Sun, August 2
Mike
Strange breakfast at the Luoyang Hotel. I can eat almost anything Chinese, but there was little there that attracted me. A few buns and not much else.
Right outside the hotel was the bus to Longmen Caves. For 2 Y we rode all the way to the end. There you walk past all of the shops. We stopped at one and had a pot of tea for 10 Y (remember, no tea for breakfast) and got a map of Luoyang for 5 Y. Into the caves - admission was 120 Y, the highest yet for anything we did.
You walk south on the east side of this little river to a bridge, then cross over and walk north to a bridge, which you cross back to the entrance. We took about 3 + hours. It was so hot that at the end my shirt was absolutely soaked, and I was so short of liquids and salt that I was near heat exhaustion. We had some dried apricots and a street food "sandwich" and recovered.
These caves are spectacular: they are not like Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, where the caves are each smallish, and you see the 10 that the guide chooses to show you. On the plus side, some of the Longmen Caves are huge. One is so big that it seems to have been blown out of the side of the hill by dynamite. On the minus side, due to the Ming and Qing hostility to Buddhism, the cultural destruction that took place during the Cultural Revolution, and the decapitation that occurred when Europeans taking heads back to the museums, a lot of the Buddhas are gone. Anyway, there are thousands of caves, some very small. You see hundreds, many dozens of which still have all of their Buddhas in reasonable condition.
Somewhat fortified, but still sweat-soaked, we rode the bus back to the hotel. There we relaxed for a bit. Then over to the train station to get the ticket for Luoyang to Kaifeng. The departure timing was all wrong for us - no trains in our direction at 9 AM (Why? Well, a train leaving Luoyang at 9 AM of necessity left Xi'an at 4 AM - and who the hell wants to leave Xi'an at 4 AM). There were trains leaving Luoyang for Kaifeng at 6:30 AM and at 11:30 AM, but nothing in between. So we decided to take the bus the next day.
Curtis found an ATM, and then across town to the Old City, where there is supposed to be a Night Market.
We got the night market in full steam, and ate all sorts of street food, filling up for less than 25 Y: some skewers, some beer, some crunchy things, some buns, etc. Back on the bus to the hotel. Then on the internet. Bought a couple of beers and a couple of waters and finally caught up on the liquid, and to bed.
Curtis
Breakfast at the hotel was even stranger than last night's dinner. We asked for tea and received a reply of "Mei you" (pronounced "may yo" = "don't have"). The only beverages available at breakfast were hot orange juice (had that in Chengdu as well) and hot, watery soy milk. Not my cup of tea. We fared no better with coffee: "Mei you."
On to the Longmen Caves. Finally, at the entrance to the grottos, we found some tea and enjoyed a large pot of it before going in.
These are not caves in the sense of the caves we saw in Europe; rather, they are niches carved out of the side of the stone mountains on two sides of the river. The largest carvings are huge, featuring a giant Buddha surrounded by four Bodhisatvas. They call ONE of the galleries "The Cave of 10,000 Buddhas." Many of those figures are very small (several inches high). All in all, there may be over 100,000! Unfortunately many of the figures have been decapitated by vandals during less friendly times. Also, some have been removed entirely and now sit in European and American museums. Nevertheless, this is quite an impressive site.
We came back to town quite exhausted. Mike thought that we might have gotten low on salt because of the high heat and humidity. It was our first sunny day in about a week, but really hot. After a second shower and a brief rest, we took a bus over to the old part of the city. Not much historic content, but interesting side streets with open markets and some pretty good street food. Not close to the street food in Chengdu, though.
That pretty much sums up the day. Tomorrow we will try to find a bus to Kaifeng. The train schedule doesn't jibe well with our plans, so bus should be fine since it is a fairly short stretch. We will stay the night and then will take a fast train to Nanjing. We are planning to stay there for two nights before returning to Shanghai.
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