Friday, July 18 We woke up early and headed straight back to the CITS office.  Thankfully, Josh felt a little more within himself in the morning and did not explode on the CITS guy.  When he saw us, he knew something was wrong and recognized his mistake when he looked at the tickets.  He ran us over to a bus ticket station and bought us tickets to a city called Taiyuan from which we could catch another bus to Pingyao.  We got the bus fine and slept some and saw some funny Chinese movies on it.  In Taiyuan, we had to take a taxi from one bus station to another, buy new bus tickets and get on the right bus to Pingyao.  This we managed reasonably well with only a little help and pointing and gesturing, but no English.  The second bus to Pingyao was more adventurous with not great roads the whole way and random passengers picked up and dropped off all along the highway.  No one seemed to think it was weird, so we tried not to either.  We finally arrived at Pingyao at about 3:30pm after 5 hour and 2 hour bus rides.

Our Pingyao hotel, the Yide hotel,  is super cute and the town is a very well preserved ancient walled city that is very old and pretty small.  We had dinner immediately upon arrival and took an exploratory walk around the city.  We are glad to have made it to Pingyao, it was worth the effort.  The train tickets we had to Xi’an were for tonight (we were supposed to pick them up at a hearby hostel) and were no longer available, nor were our bodies available for more travel today.  We are staying the night in our hotel and will leave in the morning on another bus to Xi’an and should arrive early afternoon and be close to back on our expected itinerary.

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So we get to the train station and wait for our train to board, it is late.  Being not so much of a tourist place, absolutely nothing is in English and we just kind of follow our train number around.  In China, getting on a train is some sort of experience.  Everyone in the waiting room at some point stands up, seemingly the standing begins after some announcement is made that we don’t understand.  We stand too.  Everyone jostles for position and tries to get through the gates and onto the train platform first.  At any moment approximately 25 people are staring at the white people.  This night we jostle for about 45 minutes and finally get to the ticket puncher and she freaks out because (as the above mentioned hypothetical conversation did not occur) the dates on our tickets are wrong.

So we are stopped from boarding the train.  We try in vain to explain that our tickets were issued to us this morning (the 17th), it is clearly a mistake and they should just let us on.  China is not anything if it is not by the rules, so we are going to miss our train.  Approximately, 30 minutes later, 3 train operaters, 1 police officer, 1 English translator, 1 train grand master (she had a great uniform and a huge hat), and about 30 random Chinese surrounding us in all the drama, each taking care in explaining to us that we can’t possibly board that train because our tickets are for yesterday.  I took care not to slap everyone of them.  However, I could not hide my anger and Jeannette did most of the interacting.  Finally, I explained that we are not stupid, we understand the dates our wrong, we are not trying to fool them and that their official guy gave us these tickets.  Their response:  “But sir, the date on your tickets is yesterday??!!!??”  Finally, the grand master decreed that we could in fact board the train.  But the train had left some twenty minutes ago and I had to get out of the station.  Thankfully, Jeannette followed me.  A quick side note, the Chinese get very nervous when people get worked up, apparently no one in this country has ever complained about anything.  We headed back to our hotel to sort it out in the morning.  Of course, our hotel that we had checked out of a mere 2 hours previously had somehow already rebooked our room (which we had already paid for) and was otherwise fully occupied.  Again swallowing our exasperation, we requested that they find us another room in the city and get us there.  They did, we again took a taxi to a new hotel (even nicer), checked in, and went to bed hoping this was all some elaborate dream that the Malaria medication had cooked up.

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Thursday, July 17 We woke up early and had a Chinese buffet breakfast in our fancy hotel.  We took a taxi back to the train station to meet for the CITS tour transportation to the Yungang Caves and the Hanging Temple and to pick up our Pingyao train tickets for that night.

The tour bus drove for about 2.5 hours to get to the Hanging Temple outside of Datong.  The Hanging Temple was amazing.  The temple’s name literally translates (much nicer) as “The Temple Suspended in the Void”.  It is a Temple that the locals built on the side of a sheer rock cliff about 50 meters above the ground.  They built it so high because the river below floods and would have swept away any temples.  In fact, when first built it was 100 meters above the ground, but soot and sediment have lessened its height over the centuries.  The temple is also unique because it is a site of trifecta worship:  Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.

We stopped for lunch with the locals at some unremarkable place between the two sites.

The second site was the Yungang Caves, a collection of grottoes carved with thousands of Buddhas.  The most impressive were some pretty huge Buddhas that stood over 17 meters tall.  Our very informative and cute tour guide directed us to the Tallest Buddha, the Best Preserved Buddha, the Most Impressive Buddha, the Prettiest Buddha, the most Famous Buddha, the Best Buddha, the most Colorful Buddha, and the most Photographed Buddha, among the thousands of other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (Buddha friends).  A quick disclaimer that JFJ do not know much about Buddhism.  It was a fun day and Jeannette felt very satisfied to have seen both the Caves and the Hanging Temple.

The ride back to Datong was short, we said goodbye to our short-lived tour friends and headed back toward the hotel.  We walked the small-ish city and found a great little street near our hotel (that should have been in the guidebook) and had a nice dinner there.  Proudly, Josh was able to match Chinese characters in the picture menu to Chinese characters on the order form with 100% accuracy, not counting our beverages which were again ordered verbally and our anticipated ice cold beers were some form of room temperature dessert wines (we believe one glass of port, one glass of sherry).  We got back to the hotel in time to shower, pack and check-out to head back to the train station for our night train to Pingyao.  We had the hotel for two nights just for this later evening convenience, before our long overnight ride to Pingyao.

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Wednesday, July 16 Today started a bit crazy.  We were tired after spending a late night trying to distill our belongings down to a volume that would fill one less bag … in the end, it didn’t work.  We realized laying in bed that the station listed on our train tickets didn’t match any of the names of stations on our maps and that we needed help deciphering the nickname.  At breakfast we asked our host, who was very helpful, but nervous about the city traffic and our ability to get to the station on time.  She hustled us out the door and hailed us a cab.  She was great and we HIGHLY recommend our B&B, The Mao’er Hutong B&B, to anyone in staying in Beijing.

We made it to the station with plenty of time to spare.  We figured out our train car and sleeping berth with ease and made friends with three recent university grads soon after boarding.  They were happy to practice their English and were headed to their hometown of Datong.  Josh took a few naps on the 7 hour ride and Jeannette even caught one herself.  We saw some amazing views along the way including beautiful mountains, rivers, countryside and more.

When we finally arrived in Datong, our new train friends all took photos with us before parting ways.  As we exited the station, the local CITS agent (Official China Gov’t Tourist Person) grabbed us.  It was just what we wanted for Datong.  We reserved train tickets, both for tomorrow night’s overnight train ride to Pingyao and for train tickets for the next night’s overnight ride from Pingyao to Xi’an.  The second tickets we will pick up in Pingyao from the local CITS person there (who actually runs a hostel), but it is nice to have it out of the way.  In addition, we decided to buy the CITS transportation package to see the Yungang Caves (easy enough to get to by local bus) and the Hanging Temple (not easy to get to without arrangements).  This was nice because Jeannette really wanted to do both and we couldn’t figure it out otherwise.

After taking care of business, we took a cab to our hotel, in the center of Datong.  It is very different from Beijing.  That said, Datong-ers speak very highly of their city and are very proud of the city’s history, full of periods of great glory and now they are proud of their bountiful coal supplies and boast of providing Beijing and all of their province with power.  After we checked into our hotel, a very nice one, we walked around to get a quick sense of our bearings and then headed to one of our best dinner’s yet at Deyue Lou.  As it is so close to Mongolia, Datong is the place to get some mutton hotpot, and that is just what we had at this Muslim-run restaurant.  They didn’t speak a word of English or understand a word of our attempts at Mandarin (not even Tsingtao) or our attempts at charades.  We just started nodding yes in response to every question.  After the craziness of our ordering (the waitstaff was incredibly attentive and helpful), the food was amazing.

On our walk back to the hotel we stopped at the city’s Drum tower to have a look and called it an early-ish night.  We did notice that Datong is a bit off the tourist path, most notably we get the same stares as anywhere else, but here people are surprised enough that they aren’t prepared in any way to hawk their wares, we do get the occasional “hellooo!” especially from young children emboldened (and directed to do so) by their parents.

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I can’t tell which mapping program is better so I have included two maps.

We are headed in a counter-clockwise direction, beginning in the upper right (i.e., Northeast) corner in Beijing.  Since the green and red push pins are not labeled with the appropriate city names and do not tell us “geographically hindered” people what cities they are “tacking”, here’s the list in chronological order:  Beijing, Datong, Pingyao, Xi’an, Guilin, Yangshuo, Shenzhen and ending in Hong Kong.

Map #1

Map #2

Here is the first map zoomed in a bit differently.  The map of the states beneath it is set at the exact same scale just so you can get an idea of how far we will be traveling.