Luoyang

Luoyang is off the beaten track. OK, it’s not in the middle of nowhere – it’s actually reasonably sized city even thought it’s not a well known tourist destination. The main reason I’m feeling a bit removed from civilisation at the moment is due to extreme chocolate withdrawal symptoms. You can’t get any here unless you pay really really extortionate prices in a posh hotel lobby – and I’m not that desperate! Everywhere else we’ve travelled we have managed to get hold of the odd bar, or perhaps a chocolate brownie in a coffee shop, but not Luoyang. It simply hasn’t been infected with chocoholism yet. Grr.

Ah well, we’ve only had a brief stop here on our way down the Yellow River towards Shanghai. The main attraction is a very extensive set of carved out caves on the banks of the river – Buddhist monuments carved since 492 AD. You could describe the work as prolific. Looking from a distance at the river cliffs where the caves have been carved is like staring at the side of a sponge or a termite mound – thousands and thousands of caves, niches, and nooks of varying sizes are all crammed into the cliff face with no area of rock untouched. I’m reliably informed by the Rough Guide that there are 1350 caves, containing in total over 110,000 carved statues. Lots in other words. Most are reasonably small – less than 50cm high – but a few are immense. The most impressive cave has a Buddha in the middle who is 17m high and has ears 5m long!

Anyway, it’s a nice place to spend an afternoon wandering around. Tomorrow we are off again though, this time to Zhengzhou – or at least I hope we are. We bought train tickets today in the station office, where they speak and write no English. We suspected as much though, so we prepared in advance by writing down the departure and arrival towns, dates, and train numbers all in Chinese format (including lovely drawings of the Chinese Characters for the cities). It sort of worked. I think. We ended up being served by a very unhelpful unfriendly woman, but we managed to extract from her tickets with the right towns on them with trains leaving on the right dates. Unfortunately that’s where the success story ends – the train classes were wrong (so we’re going to have to survive journeys several hours long standing up), and one of the tickets is for the wrong train, so we’ll arrive in the middle of the night. Ah well, I’ll have to work on my Chinese scripting. It’s easier than trying to understand and speak the language – trust me!