Road Trip
From Beijing to the trail of UNESCO World Heritage sites en route to Xian. The adventure began in Datong and the Yungang Grottoes and a few of the 50,000 or so statues carved into the rock cliffs there. It was a three-hour drive from Beijing, not bad, with Great Wall sitings all the way. The most impressive was a 70-meter Buddha sitting cross-legged. Other than that, there is not much to speak of in Datong, a coal mining capital, just a few poor temples trying to act as tourist attractions. The wooden pagoda in Yingxian is the oldest wooden structure in China and is lovely, made without nails, all 9 stories.
Leaving Datong for the Wutai (5-terrace) mountain was a bit of an ordeal. Just out of Yingxian our game of playing chicken with oncoming traffic was stopped by an endless line of coal trucks, overloaded, inching their way up the mountain until all traffic was stopped: it seems that trucks carrying three times their legal weight often break down, and such was the case. During our wait we learned that the truckers had been there since 2:00 AM the previous day. The police that arrived were playing cards, everyone was standing around the broken down trucks as if waiting for them to fix themselves. Our local guide was fatalistic: nothing could be done, we would have to wait all night, maybe two more days. Bullshit: David took charge and got the cork out, directing traffic until the police decided to take credit and show some initiative. Back in the car, we had a vocabulary lesson around officious versus official. And sometimes officious officials. Later traffic jams with herds of sheep were easier to manage.
On Wutaishan sacred Buddhist mountain we took in some of the 108 temples by starting at the top and walking down the 1080 steps...seemed like cheating, but David said that we earned our pilgrimage in the traffic jam. Well, he certainly did. In the mountains above the coal mines and traffic, the temples sat in that autumnal glow of sunlight filtering through cottonwoods and poplars turning gold and orange. With the National Day holiday coming up there were plenty of visitors, but mostly Buddhist monks and nuns. We caught a service (if that is the word) at a temple and heard the chanting monks and pilgrims, and then looked down into a courtyard performance of Cantonese opera being performed. No tourist hype could have guaranteed that, and it was magical.
One of our group, June, had the misfortune of being THE one in our group that the local guide Nelson imprinted on, and she was highly strung by the end of the day by Nelson's constant attention and impromptu English lessons. He is a bit wearing. My duty today was to deflect Nelson's attention elsewhere, namely to myself. I scare him, though, so he's been a bit quieter around me.
Pingyao
It's always interesting when your room comes equipped with a flashlight. In this case, not surprising, because the few hundred years the Heavenly Garden Inn has experienced have been a bit hard on the lighting and plumbing. Heat was courtesy of a kang, a stove on which the bed platform was placed: I imagined feeling like a menu item by the end of the night, but it was actually quite comfortable, and the old walled city of Pingyao was so charming, and authentically preserved in the old pre-Republic fashion, I had to agree with a traveler that were it not for the funny smell I would have liked to stay longer. The inn was a former residence of a wealthy family and my smallish quarters suggested a concubine's room: the red lanterns reinforced that.
Another UNESCO site, Pingyao is not the Disneyfied walled city that many similar towns have become. It has warts, some of its labyrinthine walls are crumbling and a peek into residential courtyards reveal the Chinese version of a Chinese still life, laundry drying on the line, children's plastic toys, kitchen bustle, chickens picking through piles of straw. It's not a museum, it is a living town and it feels like it.
I'm sitting out the afternoon in the hotel's internet cafe, looking at the old gray-roofed city through the filter of what in San Diego would be a soft winter rain. From here we fly to Xian, overnight there, fly to Dunhuang, overnight train to Turpan, and begin the ultimate road trip over the Silk Road immortalized by Marco Polo and the Tang Dynasty monk Xianzang before him. We'll end in Kashgar's bazaars, spittin' distance from Pakistan, and take a final detour to Altay, China's peninsula of land poking into what should be Russia in search of the Kanas lake monster, Nessie's cousin.
Leaving Datong for the Wutai (5-terrace) mountain was a bit of an ordeal. Just out of Yingxian our game of playing chicken with oncoming traffic was stopped by an endless line of coal trucks, overloaded, inching their way up the mountain until all traffic was stopped: it seems that trucks carrying three times their legal weight often break down, and such was the case. During our wait we learned that the truckers had been there since 2:00 AM the previous day. The police that arrived were playing cards, everyone was standing around the broken down trucks as if waiting for them to fix themselves. Our local guide was fatalistic: nothing could be done, we would have to wait all night, maybe two more days. Bullshit: David took charge and got the cork out, directing traffic until the police decided to take credit and show some initiative. Back in the car, we had a vocabulary lesson around officious versus official. And sometimes officious officials. Later traffic jams with herds of sheep were easier to manage.
On Wutaishan sacred Buddhist mountain we took in some of the 108 temples by starting at the top and walking down the 1080 steps...seemed like cheating, but David said that we earned our pilgrimage in the traffic jam. Well, he certainly did. In the mountains above the coal mines and traffic, the temples sat in that autumnal glow of sunlight filtering through cottonwoods and poplars turning gold and orange. With the National Day holiday coming up there were plenty of visitors, but mostly Buddhist monks and nuns. We caught a service (if that is the word) at a temple and heard the chanting monks and pilgrims, and then looked down into a courtyard performance of Cantonese opera being performed. No tourist hype could have guaranteed that, and it was magical.
One of our group, June, had the misfortune of being THE one in our group that the local guide Nelson imprinted on, and she was highly strung by the end of the day by Nelson's constant attention and impromptu English lessons. He is a bit wearing. My duty today was to deflect Nelson's attention elsewhere, namely to myself. I scare him, though, so he's been a bit quieter around me.
Pingyao
It's always interesting when your room comes equipped with a flashlight. In this case, not surprising, because the few hundred years the Heavenly Garden Inn has experienced have been a bit hard on the lighting and plumbing. Heat was courtesy of a kang, a stove on which the bed platform was placed: I imagined feeling like a menu item by the end of the night, but it was actually quite comfortable, and the old walled city of Pingyao was so charming, and authentically preserved in the old pre-Republic fashion, I had to agree with a traveler that were it not for the funny smell I would have liked to stay longer. The inn was a former residence of a wealthy family and my smallish quarters suggested a concubine's room: the red lanterns reinforced that.
Another UNESCO site, Pingyao is not the Disneyfied walled city that many similar towns have become. It has warts, some of its labyrinthine walls are crumbling and a peek into residential courtyards reveal the Chinese version of a Chinese still life, laundry drying on the line, children's plastic toys, kitchen bustle, chickens picking through piles of straw. It's not a museum, it is a living town and it feels like it.
I'm sitting out the afternoon in the hotel's internet cafe, looking at the old gray-roofed city through the filter of what in San Diego would be a soft winter rain. From here we fly to Xian, overnight there, fly to Dunhuang, overnight train to Turpan, and begin the ultimate road trip over the Silk Road immortalized by Marco Polo and the Tang Dynasty monk Xianzang before him. We'll end in Kashgar's bazaars, spittin' distance from Pakistan, and take a final detour to Altay, China's peninsula of land poking into what should be Russia in search of the Kanas lake monster, Nessie's cousin.
posted by EastWindGoddess | 11:32 AM
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