China Tour 2013

Today afternoon we hired a car to drive us the 40 kilometers from Pingyao to Zhang Bi ancient castle.
Again a bumpy ride and an unbelievable number of trucks transporting coal to nearby power plants. Forget the word air pollution in Shanghai, here the air has been so full of smog...
After an hour ride we arrived and were more than surprised that we could find an english speaking tour lady. English was not perfect but with her enthusiasm of guiding us she made up for it and always tested my Chinese skills by checking how many characters I could understand on these old stones (honestly 马马虎虎）。
The whole old town in which only about 600, mainly old, people live is stretched with underground tunnels, originally a total length of 10 km, of which about 1 km is open to the public.
The orientation and name of the town is related to the 28 Chinese Astronomical constellations (28 舍), where Zhang is the fifth constellation among the seven Southern Constellations and Bi is the seventh constellation among the the seven Northern Constellations. We learned much more about this topic today, also feng-shui, but lets keep it like this and enjoy the pictures :-)









Tonight another night train to Xi'An where we will spend the next two days.

The guesthouse in Pingyao was amazingly nice: Located in a small alley in old town in a courtyard. At night we did not see too much, but the room and the bathroom were spacious and clean. Than in the morning this view:



Pingyao's old town is one of the best preserved one's in
China, old wooden and stone buildings everywhere around and even the city wall is fully intact.
For sure its touristic with many shops, but not too crowded so the feeling is still nice.

So we spend the day with wandering around, have some breaks with cool beer and I also got a new haircut, more aerodynamic :-)



But sure you will be more interested in the city:



And more pretty and romantic (why am I here with Markus and not Maggie???)

After a quick lunch with 炒面 we boarded the train from Datong to Pingyao, still in Shanxi Province. The idea was to really experience China and his people and the idea totally worked out and now after almost 8 hours I understand very well why this cheapest (seat) ticket in Chinese trains is called "hard seater"...



Anyhow, we arrived on schedule on 00.30 and our guesthouse sent a guy to pick us up, all smooth.

Our sleeper train had a 3 hour stop in the middle of nowhere, nobody could explain why (not wondering).
So actually we arrived at 9.30 instead of early morning.
The good thing was we had a quite good sleep but our schedule for visiting the Yungang caves and the Hanging monastery got a bit tight...
Luckily the booked driver was still around and assured us 没有问题 (no problem), so we took the chance for a quick clean up in the toilet of a nearby hotel before we started.
After a short ride we arrived a the caves (5A tourist spot), pretty developed with huge entrance area. A pity we arrived so late so the spot already was packed with people, but the the somehow 51,000 buddha statues of all sizes have been quite amazing.







After 2 to 3 hours strolling around in the area we met our driver again and went for 1.5 hours driving through the suburbs of Datong to the Hanging monastery. Quite dusty, trucks everywhere and a bumpy road.
The monastery was smaller than I expected, but very impressive how the monks have built this into the cliff.





On the way back to Datong we passed endless construction sites of new residential buildings in and around the city. I have seen a lot before, but here is pretty crazy. Price starts from 5,000 RMB/m2 if you are interested :-)