Philip's log, stardate 0901 mark 07, to the nearest decimal place...So here we are, my first travel logue entry. We're in Datong right now, in a little net cafe near the train station. we arrived here at 10am this morning.
right first things first, ill tell you from the start - ok so we left Dalian on friday night. there were 7 of us in all - me, my brother alan, katie, kama, nate, bai ling (kama and nate's 4 (?) year old daughter) and gerhardt(?). we took the over night train to haerbin. that was pretty uneventful. myself, alan and katie had earlier gone to a korean barbeque restaurant near youhao guangchang to eat and drink a little to make the train ride smoother. it did the trick i think. on the train we had a couple more drinks courtesy of gerhardt and discussed politics of all things - you always know its going to be highly intellectual when everyone's been drinking. the hot topics were bush, iraq, israel,. you know the usual. anyway i had had enough after an hour or so, so i climbed up to my top bunk and fell asleep pretty fast. i woke to the sound of bai ling, (not that she was loud or anything), and found that i had slept most of the journey.
we arrived in haerbin at 7am and upon leaving the train station tried to locate someone to get us a hotel. now usually these people offering hotels are mobbing you around train stations but not today. maybe the snow had put them off but i doubt it. anyway we ended up in kfc eating an early morning chicken burger and consulting the lonely planet guide on where to go...we found a hotel with little or no trouble and checked in. nothing fancy, but cheap. oh and no showers. this was to be the first day of me and al's four day no shower trip (which just ended about an hour ago in datong).
so anyway back to haerbin, we did alot of walking and ice sculpture viewing. later that day after eating together, myself and al decided to trek across the now frozen haerbin river. its a fairly large river but completely frozen so safe to walk on. there were lots of people doing various ice sports on the river and they even had sleds pulled by dogs. on the other side there was a snow sculpture festival (they really milk the coldness they have here to the limit), and some russian style villages. however when we got there we decided not to go in due to monetary reasons. the reason being that i had none and al didnt think it was worth it. we debated whether to climb the small surrounding picket fence for awhile but decided against that too, i feared al would impale himself on it. anyway we hooked back up with the group at the ice festival. this was the main reason we came to haerbin. overall it was pretty good. they had all manner of things carved out of ice, including some randy pigs but i wont get into that here.
we didnt spend too long walking around because we were all really cold, it was dark at thius stage and really cold and our collective feet were freezing to the point of numbness. beer was calling so we located a local restaurant and ordered lots of food and got drunk on 1.5kuai haerbins or some other beer, cant quite recall.
after the rest had retired to bed me and al went to a roller skating disco style thing. which was a bit of a laugh.
ok next day, was pretty uneventful, we all went to see a big russian style church off one of the main streets. it was quite impressive and worth the visit. the group split again that day with me, al and katie heading inside the church into a museum and then onto some buddhist temples the highlight of which was a big 20 metre (?) high gold buddha. we all met back up later for dinner and drinks in a korean place. after that it was a mad dash to the train station in 2 separate taxis where we lost kama, nate, bai ling and gerhardt, and didnt see them again. we said goodbye to katie and went to get our bags from the bag place we left them earlier. after that it was our turn to catch our 10pm train and settle into the middle bunks.
so we arrived in shenyang the next morning at 5am with plans (and tickets
) to catch the 5pm train later that day to datong. upon exiting shenyang station (still dark) we spotted the golden arches nearby and made a bee-line for 'em. al needed his coffee fill (4 coffees to be exact - he really takes advantage of their refill service) and we ate some cold steamed buns (i cant remember the pinyin spelling) from the previous day. anyway we spent about an hour and a half in mcds and after having stowed our bags away in a bag depository at the train station we headed for the park and the north tombs. the park was a nice gettaway from the dirty and car-crowded streets. full of people doing early morning exercises, dancing, kung fu, tai chi, that hake sak sport. we even joined in on a big group of dancers which was fun and kept me surprisingly warm. i got a good video of al doing his thing. the north tombs are where some old chinese guy is buried and was basically a mini forbidden city. it was well worth the visit as it was practically just ourselves and very peaceful and nice architecture etc.
after that we did some exploring around the city, the shopping areas and some other not too exciting places. we ran a little low on time and were lucky to catch our train but we made it and now here we are in datong. (i forgot to mention the nice old guy who gave us a big piece of sweet bread when we handed in our bags to storafe - what a nice old guy).
so datong, after a mammoth 15 hour journey we arrived at 10am this morning, got sorted in a hotel and headed for the yungang caves. these are basically lots of little enclaves with buddha statues ranging from 1 foot to 20 metres tall in them. good place which ill tell you more about later. k gotta go,.
take it easy
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