The road to Xi'an...

We left you guys in Xinzhou, if I remember...the wind was blowing something fierce and it started to rain. Well it rained the next day, too and we decided that it was too cold, combined with the wet, for us to ride and maintain our good health....and we definitely didn't want to be riding in the spray from the trucks (lord knows what's in the dust on the road!). The road to Taiyuan was a red road on my map and we have been riding green roads, which are smaller, and they are plenty big enough! The smallest roads are white roads and the one that we took was dirt, so that tells you about the hierarchy of roads in China (the highest level is the expressways and no bicycles are allowed).

So we walked down to the bus station, not even 250 meters from the hotel, and asked about a bus to Taiyuan and it's ability to carry big luggage, namely a couple of bicycles :) We got the message across but all we got was a lot of head shaking. At this point we had no experience with bikes on buses, so we just had to accept it, luckily one guy piped in that he is a taxi driver and he would take us and the bicycles in his van for a fee (this was not a setup, he was just being helpful - it was a Sunday and he just happened to be standing with the group of uniformed people that we were asking). That sounded good....so we did our bit of negotiating - where, when and how much - with a young guy popping in to help with some translation right at the end and we were soon packed up and heading out of town in the pouring rain.

We were cruising on the expressway - our first experience with one (not counting the quick trip to the Trek office in Beijing) and it was a nice road - big and modern and fast. Taiyuan is about 70kms from Xinzhou so A made the best of it and practiced some of her Mandarin on the driver :). We had told the driver we wanted to go to the center of town to a particular hotel that was listed in the Rough Guide....well, the hotel was in the midst of major renovation and was not open, that was a bit of a bummer. So we were looking for alternatives and A told him, in Mandarin, that we were looking for a binguan (nice hotel) but inexpensive and he was really helpful in making suggestions as he could read the signs (there are many levels of hotel and they are indicated by name, not unlike the way they do it in the US with hotel, motel, inn, B&B, etc.). We ended up at the Railway Hotel and the driver helped us unload and then he was off, a nice bit of work on a Sunday for him :)

They hotel was decent enough...one of those where you don't get your own key, you have to ask the floor lady to open your door and also ask for a flask of boiling water (some places we get our own electric kettle). The doorman took one of the bikes and led me around back to a bike barn where we could safely store the bikes for 1 yuan a day. Then we went in search of the CTS to see if we could arrange a day trip to Pingyao (an ancient walled city with a temple outside town) and see about a bus to Louyang. It was still raining but that was no problem. We walked what seemed like miles looking for the office and then after not finding it, we went into what looked like the closest option. We were told to wait, asked about 3 times about a tour to Pingyao :) and then the English speaker arrived to help us out.

The young woman was very helpful and though she didn't book any tickets for us we didn't book a tour with her either (we found out just at the end that she was a tour guide). She took us across the way to another travel office and had the other women there calling and finding out schedules for the buses and trains and she told us that we would need to get the train in the morning but a bus back in the afternoon, as there were no trains back, and how much they would cost and she even wrote out in Mandarin a message to the ticket seller at the train station exactly what we wanted (2 tickets to Pingyao on this date at this time, etc.). Then she looked into the information about the buses to Louyang and helped us with that and told us to call her the next day and she would be able to tell us when the buses were leaving. This may not sound like much, but this is incredibly helpful - the queues at the train ticket windows are very busy and there are 3 bus stations in Taiyuan and she told us where we needed to be, where we would arrive, where we needed to leave from, etc. And she did it for free, including calling us that evening to make sure that we got the train tickets without a problem and to let us know the weather for the next day!

This was our day of incredibly helpful people - not only did the guy offer us his door to door taxi service for us and all our stuff, he did so at a reasonable price (we know how much it is to get the 15kms in from the airport in Taiyuan and we came 5 times that distance for considerably less than 5 times the price) and the travel agent woman was really helpful, but on top of that we also had some help at the train station when we bought our ticket to Pingyao. When we got to the train station later that evening it was not clear which window we needed to go to for our ticket, so I asked one of the police officers that were standing around (this is China....police officers are never far away :) which window for this and I handed her the slip of paper that the travel agent had written the instructions on. The police woman smiled and said she can help and walked right up to the window (cutting in the front) and held the paper up to the window for the ticket agent to read. She came back and asked us what class we wanted to travel in (soft seat) and went back. She then came back and sit it was 13 yuan a ticket so I gave her 26 yuan and she went off and returned with our train tickets in minutes - we spent less than 5 minutes at the train station! We are still amazed at the helpfulness of people!

Ok, so the rest of the journey is not so exciting...the next morning we caught the train to Pingyao. We shared our seating area with a pair of grandparents, a mother and about a 5 or 6 year old wild child :) The kid ate constantly - meat sticks (more on this later :), chocolate, chips/crisps, soda, etc. and she was buzzing and yet they continued to let her eat. It was entertaining to watch...and a bit painful, too :)

We arrived on schedule and since we needed the loo we used the one on the station...our mistake, it was pretty foul, the worst we have used in India or China! Oh well. We made our way into town and discovered, much to my dismay, that they had changed the entry requirements and you had to pay a huge entry fee just to get into town and not just for the tourist sights. No surprise, it is an incredibly steep fee (120 yuan) and people were probably just walking around town and not paying to see the individual sights (which I wasn't rating anyway - the first bank in China, circa 1860, is not a must see). We painfully decided to give it a miss as what I really wanted to see was the Shuanglin Si, the Buddhist temple about 5kms out of town, which houses some pretty spectacular sculpture from the Ming Dynasty. The only problem with the town being accessed on a fee basis was that the bike rental place was in town!!!! We were going to rent bikes and ride out to the temple. We decided to hoof it and that was a bit of an adventure on it's own :)

The Shuanglin Si was definitely worth the trip! It's a pretty small temple and we practically had the place to ourselves. You will have to imagine it, as there were no photos allowed of the beautiful sculptures and when we had a camera out in the first building of the temple the guy came over the loud speaker and told us "no photos, ok?" :) It was a bit creepy, but funny, too. We have photos...just not of the best that there was to see - the sculptures themselves! We have a book, so if I can't find any on the web then we will have to take pictures of the book :) It is supposedly part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site that is Pingyao, but the Rough Guide didn't even mention it was a WHS and it was made one in 1997....go figure. More news as I find it, but we are busy sorting pictures at the moment so I don't have time to look. The bus trip back was uneventful and the next day we got a bus to Louyang and we got the bikes bagged and under the bus without a problem and without extra cost.

The ride to Louyang was interesting to say the least....even the bathroom breaks were amusing - roadside toilets are efficient and not entirely unpleasant....taken in the context that it could be a lot worse :) As for how the bus system operates? We have no idea what goes on, but it appears to us that the bus drivers load up at the bus station and depart with the ticketed passengers and then they pick up passengers that flag the bus down and make a bit of cash on the side. There are checks along the way, but just a count of passengers, no one checked tickets. There is a driver and a second employee on the bus and it's the second guy that comes back through the bus and asks the new arrivals for cash - he does not give them a ticket or receipt in return. The ride was long - 8 hours - and only the first half was on the expressway, the second half was on the secondary roads where they really started trolling for extra passengers/cash.

The best thing about the entire bus ride (besides that A's travel bands work a treat and she doesn't get motion sickness :) was descending the final gorge before hitting Louyang - wow! It was so tight and twisty and we dropped really fast - 1000 meters total. There was just a trickle of water in the river (the Chinese are building dams everywhere), but you could see how the water had carved out this huge canyon - the walls rose at least 500 meters above the road and we couldn't see the afternoon sun until we got out because it didn't reach the bottom of the canyon! We would have taken some photos, but the bus windows were not exactly clean... :)

We came to Louyang to see the Longmen Caves - this is where the Buddhist carvers moved when they left the Yungang caves in Datong in 450 AD. It's not to say that we were disappointed....but the Yungang caves were much more impressive. Besides a few really wonderful sculptures that are left, Longmen is basically a bunch of carved niches that used to have sculptures in them - most of them have been stolen, damaged or destroyed over the years. It's pretty amazing to see the holes from across the river - the hillside is like Swiss cheese - but that is about it. I personally think they should hype Yungang a bit more and Longmen a bit less....and Longmen is so overdeveloped tourism wise it's pretty scary - it's on steroids! We shared Yungang with *maybe* 50 other tourists, we shared Longmen with over 1000 other tourists. We were definitely thinking Disney when we were there. That said, the ride out was lovely and the ride back was a zoomer with the tailwind :) We again stayed in the Railway Hotel and ate some delicious vegetarian food that miraculously didn't have any meat in it (imagine that! :). The next day we had an even more Disney-esque experience when we joined a Chinese tour bus to see Song Shan, the Shaolin Si and a few other temples.

I need to run, but I will tell you about our visit to the even more touristy Shaolin Si and the bus ride to Xi'an....Later!!!!