from Pillar to Post: a traveller's guide to stuff: more trains, hassles and Buddhas!

After our time in Vietnam and Lee's experiences in Ghana, Lee was not at all happy about catching this bus between Pingyao and Taiyuan. But we did it as it was basically the only way we could get between the two towns. And we survived! Yay! In fact, the bus driver was quite good (by South-East Asia's standards) although the roads along this 3 hour journey left a bit to be desired. Our time in Taiyuan consisted of walking for about 3km with our backpacks to the train station only to find that the ticket lines were huge.. So we walked around to a few places that were supposed to sell tickets (or course, when we enquired they had no idea what we were talking about) and then even our taxi driver got lost trying to find our last resort, the Advanced Bookings Office. Maybe half an hour later, and after asking 5 different people, the driver found the place we were looking for and we were able to get our onward tickets to Datong.. Another yay!
On the train, two cute little Chinese girls were very interested in us and so their dad eventually came up and acted as a translator between us in broken English. This ultimately aroused interest amongst the rest of the carriage and soon we were surrounded by about 15 Chinese peeking over each other in amazement that we could actually speak! It was certainly an experience talking with the few people that were daring enough to chat with us. Answers to the little girls' questions, such as "Why do you have that ring in your nose?", were a little more difficult to translate.. They seemed to also be fascinated by the fact that we knew how to use chopsticks. This was my first true experience of 'getting in with the locals' in China and it was great!
Datong itself is a massively polluted city due to an excess of fossil fuel processing plants perforating the outer city limits, and our 'floor attendant' in the hotel we stayed had a severe lack of customer service skills. Luckily, we weren't here for the city or the accommodation. The two attractions here are both outside of the city, the Hanging Monastery - an ancient Buddhist retreat built into the side of a mountain and held up precariously by huge stilts - and the Yungang Caves, the latter being definitely our highlight!
We caught a bus out to both sites, but the trip to the Hanging Monastery managed to take the limelight away from the actual site itself. For starters, the bus was supposed to take an hour each way.. It took nearly 3 hours to get there, and about the same amount of time on the way back! We made an interesting 30 minute stop to pile as many people as possible onto the bus, and when all the seats were full they pulled out small fold-out chairs for people to sit in the aisles too. After we had filled every possible space with humans, we were on our way.. for about 10 minutes until we came across a police road block. They stopped us, an officer boarded and videotaped everyone on the bus, then we were left for about 15 minutes without any further info before our driver decided to just take off. Then came the roadworks and exciting off-road experience.. Eventually we got there, jumped off the bus, took photos of the Monastery for about 5 minutes and were so tired from the bus ride that we decided to get straight back on the return bus haha. 6 hours well spent.
And then the next attraction: Begun over 1,500 years ago, the site that is the Yungang Caves holds the earliest Buddhist carvings in China. 51 caves full of carvings, some intricately painted, some in their natural state, are what's on offer here. The main caves number around 20 and within these are housed several seated and standing Buddhas and Hindu gods, some upto 17m high. The spaces around these huge figures are equally impressive, lined with thousands of miniature carvings of pagodas, dragons, phoenixes, flying angels draped in flowing silk, and the many tiny Buddhas seated in niches known as the '1,000 Buddha' motif. It really is a special place and it was lovely spending some time here exploring the grottoes from the earliest, eroded carvings to the most recent and better preserved masterpieces inside the caves.
We spent our last hours, before our final train trip in the evening to Beijing, wandering around the busy Huayansi Jie.

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