Rose Hotel Datong

... Buddha'd out. After a Mid-Autumn Day dinner at a nice restaurant, we ended the evening at UBC Coffee, an insanely high-priced western place where you are paying for the comfortable couches and the atmosphere. Still, the waitress had no idea what went into a margarita, so I had to ask her to guide me to the bar and have the bartender produce the bottles to be sure it wasn't something weird. It was the real deal, except for the fact that it was made with lemon, not lime juice. <br>

... work where rooms had been brutally wrenched apart. <br><br>When we eventually arrived at the hotel, we found that the area had suffered a power cut, which with hindsight could well have been predicted from the state of the power cables draped dangerously low across the road at the construction site, split open with bare wires exposed! This meant no lights in the pitch-black stairwells, no elevator to our 6th ...

... I mean I knew that China was a large producer of&#8230; well, everything&#8230; but I was not prepared to see what this had done to the landscape&#8230; not to mention the atmosphere. You can't appreciate it until you've seen it... there was a constant grey haze that lingered in the sky. The minute I got to China I found that my contact lenses bothered me from the dust and pollution.<br><br>During the journey I found myself being stared at constantly ...

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... which is a bargain. Now it may only have squat toilets, showers that are open at very odd times and beanbags for pillows, but we really can't complain too much. We went to the CITS man (tourist info) and booked some transport to the Yungang caves for the next day and asked him to look into getting us out of here as all the trains are booked up weeks in advance, can't imagine why! We went to somewhere for tea which was like ...

... got back in our rented car for the day (with a driver) and he took us about 40 more mile out of town to the Hanging Temple.  This temple was built by the Wei Dynasty again over 1,400 years ago.  It is a temple that was constructed on the side of a cliff.  The temple halls are carved in the rock face and are covered by wooden facades.  The facades are supported by very thin pillars balanced on ledges below.  And a series of bridges and walkways connect all of the different rooms and halls ...

... to a small museum they have made down there. It shows how coal mining techniques have improved over time, but the thing that was most interesting was just been in a real coal mine with real coal miners! That afternoon we got a bus to Henyuan. The hotel we stayed in felt like luxury after staying in hostels - clean ensuite bathroom, towels, and even little packets of toiletries for only slightly more than we were paying in Beijing. That evening ...

... school'. It is these areas I have so much fun in and find a trillion happy smiles! The children race around saying Hello Hello and are so full of questions. They jump from foot to foot eagerly trying to ask what they want to know. Most of the time the communication gap gets in the way and I curse myself for not knowing Mandarin but then I stop to remind myself that it is these same ...

... the ride! I visited another Hanging Monastery in Fujian Province several months ago and if I was to compare them both I think the one at Taining's 'Geo Park' in Fujian Province would win easily. Not only was it much higher on the cliff face but as it was in Fujian the surroundings were much more beautiful. Xuankong Si is found within the Jinlong Canyon built into ...

... what you have done with the place, I really do! I guess someone forgot to tell you, we are moving the capital to Louyang! So around AD494 hammers and chisels were put down and I'm sure many of those who had spent the last sixty years of their lives creating master pieces for the Emperor jumped off the same cliff face they had been ...