The monastic order has developed a lovely garden amid their many statues and water features about five miles up from the highway. You park in a residential area, then walk into the temple grounds. The old Temple is the near the start of the garden area, and then the paths wind along the river, all leading up to a new temple that is being built at the back of the garden area, and will be a spiritual destination place for pilgramages from around the world. As one walks along the serene paths, many different flowering tropical plans from around the world are found, as shown below.
Purple, red, yellow, white--the blossoms of unusual plants were abundant throughout the length of the pathways, surrounding stauary and water features.
Finally, the end of the path led to the partially completed temple, shown below.
The temple is all hand carved by carvers brought from India using ancient tools. The detail of the carvings is remarkable:
The carved granite temple sits atop a huge foundation of concrete, created and designed by a UC-Berekley engineering professor whose speciality was concrete before he left the university to tout the everlasting qualities of this speciality concrete--the mixture contains considerable fly ash from Washington state. The temple is being designed to last 1000 years, and should be completed in 2017. Tours are every week, and reservations are strongly recommended. No shorts are allowed, and anyone wearing shorts (men included) were given sarongs to cover themselves for the tour.
We completd the day by dropping Wanda off to rendezvous with her sister for catching the plane to Maui, and then later Helen, Liz and I spent the afternoon around Hanalei. We went out a farm road by the taro fields and saw much birdlife upclose--ne ne geese, and many others, then shopped a bit before returning home to the condo.
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