I live!
Picking up where we left off, I woke up the next morning and caught a bus to Luoyang, during which I was able to catch most of the on-bus feature, Turbulence 2: Fear of Flying. If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically Snakes on a Plane, only without the snakes or Samuel L. Jackson (i.e., it’s terrible).
As soon as we got to Luoyang, the place gave me a bad feeling. I’m not really sure why, although part of it was certainly that it’s clearly not as developed a city as any of the ones I’ve visited before. Everything was smaller, dirtier, louder, and generally less attractive. On my walk from the bus station to the hotel I saw several people sitting in shops that appeared to be selling only rocks.
The hotel was fairly cheap, and they put me up in a regular double for the price of dorm housing on the condition that they might give me a roommate if someone showed up. The toilet only kind of worked, and the shower was unusable so I took several baths, but it had a TV and heating, at least, to complement the perpetual construction going on right outside the door.
My first night in Luoyang, I decided to go to the “Old City” section, which has a night market and some leftovers from Luoyang’s days as a capitol. The ancient holdovers were few and far between, and the walk was way longer than I thought it would be, but I ate some delicious street food in the night market and a local hole-in-the-wall before cabbing it back home for the night.
The next day, I took a cab (foolish!) to the Longmen Caves, which are not as close as I thought they were. Having spent as much on the cab as I was spending on my lodgings (50 RMB), I headed into the park.
The Longmen Caves are a series of grottoes with Buddhist carvings dating from the 6th century A.D. They are recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and did not dissapoint. A half-mile or so (rough guess) of cliff face along a river is hollowed out with several large caves and hundreds of smaller ones, all containing statues and carvings of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, arhats, etc. Some of the statues have had their faces scratched off (defacement from the Cultural Revolution), others have had their heads stolen (by European “archaeologists” in the early 20th century). Two whole walls are also missing (one’s in England, the other’s in Kansas).
Still, what’s left is extremely impressive. The showstopper is a 30m tall Buddha whose face is supposedly modelled after Wu Zetian’s (China’s first, and only, female emperor). You would think that after seeing the world’s largest Buddha, smaller Buddhas would be less impressive, but it turns out that no, they are not. My only complaints about the Longmen Caves were that it was very cold, with a bitter wind rushing over the river and freezing my batteries while I was trying to take pictures.
I returned the hotel room by bus (1.5 RMB) and took a bath to warm up while my camera recharged. Shortly after that, a roommate showed up: a 20-something British girl who had been traveling in Asia for 5 months. We chatted for a bit and then went out for something to eat. Still getting a vibe of evil from Luoyang and having seen the one thing I really wanted to see there (Longmen) I decided to blow off the White Horse Temple and head to Zhengzhou the next morning via the Shaolin Temple.
I didn’t know where to go to get a bus to the Shaolin temple, but conveniently some guy who runs one happened to be standing in the lobby as I was checking out, and the price he offered was shockingly reasonable, so I hopped on.
As it turned out, this was a tourist bus, so along the way we visited some other sites, including the Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s home and burial site (he’s the monk who went to India and who Journey to the West is based on, the Big Goose Pagoda I visted in Xi’an is also dedicated to him) and an interesting school and temple on the same mountain as the Shaolin Temple. On the way, we also passed the White Horse Temple I had decided to blow off visiting, and I immediately stopped regretting my decision as the temple’s pagoda was shrouded in green plastic and scaffolding.
The Shaolin Temple itself was an interesting experience. Kung Fu fans the world over revere it as the sacred birthplace of their art, and it is a tourist mecca. Our tickets included a performance by some of the students who lived and study on-site (there are thousands of them), which was interesting if a bit generic. Then it was on to the real deal, the temple itself, and its attendant “pagoda forest”.
Although we had a guide (Chinese), I opted to spend most of my time in the Shaolin Temple listening to the Wu Tang Clan’s seminal 36 Chambers album, for reasons that should be apparent to anyone familiar with Wu Tang. It was a strange experience, but one I won’t soon forget. The temple itself was beautiful, if fairly small and not particularly old (it tends to get burned down and rebuilt a lot, apparently) — it didn’t seem any more or less related to Kung Fu than any of the other temples I’ve been to, but it was cool.
The real reason to visit, though, is the pagoda forest, which is basically just what it sounds like: a vertiable forest of smallish pagodas, nearly all of which are built in memory of deceased masters from the Shaolin Temple. It’s quite arresting, and if my fucking camera hadn’t been pretending it was out of battery (this happens when its cold) I would have gotten some pictures. As it was, I took some video of it until I ran out of video tape, at which point my video camera also broke (same exact way as before, which leads me to believe it will be another cheap fix, but still…goddamn it).
After the pagoda forest I hopped a bus to Zhengzhou and opted to stay there for the night as it was already evening when we arrived. I wandered the city a bit, finding it infinitely preferable to Luoyang, before running into the hotel I was looking for somewhat by accident. It cost a pretty penny — no dorm rooms here — but it was probably worth it. No roomates, working facilities, and very close to a night market where I ate some freakin’ delicious food (beef and small noodles fried in sauce and wrapped in fried thin pancake-like bread) that night for about 2 RMB.
The next day, I set out for Kaifeng, the last “real” stop on my trip, by bus. A scant hour later I was here in Kaifeng, the ancient “Eastern capitol”, meaning that I have now visited all the ancient capitols but one (Beijing is the Northern Capitol, Xi’an the Western, Luoyang the “Middle”, Kaifeng the Eastern, and Nanjing, which I haven’t visited, the Southern Capitol).
It was raining — a boon for the farmers of Henan who have been suffering through severe drought these past few months, but a bane to a tourist who wants to visit mostly outdoor temples — so I went straight to the hotel and checked into my crappy, bathroom-less room before heading out to check out the local nightmarket.
Unfortunately, the local nightmarket apparently fears rain, so I ate at KFC and spent the rest of the night in my hotel room bored out of my skull.
A closer examination of Lonely Planet revealed two main things to see in Kaifeng, the Temple of the Chief Minister and the Shan-Shan-Gan Guild Hall, so I woke up this morning (thanks, singing guy next door!) and set out by foot to find them.
The Temple of the Chief Minister was nice, essentially a by-the-books Buddhist temple save an octagonal chamber containing a Guanyin (I think it was Guanyin) with 1000 arms and 1000 eyes. It was full of old Buddhist women wielding flaming incense as though no one else was around, and I’m amazed it hasn’t burned down. I spent about half an hour there and then moved on to the bakery across the street, which sold me delicious bread. Then I went on to the Shan-Shan-Gan Guild Hall.
The Guild Hall was small, but full of the kind of interesting details I would never pay attention to if the tour guide hadn’t badgered me into purchasing her services. The tour was in Chinese, but it only cost 10 RMB and was probably worth it, as I learned lots of interesting things about the carving details in the decorations under the roofs; in short, EVERYTHING is significant and has some meaning in addition to its aesthetic value. The place was more or less deserted, and actually quite beautiful although it’s really just one courtyard and hall, it was aesthetically one my favorite places on the trip.
It was also the last thing I really felt the need to see in Kaifeng, save the nightmarket. There are some pagodas, but I’ve seen my fill of those, and many of the other sights are parks and lakes, not a ton of fun when it’s freezing out and all the trees are dead.
I’m hanging out in Kaifeng for tonight to take another shot at seeing the nightmarket before returning to Zhengzhou tomorrow. There’s really only one thing to see there — a musuem that promises to show me oracle bones, among other ancient things — but the hotel is nice, I can afford it, and my flight leaves from there on Sunday so I’m just going to hang out, eat street food, and see my one sight at a leisurely pace. I probably won’t bother to post again until after I’m back in Harbin on Sunday, at which point I’ll be able to provide some photographs and more cool stats. Video will also be forthcoming, including cute panda video, but that will take longer as I’ll need to get my camera repaired again before I can load the video onto my computer.
MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 13
Trains taken: 1
Cabs taken: 19
Private vehicles taken: 3
