The last train to Beijing

Our last train trip in China is a short hop from Datong to Beijing. Just 6 hours, but our kind travel agent still arranged for us to have a soft sleeper. What a guy! Thank you Young Fan for a great trip around China!

We like the soft sleeper. Plenty of room to spread out and of course sleeping. Some get to fit in more of that than others...
We arrive to Beijing in the early afternoon and find our hotel in a nice quiet residential neighbourhood. Soo we made a bee line for the hoards at Tienanmen Square and were not disappointed.
What a madhouse! Of course in a good Chinese way! After braving the inferno that was the square we found a quiet tree lined sidewalk on one edge of the square to sit and enjoy some ice cream with 50,000 other people.
Got to admit though for all of the foreigners that are supposed to be decending on the city we see barely a one.

Datong and the Yungang Caves

Datong is full of interesting stuff most of them the largest, We visit the 9 dragon screen. The largest in China. There used to be a palace in Datong like the Forbidden city and it was destroyed a few hundred years ago. I bet they are kicking themselves for that one! Anyhow the screen remains and it is a doozie. Funny though it is just sitting there in the middle of the city. No real park or other monuments surround it.
Not too far away is the Shang Huayuan temple, built in 1062, the largest temple room in China. It did seem pretty big....
Finally we trekked out to the Yungang caves. It is a huge complex more than 2 k in length. It is full of caves with Buddhas inside, anywhere from 20 meters in height to 2 centimeters.
The caves were built by an emperor in the 5 century A.D. This particular man was the grandson of another emperor who had a beef with the local monks and had mercilessly killed many of them. The grandson fearing the bad karma and having become quite devote in the interim, looked for a protected area to dedicate to Buddha.

Good stuff on the way to Taiyuan

We left Pingyau after the big party and made a couple of stops on the way to TaiYuan. The first was the "Hanging Monetary". It was pretty impressive as far as elevated 1300 year old monasteries go. Apparently it was elevated many times over history as the level of the river rose. Recently however a dam has been built to control the water level.
The building is very thin and narrow pressed against the side of the cliff. Tourists are aloud to go all over the building and in my opinion many of the poles were dangerously rickety!
Luckily we survived to view other dangerous tourist attractions, like this humongous stone cabbage in the lobby of our hotel in TaiYuan. Yeah, you can see how the children are effected by it.
In the morning we were off to our final destination before Beijing, the Wooden Pagoda and Datong.

The Wooden pagoda is the oldest wooden pagoda in China. It is 9 storeys tall and more than 1,000 years old. It is also blessed by a huge Buddha inside.

Happy Birthday Evita!

We celebrated Evita's birthday in Pingyau at a lovely restaurant. We had a nice lunch followed by presents and the most AMAZING cake of all time. This photo does not do justice to the massive flame that erupted out of the middle of the lotus flower decoration. All of the petals of the flower began as a pretty pink flower bud, After lighting the...dare i say fuse, the middle of the flower napalmed the ceiling while daintily lighting all of the candles on the rest of the decoration. Sweet!
The cake tasted as good as it looked and, Evita raked in various trendy Pingyau prezzies for the three year old set.

Hop skip and a jump to Pingyao

Relativly speaking that is! We took a regular day train 6 hours north west from X'ian to Pingyao. The small town was on a major trade route for north eastern China, and is the home of China's first bank. The town fell into obscurity at the end of the 19th Century, with the arrival of European banks and the shif to a more industrilized economy. Lucky for Pingyao!
Consequently none of the old buildings nor the ancient wall were ever torn down. The wall with the city inside is intact, all of the Ming dynasty buildings, little allyways and of course the requsite passle of temples.

We stayed at this beautiful hotel. All of the rooms were decorated in Ming dynasty style with a large (about 8x10 feet) elevated bed, and cool furniture that you could bring into the bed with you. All that plus A/C and hot water. The movie "Raise the Red Lantern" was filmed down the road! We loved waking aroudn the streets, there were plenty of bikes and these golf cart things that were popular to cart people around in. (Just like they had in the Ming dynasty i am sure!)

Terra Cotta Warriors

Who says you can't take it with you? The first emperor to unite China made so many enemies during his life time that we wanted to make sure some one had his back in the afterlife, to the tune of more than 7,000 warriors, horses and weapons. All larger than life size, no two faces alike.


The first pit was found by two farmers in 1974, and over 1,000 warriors have been fully restored. The rest lie under a clay layer that formed over their 2,200 years of rest, waiting to be carved out. The tomb of the same Emperor also is nearby, supposedly huge and full of goodies. The Chinese have never opened the it. Go figure.

We also went to a workshop where they make replicas of the statues, using the same techinques that they used oh those eons ago.

Off the train into X'ian

We got off the train in X'ian, it goes on to Beijing, but we had places to see! We were back in China, home of the pagoda and yeah, truth be told a bit of haze. Our first stop was the Big Goose Pagoda, which apparently has a set of footprints and a piece of bone of Sakayamuni himself. The pagoda is of an older more Indian style before they became Chinese influenced with all of the swoops and dragons etc.

X'ian was the capital of China for hundreds of years. They walled the entire city to protect them from outsiders. The X'ian wall is intact still. The whole dang thing. It goes 14K around the center of the city. You can walk and ride bikes on top of the entire thing.

The higest train in the world

At more than 16,000 feet the train from Lhasa is in serious need of oxygen. Luckily they have it. Each cabin has four little outlets that keep you breating. Still one time when i lifted Evita down from the bunkI thought that i was going to faint. Cool!

We saw lots of Yaks, lots of snow and nomads in the middle of nowhere. The Tibetan plateau is huge and took us more than 24 hours to cross, it is full to the brim with water, like a giant sponge.You can easly see why it is the sourse of the Yangzi river (and no doubt others). We survived in our nice comfy beds with plenty of instant noodles.

After passing out of Tibet, our trip continued through the Loas Plateau, which is, made up of a yellow earth cut into terraces. The same earth is used to make the local bricks so all of the houses are yellow too. It is very dry on the mountains with crops on the rivers edge below..

Our last day in Tibet

Our last day in Tibet was a busy one, We bought a rug from Doma "come home to Doma!" Which hopefully is already on it's way to Tennessee. (You should be seeing it soon Mom!) We also enjoyed some lovely Indian Food with Nema, and a walk through a busy Tibetan bazaar.

Then we went to Saraje Collage, which is a monastery, it has the largest chanting room in Tibet, 180 pillars, it can hold three thousand monks! The collage is also home to the horse of Buddha. Supposedly a good thing to protect children. The place was sooooo packed! The line to get to the altar went around several different rooms.

The smoke from the Yak butter was intense. Nema kindly took us to the head of the line line (i felt kind of bad about that but it was hugely claustrophobic) where a monk blessed the children with two soot smudges on their noses.

Jokhang Temple

In the center of Lhasa lies the Jokhang temple the most holy of the Tibetan sites.
All Tibetans, if they are to be considered devout, are supposed to make a Pilgrimage to the Jokhang Temple once in their lifetimes. They have to circle the temple clockwise as many times as they can before entering. They also can circle the block to make their pilgrimage extra effective, and we even saw pilgrims circling the city(!). Prostrating is also a part of the process.
That is what the folks in this photo are doing. They are prostrating in front of the temple before they go in. As you can see they have special mats and stuff to make it less hard on the bones, but of course there are many who don't. Nema says that it is good to prostrate every day. No specific number but in his family they do it the number of thier age. There are also many pilgrims that prostrate the whole circuit around the temple and Nema told us of some who will prostrate their whole pilgrimage route from their village in the country and take years to get to Lhasa.
The next photo is a large prayer wheel. They might have these in India or Nepal but not China that is for sure. The Prayer Wheel is full of religious scriptures, and each turn of the wheel is like "reading" the scriptures inside. It is important to read scriptures to counter act any bad things that you have done in your life. We saw people all the time walking around with prayer wheels spinning them all the time. I don't see how anyone can be as bad as all that.

The summer palace

The Summer Palace was started by the 7th Dalai Lama who was a major mover and shaker back in the day. Apparently he was under the weather at one point and consulted an oracle who told him to look for a spring on the outside of town and bathe in it to cure his illness. He followed the instructions and was subsequently cured. The spot was developed into a retreat and later became the official summer residence of the government. It is a huge place surrounded by lovely gardens. As with everything we have seen in Tibet, it is in wonderful condition.

All of the heads of state have added to the complex, including the current Lama. When he left Tibet in 1954 he left from the Summer Palace.
The torch of the Olympic games also was conducted through Lhasa beginning on this road in front of the Palace.
Below you see the Dalai Lamas personal quarters with the a balcony for viewing performances. Nema told me that there used to be a large spring celebration here with all of the nomads from around the area and of course Lhasans camping in the gardens around the SP. Sounds like fun!

PP Continued

The paintings on the inside of the entrance are the best preserved that we have seen, They represent the guards. The Palace is full of artifacts. Every Llama is buired there, in massive gold tombs. Each one bought by donations. The Tibetans use Yak butter to offer to spirits a light to find thier way to the next incarnation. Consequently there are large tray/chalise things all over the place with multipul wiks in them. The pilgrims, bring the butter from thier farms, or buy it in town and scoop it into the large candels. I could definatelly smell the animally scent of the butter. But Jim didn't notice it.

We are not alowd to take photos of the inside, so you will have to take my work for it, it is an amazing place. There are multipul chanting rooms where hundreds of Monks can do thier stuff, and huge chambers of scrolls and documnets that are more than 1000 years old.

Behind us in this photo is the current Llamas chambers (which we saw from the inside. Small and unassuming) and the balcony from which he can watch presentations on the terrace where we are standing.

The Potola Palace

I am going to post these photos now and add more later. Leave it to be said, 999 rooms and one cave are pretty impressive!

It was a perfect day to climb stairs above 12,000 feet. We actually got up to 13,000 feet when we reached the top of the palace.

The Potola Palace is the center of Lhasa. It is the former wiinter residance of the Dali Llama, that has now become little more than a museum since the Tibet has been part of China.

The Palace was started by the 33 King of Tibet about 1600 years ago. Although he was the 33 King he was the first King of consequence and really put the kingdom of Tibet on the map. He started the palace around a cave that was found on the mountain that the king used as a meditation room. He also build some basic rooms around this cave. Many of the later Kings and Llamas added to the palace untill it became the size it is today.

We had to go through a security check to get in. Then we got cracking on those stairs. Nema was kind to us stopping every 25 or so for us to catch our breath. On one of our stopps we met three Nomads. Nema spoke to them and they inpromed him that they had 60 Yaks. They had met foreigners once before. The guy on the end by Jim had a long braid with a large bead in in and a big red tassle attached to the end. When i asked to take the photo he wrapped the tassle around his head. The guy next to me lamented the fact that they didn't have thier traditional gear on for the portorate. I was happy to meet them whatever.


When we got up to the entrance to the palace it is covered with a huge cloth with "endless knots" on it. The fabric is made from Yak wool and protects the paintings that are just inside.