to be a drama queen for the day. After having had our lunch in the city and a short stroll at the beach, we hit the road again and headed home. Guess what, once again, I missed to see the Picton Rd’s entry point and we were on the way to South Sydney. How exciting this was!!! Another conclusion I had drawn for today: We need a navigator!!!! Navigator is women’s best friend.

Well, what’s new for me? A trip that we only had planned to travel such finally ended up in Hurstville, a southern suburb of Sydney where we used to live. Okay, we had to shop for Chinese groceries. We had to eat at Chinese restaurant. We had to buy cakes in one of our favourite shops Golden Palace.

We wandered in the crowd, flashed by bright lights on the streets, shocked by the cheap packed food and we started to recall the busy and convenient lifestyle that it is supposed to be when living in Sydney. All that takes, is my negligent mistake and some fall-through plan.

So, as you can see, this is our wonderful trip to Wollongong. You are not expecting any photos, are you?