Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Datong

My friend Molly was making plans for me while I was hanging out with my parents. For a change, I did not plan the weekend trip, and she arranged for Jon, Aaron, and I to come with her to Datong for a day. We took the overnight train there, and an overnight train back to Beijing the next night.

We arrived at 6 am and visited CITS, one of the best Chinese tourist agencies, to pick up our return tickets for that night. The man who worked there offered us a 100 Yuan tour to both of the places we had planned to visit, which would take care of transportation at less than the cost it would have taken us to get to the two locations on our own.


The downside to the tour, which lasted all day, was that our tour guide sounded like she learned English from an answering machine, and a broken one at that. Luckily there were other people on the tour, so we were able to slip away and explore things on our own.

The first place we visited was the Hanging Temple, which is about 75 km south of Datong. The Temple was built over a river that was continuously flooding and destroying crops and livestock. Huge spikes were driven into the cliff to support a temple being built against the cliff face. The temple was very interesting, and while walking on the rickety walkways and starting down at the drop below me, I could imagine it was very difficult to be a monk there. At first, the temple was built just on the side of the river, but as the river continued to flood higher and higher every year, the monks moved the temple up higher and higher along the cliff face. Now there is a dam that keeps the river from running under the temple anymore, but churning waters below a rickety temple would certainly make it an unnerving place to live and worship.

After the Hanging Temple, we traveled to the Yungang Caves, which are a set of grottoes that were built by Buddhists in 400 A.D. The caves are amazing, and many of the Buddhas towering above us were still in tact and unspoiled. The sandstone they were carved in has been weathering away on the outside of the caves, so large building faces have been built in front of some of the caves to protect them from further weather damage. The acid rain from the mining and coal production city of Datong certainly doesn’t help the future of these caves either.

The Northern Wei Dynasty built the temples while their capital was in Datong. Later they moved their capital to Luoyang, and the cave carving in Yungang stopped. These caves are the best preserved, and there were 51 of them for us to visit.

Tired and exhausted from listening to our tour guide say “this is most beautiful Buddha, beautiful Buddha, beautiful Buddha…this is biggest Buddha, biggest Buddha, biggest Buddha…Buddha was born from his mother’s armpit, armpit, armpit,” that we decided we needed some Western food, and a place to hang out until our train at 11pm. We sought out the most friendly, welcoming restaurant in Datong, its presence signified to us by the presence of two, beautiful golden arches.


We sat in McDonalds for three hours, drinking coffee, eating mediocre hamburgers, and devouring hot fudge sundaes. It amazes me that in McDonalds in China, the advertisements and pictures on the walls are all of Westerners who are happy and enjoying their McNuggets, not Asian people. After we’d had our fill of fast food we walked over to a pool hall and played a game of pool, at which I am hopeless, before we headed back to the train station.

1 comment:

  1. aaaaaah I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU RODE A ROLLERCOASTER WITH AWFUL SEAT RESTRAINTS!

    ok, come home soon. it's almost our birthdays.

    ReplyDelete