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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Tags: Datong
The Hanging Temple looks crazy.
It reminds me of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, only a lot more elaborate.
Wow. The Yungang Caves are equally as impressive. Geez, this stuff looks amazing! I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be there in person.