Fly-by

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Sunday September 24, 2006 - Today we arrived in Datong around 7am. We went to the CITS office at the train station - this is the goverment run tourist office - and planned our day. We decided - like so many others on our train - to just do a day tour and leave the same night on a train to Pingyao. We had a couple of hours to kill so I got a breakfast pancake kind of thing on the street and we bought some snacks for the day. Steve work up sniffly and as the day progressed it turned into a cold. Met back with the group at the train station at 9am where they shuffled us all into two vans - there were 29 people in all. We chose the smaller minivan and ended up in there with a nice English couple and a nice, older Israeli couple. We had a long drive to the first site, the Hanging temple. It is literally a temple built on the side of a mountain, to prevent it being whipped away by flash floods that can come through the area. It was a cold and rainy day - we have stepped out of Beijing and into fall again - so the views were not spectacular. We got to walk around the hanging temple and check it out from all sides before coming back down again. It is wooden with long stilts that go down to the mountain.

At this point it was time for lunch and I decided to get some. Steve went without so I sat with Michael and Faith, the English couple, as well as some others from the group. We had a meal similar to the one we had on the Great Wall tour, but this one was not nearly as nice. We were rushed out of the restaurant and back into the van where we were driven to the Yungang Caves. This is a set of sandstone caves that are full of Buddha carvings and statues. Really impressive actually. Would have been if it hadn't been raining, but it was really impressive anyway. One of these caves houses one of the most famous Buddhas in China. It is very well preserved and is easy to photograph due to it's location. It is the buddha you would most commonloy see a picture of - "the Foreign Minister of China".

From here we would it back to town. The tour was good for getting us around, but the tour guide was fairly a waste of time. There were just too many people and we could barely hear her, and half the time she was talking before we even got to her, so we missed a lot. Back in town we decided to go to a pub for some western food. Michael and Faith joined us and we got a cab. Turned out they didn't serve food at all, so we walked around and ended up at the first place we saw - a chinese version of McDonalds. We all got some sort of chicken, fried and a coke meal. Then a cab back to the train station where we waited it out until our train left. This was a great train ride - we had lower bunks, which were so much easier. We were next to Michael and Faith, which was nice. And there was no one above us - it was nearly empty! I slept well too. Next stop Pingyao.

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Photos

The Hanging Temple
Aside from the constant rain, the hanging temple was a cool sight to see.

Dragon stairs
Unfortunately, we didn't have time to go up the stairs and through the dragon mouth on our tour.

Just hanging around
Oooh, bad joke. Hanging temple...