Things To Know Before You Go to the Shaolin Temple

The easiest and most convenient way (especially if you do not speak Chinese) to study kung fu at the Shaolin Temple is to travel with one of the tour groups that specializes in such trips. You can look for these types of tours in martial arts magazines or on the Internet. The following advice is for those who plan to make their own arrangements.

Getting there: You need to get to Zheng Zhou, the capital of Henan province. The best way is to fly to Beijing. In Beijing, you can buy a roundtrip plane ticket to Zheng Zhou for as little as $200. The other option, which is cheaper, is to take the train to Zheng Zhou, but this can add up to 12 extra hours in travel time and is difficult to arrange if you do not speak Chinese. (As a general rule of thumb, the less expensive the option, the less likely the Chinese involved with it will speak English.) Once you arrive at the Zheng Zhou airport, you can proceed directly to Shaolin or Deng Feng (the nearest city to the temple) in a three-hour cab ride (don't pay more than $50). If it is late or you want to take the bus to Shaolin (less expensive, more difficult), you can take a cab into Zheng Zhou (45 minutes from the airport) to stay the evening. One warning: Henan bus and cab drivers are, shall we say, not risk-averse on the road; they like to spend a lot of time driving into oncoming traffic, particularly around bends and up hills. You will arrive safely, but you will need to keep reminding yourself of that during the drive.

Where to stay: Beijing has a number of options, which can be researched and booked on any of the Internet travel sites. They range in price from around $60-$200 per night. My favorite is the Great Wall Sheraton ($120 to $150 per night), which is very good about arranging for tickets (like plane flights to Zheng Zhou) and individual tours of Beijing. The best hotel at the moment is the Grand Hyatt Beijing ($170 to $200), located over the flashy Oriental Mall and very near the Forbidden City. Everyone who visits Shaolin should stay at least a day and a half in Beijing to see the Great Wall (one day), the Forbidden City, and Tiananmen Square (half a day for both).

There are four or five hotels in Zheng Zhou, which can be booked over the Internet, but the Holiday Inn is my favorite ($50 to $70 per night) and also the most convenient.

Deng Feng now has a couple of clean, efficient hotels with staffs that do their best to speak English, but you will not be booking any of them on the Internet just yet. The best is the New Century Hotel ($35 per night). If you stay at a good hotel in Zheng Zhou, they will be able to arrange a room for you in Deng Feng and tell a cab driver where to take you. Or you can point out the Chinese word for "hotel" to a cab driver in your Concise English-Chinese Dictionary, and say, "Deng Feng," which fortunately is pronounced exactly like it is written. He will know where to take you.

The Shaolin Wushu Center has Shaolin village's only hotel, a fairly grim three-story job that they are planning to replace next year with a much-improved version. But since "eating bitter" is considered crucial to the study of kung fu, the old hotel will certainly put you in the right frame of mind, and you can't beat the location or price ($12 to $25 depending on your negotiating skills).

If you are not planning on any kung fu training, then a trip to Shaolin should take no more than a day. Spend the night in Zheng Zhou, take a tour bus (your hotel can arrange it) to Shaolin, eat lunch at the Wushu Center restaurant, watch a kung fu performance in the Wushu Center performance hall, and then walk a block down the road to take a tour of the Shaolin Temple. The bus will return you to Zheng Zhou that night.

Arranging for kung fu training: If you are planning on kung fu training, there are three options. The simplest is to live, eat, and train with the monks at the Shaolin Wushu Center. The standard training arrangement is four hours (9 to 11 a.m. and 3 to 5 p.m.) of private tutorials five and a half days per week. The cost the leaders of the Wushu Center would like me to quote is $50 per day for everything, but $30 is not impossible to achieve for longer stays and skilled negotiators. The Wushu Center is probably the best option for those staying less than two weeks.

The more popular option for those staying longer is to live in Deng Feng and take a $1, 20-minute bus ride to the Shaolin Temple every day. There are martial monks living in the temple who are willing to make private arrangements with foreigners who show up at the Shaolin Temple's gates. It will probably involve a great deal of pantomiming if you do not speak the language, but there were two young men, a German and an African-American, who had both been living and training this way for nearly a year when I visited. The advantage of this option is that you can honestly say you trained in the Shaolin Temple. No one would quote me a price, but if you figure that the average salary in Deng Feng is $100 per month, the tuition should range from $5-$10 a day. My advice is to be as stingy as possible with hotel and restaurant arrangements, and as generous as possible with your instructor: A happy and dedicated kung fu teacher makes all the difference.

The final option is to live in Deng Feng and train at one of the dozens of kung fu schools in the city. While most do not have eating or living arrangements for foreigners, the standard price for those that do is $45 per day, but, again, negotiate. The leaders of Deng Feng's Special Shaolin Wushu College said they would be willing to offer free room, board, and training to any bilingual foreigner willing to teach English to their Chinese students.

When to travel: Shaolin is in the mountains, and it gets very cold in the winter. Since there is no indoor heating and most students train outdoors, they take winter, instead of summer, vacations from roughly the middle of November to the middle of February (after the Chinese New Year). You will want to avoid traveling to Shaolin during that period.

What to bring: If you have not already caught on, the most important item to bring to Shaolin is money. But at least there are ATM machines in Deng Feng now. The second most important item is Immodium A.D. and antibiotics such as Cipro. Unless your stay is very short or you have a cast iron stomach, you are very likely to get diarrhea (Mao's revenge, we called it). Usually the cases are mild, easily treated by Immodium, but sometimes they can be quite severe, which is why antibiotics are necessary. The only other physical dangers are sports-related (cuts, bruises, sprains), so bring bandages, wraps, aspirin, and ice packs. A healthy, well-conditioned, and (especially important) well-stretched body is also a big help in avoiding injuries.

The standard clothing for Chinese kung fu students is a jogging suit. Yours should be loose and comfortable: You will be doing a lot of high kicking. You will need shorts and loose T-shirts for the summer months and some type of long johns for the late fall and early spring months. The single most important item of clothing, given all the running and jumping you will be doing, is your shoes. You can buy and wear the shoes the Chinese use, but I found their arch support weak. You should avoid running shoes at all costs because their edges tend to catch when you make sharp turns, causing ankle sprains. My favorites are no-spike soccer shoes for the combination of closeness to the ground and arch support. Other items you should include: a towel, toilet paper, a water bottle, a camera, reading material (the nights can get lonely), pictures of your family (a good way to start a conversation), and a personalized gift for your instructor. While you should also give him some money (a tip) on your last day, they enjoy something (a baseball cap, a T-shirt) that is clearly from a foreign country. And, finally, don't forget your English-Chinese dictionary.

Some reference material: The best American Web site devoted to Shaolin is russbo.com. Shaolin is much more popular in continental Europe than in America, so there are quite a few Shaolin Web sites written by fans for whom English is a second (or third or fourth) language. The best of these is Shaolin Kung Fu Training in Shaolin.