Nighttraining through Northern China
Trip Start
Feb 29, 2004
1
22
33
Trip End
Nov 24, 2004
Xian,
China
Monday, September 13, 2004
LAOYANG
Although my next planned destination was Xian with its famous terracotta warriors, all flights from Kunming to Xian were booked for the next days, so I glanced at the map and opted for an early morning flight to the unassuming city of Laoyang, a couple of hours drive east of Xian.
On arrival, the pocket-sized airport was empty except for the woman who checks that you only take your own luggage out and who locks the doors behind you when you leave the building. We were on the only flight arriving that day. I dumped my luggage at the train station and hopped on the bus to the city limits (passing a very weird concrete-turreted Disney castle on the way) to reach the Unesco-listed Laoyang Buddhist caves.
On both sides of a small river gorge, thousands of Buddha images have been hacked out of man-made caves or grottoes, starting back in the fourth century. It was raining softly when I arrived - perfect weather for touring sights in China, as the CMT (Chinese Mass Tourist) hates rain because it messes up his family photograph album. The car park was nearly empty.
To get to the caves from the bus stop in the first place was another adventure that confirms the CMT mindset. This country is so geared to group travel that on disembarking from the public bus, it's completely unclear to the individual traveller where the ticket office and caves actually are. As usual, signs and site maps are absent; only the bus parking lot and the tourist stalls are indicated on signs. The Chinese have constructed the tourist village around the caves to maximum effect - the stalls and restaurant buildings cover an area larger than the whole gorge (and that's not even counting the car and bus parking lot).
After having walked 500m, refusing dozens of offers of bottles of water and lunch and film rolls (and still with no gorge in sight), I came to an official-looking woman under an umbrella with a stack of tickets. She pointed at a golf cart with an eager driver when I asked about the whereabouts of the elusive caves. Ten yuan please. Me walkie walkie, no geriatric golfo cartie for me, missus. Only then did she point out the footpath leading 500m across a muddy new park to the entrance. It makes you wonder if the Unesco officials ever get to see all this. They surely must visit every now and then to check if the Chinese haven't replaced the statues with Coke vending machines? I assume they get whisked straight to the main gate. Maybe I should suggest they send some scouts out now and then to see what normal visitors experience. I'll be glad to volunteer.
Once safely inside the gorge, I viewed the sometimes huge, sometimes tiny caves filled with up to ten thousand centimetre-high images of sitting Buddhas. The largest was a towering 20m statue of a sedate-looking Buddha (he didn't have to walk here through touristville) flanked by amazing statues of disciples and princesses. Unfortunately many of the statues and images have been damaged over the centuries by the weather, souvenir-hunters and Chinese revolutionaries. Still pretty impressive though.
XIAN
After I was really unable to find out if/when there was any train to Xian that afternoon - with the staff not even trying to understand what I wanted (not made easy by the weird pronounciation of the word Xian), I just went to the bus station next door and caught the first bus out to Xian instead; just find the bus and pay on board, no pesky counter staff involved. Five hours of smooth driving along even more perfect highways later, I arrived in the big city.
Checking into the only central budget hotel, I took a nice, more expensive room, only to discover later that it's on top of the basement bar which offers drunk guests the chance to have a go at playing drums or trumpet or keyboards until about 04:00 every night. I complained the next day and the day after, but no actions was taken of course, though I did see the staff feeling bad about it, which was enough for me.
Xian is firmly on the itinerary of most visitors to China. It's a big place with a handful of sights, not too far from Beijing, and most of all because it's near to the Unesco-listed Terracotta Army. You must have seen pictures of it: a big hall with row upon row of clay warriors. It was discovered by a peasant in the 1970s and has been under excavation ever since. If you've seen the warrior pictures before, I can advise you not to visit Xian on your China trip. Although impressive enough, I found the visit strangely bland. After the huge tourist circus around the site has you numbed up, the fact that the whole thing looks *exactly* like what you would expect judging from the photos you've seen before, made me wonder why I came in the first place.
Sure, it's unique and impressive, but in the third of the three big halls covering the trenches of soldiers, I was somehow more interested in the engineering of the roof construction than the shards of soldiers in the pit below. It seems that the expectations raised by the information I got beforehand about the Warriors (the most visited Chinese sight after the Wall and the Forbidden City) were cranked up too high. But here's the dilemma for the Average Tourist... you can either visit such a well-known sight and perhaps regret it a bit, or else skip it and face eternal doubts about whether a visit might have been worthwhile (not forgetting the number of times you'd have to explain at family parties that yes, you visited China for a long period, but no, you didn't see the damn Warriors). It's like the select club of people using the India forum website indiamike.com, who are proudly counting the number of times they have visited India *without* seeing the Taj Mahal.
(start of rantologue)
As this is China, the Warriors complex is very much geared towards group visits. Commendingly, Xian does have a special bus service, but of course this dumps you on a dusty car park with no indication of where exactly the halls of Warriors might be. You walk through a large temporary tourist market (all selling miniature to life-sized copies of the warriors, so now you also know what they look like in 3D before you even entered the halls), then past a gate where several stalls of bored-looking tour guides try to get yout custom (still no signs at all where the ticket office or the halls are) and then through a landscaped park with pines to (tadaa!) the entrance. At 90 yuan, it's an expensive place to visit, but it's comforting that at least the Chinese tourists get fleeced as much as we do. The ticket is a card with a magnetic strip that opens an automatic turnstile, but to keep employment figures up, there are helpers at hand to push the card into the machine for you. Once inside, you're on a wide expanse with the three big halls in front of you and another building to the right - with no indication at all as to where you're supposed/recommended to go first.
You may think I'm whining about it all, but I think I'm not just pointing out the flaws of the museum, but rather the effects of years of extreme, centralised rule on the thinking of the Chinese. I think the point I'm trying to make is that the Chinese have been forced into a certain pattern of thinking for so long - and punished severely for deviating from the desired thought patterns - that it has shaped the country to a great degree... in a way that strikes discord with my individualised way of seeing and arranging things.
The written information about the warriors is poor - there are only a few statues that you can view, properly lighted, from nearby, and for the most part a good explanation of what you're looking at is absent. It's only when I was messing around with an interactive display thingy hidden in a corner that I learnt that *all* the statues were painstakingly pieced together and 'repaired where necessary' over the past 30 years. They might all be plastic for all we know.
(end of rantologue)
The first hall holds the prize exhibition - dozens of rows of ceramic soldiers in the original pits that they were burried in, hundreds of years ago. All different, they face the tomb of the emperor who commissioned them made. Every one of them is unique, and there are ranks of different brigades and platoons, with different postures, clothing and weapons. In between the ranks, sets of clay horses pulling disintegrated wooden carriages. More to the back the trenches are filled with heaps of fragments, the remains of the statues that were crushed when the wooden roofs of the trenches they were buried in collapsed over time. In the second and third halls, more excavations, shards and half-collapsed trenches that yet have to reveal the soldiers buried beneath. Thirty years after discovery, you'd think they'd have uncovered more than the few trenches that we saw opened up, but maybe they're waiting. It's the eternal dilemma of archeology - the very act of digging something up to see what it is always destroys valuable information, making the decision to postpone excavation awaiting better techniques quite logical.
Xian itself is another huge Chinese city with lots of traffic, wide roads and new buildings, but with a massive city wall (20m high and wide) nearly all the way round the huge centre. Opposite the train station, where in the past the wall has been knocked down to provide easier access to the city, they're rebuilding it, and you can see a cross-section of the new wall, which is a hollow steel-supported version, with stones glued to the outside. It won't surprise me if the interior will be a shopping complex selling terracotta warrior alarm clocks.
The best thing about Xian (maybe the only really attractive thing) is the ancient mosque in the centre of town. Built in the style of Chinese temples - a series of courtyards in a straight line leading to the main building - it's an oasis of quiet and the buildings and arches are beautifully carved. Somehow, the complex and the practice of Islam survived the Red Guard brutalities. We witnessed the mullah in the pagoda-shaped minaret call the faithful to prayer, who came scurrying from all corners of the surrounding muslim area.
PINGYAO
More or less halfway between Xian and Beijing lies a town that for some reason most travellers in China skip - they take the nighttrain straight through it, zipping from big city to big city. That's a pity, because in retrospect, Unesco-listed Pingyao is the nicest place I visited in China. And I was in good company too; the hostel that booked the train ticket booked me in a compartiment with two great English girls, Ruth and Claire, with who I ended up travelling on to Datong and Beijing.
If you have seen the 1991 Zhang Yimou film 'Raise the Red Lantern', you'll have a clue what Pingyao houses look like. No skyscrapers or multiple lanes of gnarling gridlocked traffic here, but a lowrise, unscathed town centre ringed by a long mud-and-stone city wall. Houses are red-brick-built and dusty, often seperated by high walls. The streets are void of traffic except for pedestrians and old men on squeaky bikes. Many of the houses are original 16th-19th century family mansions, with several courtyards behind the main gate. A few of them can be visited (and some are now nice cheap hotels), and on an (expensive) ticket you can 'do' Pingyao's walls, houses and temples in a day or two, at a fairly relaxed pace.
At night, in some streets the red lanterns hanging from nearly every house outnumber other lights. In the centre there are no restaurants other than local ones, no big hotels, no bars, no discos and all is quiet by 22:00. Outside the city walls near the station there's an attempt to create a dull modern Chinese centre, but it hasn't encroached on the pretty spots yet. Bliss.
We wandered around the old town and across part of the walls peering down into the dusty courtyards. We ate the local speciality, dried beef (which tasted just like corned beef) in a restaurant that also had dog and donkey on the menu. We rented bicycles and pedalled 5km out of town to see a fortified Buddhist temple with amazing wooden statues that had survived the Cultural revolution because the caretaker locked the high temple gates and risked his life defending the buildings. We cycled back on dustroads between flat cornfields with polar trees, a landscape reminding of Holland or Belgium. Then we had more of that great food. Ah, the food, the food.
DATONG
North of Pingyao, in China's less attractive coal-mining area, Datong is an unassuming city with no real sights. But hop on the local tourist office's daytrip bus and you'll be shown China's best Buddhist cave complex and the quirky Hanging Temple and stuffed with a huge lunch, for just 220 yuan.
After travelling independently for a while, you get used to getting into action immediately after arriving somewhere new. You constantly have to make decisions; which hotel do I head for, where the hell am I on the map and which way do I hold it, do I trust this taxi driver, etc etc. You're always busy. When all of a sudden decisions get made for you, it has an immensly soothing effect, and slightly unsettling too as you have had no insight into the choices that were made to arrive at this decision. It's time to let go of your anxieties in that case, and go with the flow. Like a dead fish. Today was one of those days.
Ruth and Claire were on a different train, arriving in Datong much earlier than I, so they had scouted the options and practicalities while I was still in dreamland somewhere down the line. I emerged from the train at 07:30 to be greeted by the girls, who energetically whisked me to the baggage office, told me what it costs and when it closes, then dragged my sleeping body to a bench in the information office where the bus ticket and the onward nighttrain to Beijing had already been arranged - all I needed to do was grab my wallet (a recurring theme when it comes to women).
The tourguide in our bus enthusiastically babbled about the wonderful facts that make Datong the 'number one tourism city in China': the muddy remains of a half-bulldozed city wall; a rebuilt pagoda, now marooned on a traffic island, circled by traffic and closed for tourists; and a large dragon mural made of tiles and utterly fascinating for at least three seconds. We soon arrived at the caves outside town however, which were marvellous. Hacked out of a cliff since the fourth century, about fifty artificial caves held hundreds of Buddha images, from tiny to one twenty metres high. Amazingly well preserved, some even still had remains of the original paint on the murals. More beautiful and much better cared for - and signposted - than the caves in Laoyang, this was a great experience.
The afternoon was spent driving across a plain with deep red ravines to a 2000m-high mountain range where the Hanging Temple can be found. To protect it from the wild river below and from people who liked to burn temples, this one was somehow glued halfway up a cliff, 50m above the ground. Half built in man-made caves and half supported on wooden stakes sticking out of the rocks, the cute monastery has a few small rooms dedicated to a mish-mash of deities from three religions (Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism), a religion I'd like to christen Confusionism. Nice, but more interesting than the visit was the lunch we had at a dodgy-looking tourist restaurant beforehand. Seated at a high table, our group of about eight foreigners got perhaps 20 different dishes of vegetables, meat, eggs, rice, noodles, dumplings and fruit. Delicious, one of the best meals I had in China. The food, the food.
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Next up: Beijing days
Sign of the Day: 'The tartness can't be protruded out of the staircase' (sign warning you not to lean too far over the railing of the ian subway escalator). This one is a winner.
Currently reading: 'Everything is Illuminated' by Jonathan Foer. A hilarious, tragicomic book about an American writer looking for his Jewish roots in rural Ukraine, and his polemic with his local guide, Alex. You should all read this one.
Stomach status: doesn't want to leave China, ever.
