Does anyone speak English, Help! - Datong, Yungang Grottos & Hanging Temples

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We took the overnight sleeper train and arrived nice and early in Datong. What a culture shock, unlike Beijing this place is an industrial coal mining city. The train station was heaving with Chinese peasants migrating in search of work and unlike their Beijing counterparts these guys are not used to Westerners. With their belongings in a sack, they walk up to us and just stand staring.

Having walked around this town which is stained black with coal dust, and shows no signs of any westernisation, we quickly made a decision this wasn't a place we were going to be staying the night, and booked another sleeper train out.

We knew Datong was going to be a bit rough but that's not why we are here. Just out of the town are 2 two sites that Datong is famous for, the Yungang Grottos and the Hanging Temples. These are impressive.

The grottos were built by some of the first settlers in the area, the Northern Wei, and are a series of caves dug into the mountain side, which is impressive enough. However fill these caves with intricate carvings and paintings and you'll understand why we are here. They are amazing, the full story of the creation of the Buddha is in one cave and another has thousands of carvings of littles Buddha's - Very Mad.

The other justification for visiting Datong is the Hanging Temples. Someone decided that the best place for a group of temples would be hundreds of metres above a river and attached to a cliff face - obvious really. How they are still "hanging" I don't know - and neither I think did Paul who had a bout of vertigo and spent half the time hanging to the walls panicking! Who knew Paul had vertigo?!

On the way back to town we stopped to pay homage to a crazy old guy who lives in a cave, complete with kitchen, living and bedroom (a real life caveman), after being shown around and a couple of photo's with him we natrually had to part company with a few Yuan, I expect his real house was probably a mansion somewhere else in the valley!

Had our first real issues with language in Datong and ended up pointed to various chinese words to order some food, amid much laughing from us and the staff - luckily we didn't end up eating chickens feet!

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