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Published: June 30th 2009
We left Beijing for Datong quite early in the morning about 5:30 AM and arrived at the Yungang grottoes at 9:30 AM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungang_Grottoes. We rent a car with driver across the street from the hotel. It was quite a surprise how we made it since I don't speak a single word of Chinese and the driver does not know English. With a map, a pencil, paper and body language we agreed to go to 2 sites in Shanxi province namely the Yungang grottoes and Hanging temples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_Temple.
The highway connected Beijing to Datong is very good. In certain section, the driver sped to 150 km/h with his 5 seats Suzuki sedan car. There is not a lot of cars in these highways but lots of trucks. We were heading North pass Badaling Great Walls and went West to cross border between Hebei and Shanxi provinces. We saw lots of mountains/hills in this region like the ones in California/Nevada. As we approached city of Datong, we started to see motorcycles and donkeys carrying coal. The Yungang grottoes are simply magnificient and dated from the 5th century with beautiful Buddhist stone carvings. We admired this site for about 2 hours visiting different caves and we saw lots of Japanese/Korean tourists then we headed South to visit Hanging temples which is also dated around the 5th century. This monastery is hang on the cliff of the mountain by wooden pillars and inside these temples you can see Bouddhism, Confucism and Taoism. On the way back, we passed by certain winding roads where the scenery was quite stunning before taking a tool highway back to Beijing. Allthough we spent 9 hours in a car, the whole family enjoyed this trip very much.
Finally we will not go to Xian since our objective is to visit 1 city besides Beijing while we are here and that was done with Datong. Tomorrow at 5:00 PM we will leave Beijing for Bangkok then Hanoi the next day on Jul/2. It looks like this travelblog website has some problems with some large photos so in case you don't see them here you can visit them at http://www.flickr.com/photos/longthai/
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anonymous
non-member comment
So, you have crossed 2 provinces, namely Hồ Bắc (Hobei) and Sơn Tây (Shanxi) . Grottos are carved in limestone formations, so this area was a shallow sea about one million years ago and sea retreats, retreats and now submerged mountains become emerged . Limestone are from sediments of coral and coral receefs (recifs coralliens) abound in the sea. We will leave here in 3 days for San Jose !