My last full day in China and one final stop along the Silk Road: some more Buddhist caves at Shuilian Dong!

Shuilian Dong, or the Water Curtain Caves (I like the Chinese name better), are about 20km outside the small town of Luomen.  I traveled from Tianshui yesterday afternoon through some beautiful countryside to get to Luomen.  It’s hilly (verging on mountainous) terrain, and every square foot has been terraced and irrigated for agriculture.  Not rice though – just not enough water around here and I reckon the sandy soil isn’t up to scratch – but corn, grains, and lots and lots of veggies.  They’re in the middle of the late summer harvest right now so there’s fresh food aplenty.  Yummo.

Luomen aint nothing spesh and I’d guess I was the only tourist in town.  I certainly didn’t meet anyone that spoke even a word of English past “hello” (not even the “English teacher” I met!).  But I was cool with that, in fact I’m pretty happy with my decision to avoid the Chinese cities as best I could and stick to rural town or regional centres instead.  These places are the “real” China after all.  The people in the towns I’ve stayed have been incredibly and surprisingly friendly, helpful and accomodating – and inquisitive.  The locals in Luomen were no different, and it was a nice place to finish my trip.

First thing this morning I got a taxi to drive me out to the caves.  I soon realized why the driver tried to bump the price so high: the road there had been well and truly washed away by what looked like a biblical-sized flood sometime not that long ago!  We drove along the riverbed for a few klicks, but in the end I had to walk the last couple through a pretty red sandstone canyon to get there.

Shuilian Dong is a mixed Taoist/Buddhist religious site nestled in the folds of a steep-sided valley.  It was an incredibly picturesque place with the mix of red sandstone outcrops, autumnal leaves changing colour and the brightly coloured temples and carvings.  The Taoist temple was wedged underneath a massive cliff overhang, and on the opposite side of the valley stood a 30m tall colourful carving of Buddha on the cliff wall, which dates from the 4th Century AD.  The scale of it was enormous!

    
Look at the scale of these carvings!!       Close-up of one.

These rock carvings don’t look all that impressive until you actually discover just how large they are!

I’ve made my way back west to Lanzhou this afternoon to finish my Silk Road trip and I fly out for Guangzhou tomorrow (and then by bus to Hong Kong).  Officially, and somewhat historically, the Silk Road did/should end at Xi’an.  I would like to have got there if not just for the symbolic act of “crossing the finish line”, and I had time as it turned out, but I already had this flight booked from when I first arrived in the country (and had to think ahead to where I might be in a couple of weeks).  Oh well, can’t have everything, right?

A few of you are surely going to ask me, but I really don’t know right now how I feel about finishing up my Silk Road trip.  Hmmm…  A bit of everything I guess!  Give me a few days to think about it in Hong Kong…

Nothing much to report today.  I had a look at a “famous” Taoist Temple in the city today, but didn’t think it was anything spesh.  I’m off to my last destination, Luomen, this afternoon, and have time to kill until then so I’m chilling in this internet cafe with about a thousand chain-smoking Chinese guys playing shoot-em-up network games or in chat rooms.  Aaaaah the wonders of the internet…

For “fun” I thought I’d list a few of the pet peeves that bug me about traveling in China:

• Spitting.  Ubiquitous, filthy, everywhere, everyone.  Yuk.
• Smoking.  Every guy I’ve seen smokes like a chimney, but it’s the guys having a sneaky fag on the “no smoking” buses that really piss me off.  And Chinese cigarettes reek.
• Pollution.  Like unleaded petrol exhaust was the smell of Iran, in China it’s definitely coal.  Whether I’m in the cities or in the countryside, it always stinks of coal.  You see piles of it everywhere, and it’s burnt in everything from people’s inefficient home-made stoves to the thousands of huge brick kilns that dot the countryside.  The result is a grey smoggy pall that hangs over most of China most of the year.  I hate to think of the greenhouse gas emissions.
• Noise.  Everywhere, 24/7.  One-cylinder put-put-put tractors, honking car and truck horns, construction equipment, and everyone speaking at volume 10.
• Toilets.  I’ve done a lot of traveling around the globe but China definitely takes the cake for having by far the worst toilet and bathroom standards anywhere in the world.  It’s gross enough to even make me gag, and that’s saying something…
• Split Pants.  Forget nappies, the Chinese just give young kids a pair of pants with no bum, so every kid’s arse is hanging out.  Parents train their kids at an early age to shit on demand – no shit!  With a “psssssss” sort of sound they can make the kid go wherever and whenever.  And I mean wherever – on pavements, in gutters, in corridors of buildings, I even had a mother next to me today on the bus holding her baby over the bin in the aisle to go.  Yuk-o.
• Lining Up.  Or should I say lack of.  They’re not big on queues for anything: ATMs, food, banks, tickets.  Train tickets are the worst.  It’s a real rugby scrum in there pushing for the window to secure a hard sleeper ticket on an overnight train, and even 10 years of playing rugby hasn’t trained me well for it.  But a 30kg backpack on my back does have its uses in clearing a crowd…
• Rushing.  I really don’t like – or understand – the go-go-go frenetic pace of Chinese life.  Even on a train with reserved seating, or boarding a plane, it’s a real “gotta be first, can’t be left behind” rush.
• Overcharging.  It’s got a lot better since I was here five years ago, but some people love to overcharge foreigners, and that really pisses me off.  Taxi drivers regularly charge double or more and hotels always add a bit.

Alright so maybe I’m being a bit harsh on the Chinese.  It’s definitely not all bad and the country does have its highlights.  But to appreciate China’s highlights, you’ve gotta put up with a fair bit of crap.  And that said, for a country this big, there’s a whole lotta nothing you need to get through for the few choice sights to see.

My two cents.

I was disappointed to leave Xiahe, but also excited at the realization that I only have a handful of days left before it’s all over.  I fly out from Lanzhou on the 15th for Hong Kong, where I’m going to chill (and stock up on yummy yum cha/dim sum) before I fly back to San Fran on the 18th.

I caught the 7:30am bus back to Lanzhou, getting there around lunchtime.  After being screwed around by a taxi driver (and short-changed by an Aussie union staffer I decided to share a taxi with, tight-arse…) I got from one bus terminal to another and jumped straight on a bus to Tianshui, my penultimate Silk Road destination, in eastern Gansu province.

On the bus I was befriended by a friendly young Chinese guy called William (his English name of course).  He wanted to practice his English so we had a chat about this and that.  When we arrived in Tianshui he was nice enough to check me into the hotel, saving me the extra 20 yuan I’d have to pay as a foreigner if I walked in myself.  He then offered to take me to his grandfather’s apartment for dinner with the family, which I gladly accepted.  After a superb dinner of home-made dumplings, and after meeting all of his lovely family, he topped the night off with an offer I couldn’t refuse – the chance to speak to his class at high school!  I’ve always wanted to do this on all my travels…  And last night was the night!

It was a great experience talking to the class.  I had about an hour with them and gave them a bit of my history, a bit of info about Australia etc., and then opened it up to Q&A.  It was all pretty kosher until the teacher left the room, and then the students really let fly with all the juicy bits of info they wanted to know: do I have a girlfriend, what music do I listen to, how much money does x and y cost, what do I think of China etc.  Actually that last one got me in a bit of trouble, as I was pretty truthful in my assessment and opinions of China.  I was in the middle of describing some of the differences between a democractic government and a communist regime when the teacher walked back in.  He gave me a dirty look and I was asked to leave sortly thereafter!  The kids loved it though…  🙂

The were great kids and I had a lot of fun with them, but the experience did leave me doubting the quality of Chinese education.  These guys were around 17 years old, and this is their last year of school before they hopefully go off to university, but rote learning methods (memorizing and regurgitating information on demand) were clearly de rigueur.  Get them thinking?  God forbid!  Their English was OK but their vocab severely limited – most didn’t know the word "China" in English, and even words describing their own country (like "communism") were beyond them. And for all those people fearing Chinese world domination, don’t.  It’s not their fault but these kiddies don’t know much about the world outside China (e.g. couldn’t find Europe on the map, had never heard of Britney Spears or U2, didn’t know what an iPod/mp3 player was) and weren’t at all up-to-speed with the internet and email.  But at the end of the day they’ve all got their big dreams, so good on them and good luck to them.

   
William and some of his family.             Say cheese!

All that fun aside, I came to Tianshui to see Maiji Shan, one of the four largest Buddhist cave groups in China (the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang are also on that list – so I can tick two off now!).  I caught the bus out there this morning, and after all the deserts and arid landscapes I’ve seen recently, the lush green forests and hills of the countryside out of the city were a welcome change.

Maiji Shan means Haystack Mountain, although I didn’t see the similarity in its shape when I saw it.  What’s amazing about the place is that there are hundreds of Buddhiust caves covering one side of the mountain, with most of them dating from around the 4th and 5th Centuries AD.  But how they ever constructed the caves I have no idea…  The caves are built into an overhanging cliff face, with the highest probably a good 200 vertical metres above the base of the cliff.  I learnt that the stone for the statues isn’t even from the local area and would have had to be brought there (the stone in the mountain is too soft to carve).

While the caves themselves weren’t anything near as spectacular and exquisite as those at Mogao, exploring the caves was infintely more exciting!  For once I didn’t need to take a tour and could roam the area by myself, and best of all I could snap pics along the way.  Yay!  Scaling the many stairs and platforms plastered to the overhanging cliff was definitely a little vertigo-inducing (and admittedly had me questioning Chinese engineering standards), but it was heaps of fun and a good way to spend a few hours.