The World's Best Xinjiang Diary Ever: Spring Festival Travels 5

19th January 2008 // Day 5 // Hohhot (Inner Mongolia) --> Datong (Shanxi)

This day pretty much sucked all round. We got up, me at 6.05am and Liam a little later. I had showered the night before so I just had to get up, wash and get packed up and then we were off to the train station, truly knackered. The train was uncomfortable and until after the first stop Liam and I were split up by our seat numbers. At least we had seats though, I guess. Nobody paid much attention to us thank god. I wrote some more endless diary and dozed a bit. Liam came to sit next to me, as did Chatty McChatterson as I named him, who was seated opposite me and kept trying to make conversation in pidgin English. Fortunately I still managed to snooze but woke up feeling seriously nauseous. I threw up in the charming train toilets about half an hour before we arrived at Datong. Just before, Liam and I had been co-erced into posing with each other for a photo for Mr McChatterson, and then after I was sick I came back and, despite looking sickly, was forced to pose individually for one with Chatty. I noticed he had taken photos of pratically every possible view out of the train window as we went along, and then I saw that he was zooming his lens in on a little girl, which I thought was pretty weird. Then he actually went over and told the girl's dad that he wanted to take photos of her, and the dad was like "yeah, sure, go ahead, why not take pictures of my young 7 year old daughter?" People here are clearly less suspicious and cynical than I am! Strange man, that Chatty McChatterson. He also told Liam in his rather broken English that we were "welcome to go to his home town, it's just a million kilometres north of Beijing." Liam struggled to keep a straight face. Our theory is that if you go north from Beijing and circle the earth for a million kilometres, you may well end up at his home town. That said, you're more likely to end up somewhere smack bang in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
At Datong we bought tickets for 81 yuan to Taiyuan for 11.30pm the next day, and then immediately found a hotel which was okay standard. I threw up on entering the bathroom and then lay down and fell asleep; I woke up now and then to vomit and then went back to sleep almost instantly. The next thing I really knew it was half eight and we'd missed a whole halfday's worth of tourism. I felt rather guilty for Liam's sake because he couldn't do anything with me like this, but I was so completely out of it! Liam and I officially went to bed at 9.40pm as we were both still so exhausted. During the night I didn't throw up at all which was a relief. Fin.

20th January 2008 // Day 6 // Datong (Shanxi) --> Taiyuan (Shanxi)

Today had to be comparatively better than the day before, regardless of what happened! It was a good day in its own right in the end anyway. We began the day at the healthy time of 9am and went out to find some caves. The reason we'd come to Datong was to see the famous Yunggang Grottoes. We also wanted to see the Hanging Temple but it turned out it was actually quite far from Datong (69km) and was not accessible right now because of the snow, so we had to give it a miss. We noticed a brown tourism sign pointing the way to the caves. We looked at a bus timetable but of course we didn't know what stop we were looking for so it was futile. As per usual, we jumped in a cab and asked the driver to take us to the bus stop for the caves. He of course offered to take us himself but we preferred the cheaper option and jumped on a number 3 at the recommended stop. Seconds later, three Americans also got on - our first white people on the whole trip! They said hi and were friendly but it feels somehow strange to be around white English speakers who understood our every word. We'd been hoping to not really run into any other foreign travellers until Beijing at the earliest.
The caves were reached through a long road basically in the middle of the nowhere but surrounded by the noted Datong coalmines. We got off, got 30 yuan student tickets and began touring the caves. The sculpting was magnificent, really mind-blowing, especially considering that it was so old and had stood the test of time. It was not only the technique but the pure spiritual devotion which most astounded me. I took photos which was apparently banned but I saw plenty of others doing it, so I kept my flash off and took the majority from outside the caves with the zoom on. We saw the caves very quickly and could surprisingly spot some of the stylistic changes through the ages (those caves took a long time to craft!) with the different influences on Chinese Buddhism, and while I don't doubt that it was only the glaringly obvious differences that we spotted, I think these days we are becoming quite the experts in sinicized Buddhism, considering the fact that before coming here I had never entered a Buddhist temple. I find it hard to believe that that was the case because I am now sick to the back teeth of them! But it's true.
Some of the statues were still in astoundingly good condition with the original paint still on. Others had discoloured, some had chips or cracks or slight erosion damage. The very worst weathered ones were barely recognizable, and some had been stolen. The biggest problem, though, was the soot damage; because the main thoroughfare for coal transportation had run close to the caves, the exposed parts of all the carvings were coated in a filthy layer of ebrasive soot, which presumably could not be safely/easily removed. The stark contrast between the non-polluted undersides showed us how the statues had looked in all their glory. A small museum showed us the measures that had been taken to prevent more damage - the main coal-ferrying road had been basically lifted up and moved much further away.
We caught a bus back to Datong and saw that we had plenty of time for more temples (at this point we still weren't too sick of them!) We didn't stop for any lunch because I wasn't eating and neither was Liam, so it seemed. Our first stop was Huayan Temple. We got a taxi - it was freezing! The driver informed us that there was in fact an upper and a lower temple. We started with the upper, which was 20 kuai entry and was an absolute rip-off. There was nothing of any interest to see, and no particularly spectacular scenery, views or architecture. After a mere 15 minutes or so, we meandered our way down to Huayan Lower Temple. This one was only 10 in, and was considerably better, including five museums about various seemingly unrelated artefacts and historic periods; interesting nevertheless. We left the temple and next found our own way (thanks to Liam's rather astounding navigational skills) to the Nine Dragon Screen. Thes were built for auspiciousness and this was the largest one in all of China. It was a huge greenish-black ornate wall carved with nine writhing dragons. 5 kuai to see and I think that's worth it, though my fingers nearly fell off from the cold changing my camera batteries. All for one final photo as well.
We had one final stop which was the Drum Tower. Not knowing what to expect, Liam and I got there and we found a tower on a large traffic island which was fairly pretty, though nothing special, and couldn't be entered, let alone climbed, to our disappointment.
Jumped in a cab and came back to the train station. Our train left for Taiyuan, at 11.30pm, and it was still only very early at 4.30pm. We found an internet cafe but it was full so we crossed the street to another (they really are everywhere here in China) where we whiled away four hours. Next we crossed back over the street and we went to Mr Lee's American Noodle chain, where Liam had a bowl of California beef noodles and my mouth watered in envy. At last we reclaimed our bags from the bag deposit and went to wait it out in the station. I labelled all my photos and then thought it was 15 minutes to the train's departure. I was wondering why there was no mad queuing and rush yet. At "11.20" with only 10 minutes to go I was about to say "what the hell is going on?" When I realised it was actually only 10.20. I slumped in frustration at having a whole nother hour to wait but Liam lent me his book Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (brilliant book, read it! And while you're at it, read his Nobel Prize-winning One Hundred Years of Solitude. Mind-blowingly good.). I was quite getting into it and was a bit annoyed when the train turned up!
The train journey was our second night train (the first being the horrific Baotou one), through the night from 11.30pm till 7am the next day, so I was glad we were fortuitous enough to get a sleeper. The sleeper was a hard one which means six metal bunks to a section, in two sets of three. Plus no compartment doors. Soft sleeper is four bunks to a section, compartment doors, slightly thicker I want to say mattress but I mean padded-with-straw sheet, with a lot more room and privacy. But a hard sleeper is more than acceptable; I mean yeah we only had like 2 inches of space, but we were perfectly comfortable! We were in adjoining top bunks (top bunks are cheaper!), which were nigh on impossible to get into for someone with such short legs as me - I know the Chinese in general have similar legs, but then most of them were trained from birth to be Olympic gymnasts, or so it seems - and it was most amusing to us to get up there and attempt to get settled in for the night without room to properly sit up. But once we were ready, it was quite cosy! But I had to be careful not to lift my head up too enthusiastically because I would bash it on the ceiling.
I had finally permitted myself food for the day, thinking the vomiting was finally done. In the station I had two dry 'French bread' (weird sweet sponge things, not French in any way and most certainly not bread), half an hour apart, because I thought I might faint! Really I should've waited to the next morning to be on the safe side and fulfill 48 hours but I had no ill effects and then the willpower caved in. On the train I was curled up snacking on Oreos and reading my book when the lights went out all of a sudden at midnight. Hugging my phone so I would definitely hear my 6.40am alarm, I settled down, and soon, surprisingly enough considering my environment and the amount of sleep I'd had already recently, I fell straight to sleep.