Secondly, and more importantly, Maya and I got back from Datong Thursday night, and it was an eventful trip...though it actually started out rather blase: After 3 overnight hard-sleeper trains, the 7-hour ride from Beijing to Datong was totally same-old same-old to us and we sat around, with the locals, feeling bored and, disturbingly, somewhat at home. There were two German or Austria guys in the bunk area next to us, and it was clearly their first hard-sleeper experience as they bumbled around, unsure of their bunks or where to put their luggage or how to deal with all the Chinese people bustling around them. We must have had the air of pros, because they almost immediately started asking us for advice; Maya was eager to dispense her recently acquired wisdom, and when we went to bed an hour or so later, we lay down feeling pretty fucking cool, and with a real sense of how far we've come since our first hard-sleeper ride. That didn't mean we got any sleep - both of us tossed and turned all night - but it still felt good.
Datong, when we finally arrived at 6:30am or so, was not nearly as apocalyptically polluted as we had expected - and we were actually kind of disappointed. It was a proper shithole though, especially considering that it is supposedly one of China's top 3 tourist-destination cities. Sketchy-looking dudes smoking cigarettes paced around the square, and all the dirty shops on the streets around seemed to have a sad, scuzzy little cat tied by a string around its neck to the front door, presumably to deal with an epidemic mouse problem.
We found a relatviely cheap hotel close to the station that let us check in despite the early hour and that seemed spotlessly clean. There was a catch, of course: as soon as we lay down to try and catch a quick nap before taking off on our 9am tour to the nearby sites, we discovered that our room was retardly loud: the nearby trains blared their horns every 5 minutes or so, workmen started drilling and arguing (or just chatting - Chinese people basically always sound like they're fighting even when they're having a totally friendly conversation), and there was a weird office of some sort right across the hall with its door open and two men and a woman working noisily at a desk inside, the phone ringing every 10 minutes or so.
Feeling more exhausted than before, we walked back to the station to meet up with our tour. There, we and maybe 14 other backpackers from around the globe were crammed into a tiny van - everytime it seemed like the vehicle had been packed to capacity, progressively tinier new seats were mysteriously folded out of some hiding place; by the time we hit the road, we were all jammed in like sardines.
We drove through Datong, where we passed everything from fancy-as-fuck hotels to craggly old peasants leading mule-drawn carts overloaded with teetering towers of scrap metal, often on the same block. Once out of town, we wound by tiny potato- and corn-farm towns that were basically just rubble: as Maya put it, "At first you think it's a pile of rocks, then you realize you're looking at a town." The landscape reminded us of the America Southwest - all vast plains cast in the shadow of distant mountain ranges and split by narrow canyons. Perhaps what amazed Maya and I the most was that those canyons were riddled with the openings of clearly man-made cave dwellings, many of which looked like they were in better, more lived-in shape than the stone shacks around.
As surreal as the ride to them was, the sites turned out to be fucking mindblowing. Here are some photos (which, of course, don't do the places justice): First up, the hanging monastery, which, as the name suggests, literally hangs high on a cliff face.
Then, the Yungang grottoes, where a seemingly endless number of caves have been cut into a cliff face and ridiculously detailed and, in some cases, massive Buddhist statues carved inside.
When we returned to Datong around 5pm, we ended up having dinner with a few of our fellow backpackers: a Danish dude studying engineering at Beijing University, and two women who were, well, fucking insane, but in a good way. The first, an Irish woman, had just been teaching English in Mongolia, living in a yurt for 2 months. She's currently traveling China on the way to her next gig - teaching English in Laos. Over dinner she revealed to us that before Mongolia she hadn't really traveled outside of Ireland or even her town in Ireland. When Maya asked her how she dealt with having no electricity and outdoor, hole-in-tundra bathrooms, she explained that it really wasn't that different than her house in Ireland, which she had built herself out of mud and lyme, powered by solar panels, and with a compost toilet! Everyone at the table was astounded. The other woman was Austrian, and she had been all around the world many times over already (everywhere but Africa, it seemed) - she would work (also teaching) at home for a year, then take a year off to travel. We picked her brain about Southeast Asia, where she had been many times, and she would say, in a thick accent, that every place there was "easy, very easy," before eventually adding that things could occasionally get "tricky," like when she was motorbiking around Nothern Vietnam and the locals would knife her tires! Tricky, indeed. Hanging out with these crazy women and many of the other backpackers and ex-pats we've met so far, Maya and I have sometimes felt like we're joining a club that we're not sure we're prepared to be part of. Or that we necessarily want to be part of, to be honest. But only time and experience will tell.
The restaurant we were eating at was a local hole-in-the-wall, staffed - as all such places in China seem to be - by young kids: in this case, dirty-faced boys who looked all of 12. They were facinated by us, and we were fascinated by the bill, which, though the five of us had gorged on a virtual banquet and downed at least 10 4os of beer, cost all of 122 yuan - or less than $20 total!
The next morning Maya and I took the bus back to Beijing, which was purported to take only 4 hours. They played kung fu movies on the TV monitor upfront for the entire ride, which was awesome, as was the landscape that we passed - majestic mountains, rolling dunes, and serpentine canyons speckled with those same strange cave dwellings, numerous stone towns, and ominous factories pumping bizarre technicolor smoke into the sky. The traffic around us was mostly huge, delapidated cargo trucks, some carrying double-decker loads of cows and sheep all jammed in together till they were literally on top of each other. When, just an hour outside of Beijing, we hit a total bumper-to-bumper jam-up, most of the drivers stepped out of their vehicles to gossip and try and catch a peek ahead of what was causing the delay. Maya caught an unfortunate glimpse of one driver who had stepped out and was squatting at the side of the road, in clear view of everyone, presumably to take a shit. Peasants, meanwhile, appeared out of nowhere, having somehow sensed the traffic jam, weaved between the vehicles, selling bags of berries. The ride back to Beijing ended up taking about 6 hours instead of the promised 4, but we weren't surprised. I think Maya and I have finally come close to Eveline's philosophical outlook on living in China - shit is gonna take longer and be more complicated than it should, so just stay cool, be patient, and enjoy the ride.
1 comment:
China is sold to us now for sure. The hanging monastery is awesome. I can't wait to see them in person.
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