Datong and our first day of cycle touring :)

First, you guys should know that we can't actually *see* the blog, but we are hoping you can :). We could see it from the internet in the hotel in Beijing, but not the internet cafe in Beijing. It was the same in Hong Kong (we could see it in the hotel, but not the inet cafe). We can't see the blog but we can use blogger....we think it's the filtering done by the ISPs in China to comply with "government regulations" :)

On to cycling!!! Yesterday after we got back to the hotel (from chatting with you guys on the blog :) we were so beat! There had been so much excitement and anexiety from the minute we woke up that we were crispy fried. It was all good stuff - there was so much that could have gone wrong and it didn't...but it could have :). I know I was asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow.

I was awake bright and early this morning, well rested and ready to ride! I even had coffee made for A before she was even awake! She was not amused by my wakefulness and she sent me off to the shower as she grabbed another half hour of sleep (and peace and quiet :) After a very strange breakfast - a variety of local specialties provided by the hotel (*) - we headed over to the CITS to see about picking up a great map of the area that I had read about in the book and to see about where we might see a bit of the Great Wall and also to ask about booking some of the hotels for the next few days.

We don't know what it's going to be like out on these roads, so it's best to know where we are staying and not have to try to communicate (difficult sometimes even when we are at our best :) when we are so knackered all we want to do is collapse :):):) Also, it's Easter weekend (Happy Easter!!!!). As it turned out, it was a good thing we did book as the guy had to call around to several places to find us something (anything! :) in Heng Shan - there are some weddings going on apparently. He has booked our first three stops, so we are sorted until Wutai Shan.....we just have to get there :) Oh...that 'great map' is no better than my maps, so I gave it a miss...and the Great Wall is fairly close by, but it's not as great as it is over near Beijing...so we are going to give it a miss :( I know!!! It was a hard decision to make. We should have done it from Beijing but we just didn't fit it in - there is so much to see there even when tons of stuff is closed for renovations. Oh well... we want to come back to China anyway (via the Trans Siberian train :) so we will just have to be patient. After CITS (that is the gov't travel service especially there to help foreign tourists), it was time to head for the caves at Yungang!

It was looking like a lovely sunny day, the wind was too bad...I consulted the map and we were heading out. Once we found our way through town, past the Drum Tower and Hongqi Square, things were well signposted for the caves...and, oh well, we had a headwind but we were still up for riding :) The scenery was interesting and depressing at the same time. A will have more in her descriptions, but basically I was feeling really ill about what we were seeing - black streams, a huge coal mine surrounded by the city of workers that make it operate (which made me think of the movie "The Matrix" where people are just fodder for the big machine...what would it be like to be a kid in that city???), the dust, the smell of burning coal and the clouds of diesel smoke from the bus traffic clogging our lungs...ugh. The houses on the sides of the roads looked abandonded...but they probably weren't.

The coal mine is only 1 km from the caves!!!! One nice thing we learned at the caves is that they re-routed the road that the coal trucks take because of the damage the coal dust was causing. That is a very good thing :) We saw the before pictures and the caves now and it is working quite well. On to the caves!

I was pretty excited about these caves because of their historical connection with India and I wasn't disappointed! The caves and sculptures are very different, but no less amazing. I was again wowed. Check them out here:
UNESCO World Heritage Site
China.com

Oh, and we have photos for you :)

Must go!!!! Time has run out! Later!

(*) breakfast consisted of:
-> a bowl of very thin rice porrige - which A liked and I found extremely tasteless and not worth eating.
-> steamed bread balls (like Tibetan Tingmo bread) and fried bread - I liked the steamed bread but the fried was too greasy for me, A ate some of both.
-> boiled eggs - neither of us had eggs as they did not look great (cracks with dried up yolk that had leaked out crusted on the side)
-> a selection of three kinds of pickled vegetables - we liked all of them! :) One was pickled onion with chili, another was pickled chopped celery and the third was pickled chopped greens with some light colored beans and a few other things (it was the saltiest of the three)

P.S. I have been drinking dark beer (something I haven't done since I left the UK!!!) I had 3 beers, one was a Japanese black beer and it was ok, but these 2 were way more interesting! TsingTao Dark and a Romanian one. Later!!!