"moped to marble mountai"

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A great trip to fill our morning!! We hired Mopeds with some of our group and headed off on the 40min ride out to a huge mountain called marble mountain which is pretty self explanatory. It was a warm drive but if you kept your speed up you managed to stay cool in the breeze.
Once we arrived we took some time to look around at the marble carvings made at the base of the mountain, there were some HUGE ones-of course we would have bought one for all of you but we couldn't choose and we figured you might not be in to take the delivery off the postman so we just left it!!
We walked up the millions of steps and were soon flaking a bit in the heat!!
we saw some beautiful pagodas with buddhists chanting and doing some rituals which was very interesting. We also went into some of the caves which are absolutely huge and beautiful and have carvings in the walls of buddha etc that were done straight into the walls as they would have been too big to carry in!! A lot of the caves now have holes in the ceilings beacuse of the bombing during the war but it meant that proper beams of light came through the gaps so it looked very picturesque!

Pretty un-eventful moped ride, we were all very careful. A couple of the guys kept their moped for the afternoon and one of them flipped a wheelie and almost deposited himself and matt on the floor in the middle of the road but they were both unscathed..but the 'new' bike (owners pride and joy) was a bit worse for wear!! never mind!!

In the afternoon we hired a couple of bicycles and explored a bit of the old quarter, japanese bridge and negotiated the traffic by the little river and through the streets which was really relaxed!

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Comments

[doc]

great pictures
It looked like you guys had a great time! By the way, were the carved marble statues expensive and were there a lot of shops?

[gemandmatt]

yes there are loads of shops and they are pretty pricey but depends on size etc, things are shipped priced on sq metre rather than weight as well.