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Yungang Grottoes- 30 Junio - Dia 10
The sun hitting the tent woke us up immediately. You do not have time to stay inside the tent since it just gets extremely hot. After my morning stretching and short ab workout , I started adding that to my morning routine 😊 , we were off! Today's plan was to visit the Yungang Grottoes, which is a monastery built by the emperor to the royal families for praying. It took a total of 64 years to built and it consists of huge Buddha structures being carved out of the wall. It is considered a world Heritage site and I was pretty excited to go see it.
We quickly managed to hitchhike our way to Datong. Barely stopping in the busy industrial city, we took a bus to the Yungang Grottoes. All of us felt pretty exhausted today and by the time we got to the grottoes we really just wanted to lay down and do nothing ?
After making coffee with the French press we crawled ourselves to the entrance of the monestary.
It was already late in the day and the lockers where not available so we had to do the whole
excursion with our huge backpacks on, not to exciting. But once we got to the carved mud cliffs all our efforts where worthwhile.
There where multiple carvings and they were really well preserved, for some you could still see the color.
We stayed until closing time and after took a bus to a small village on the outskirts of Datong to find a place too eat and sleep. Eating was easy, finding a place to camp was a bit more challenging. After realizing there where no decent places around the village to camp, we had to taxi to a random place we chose in Google maps which looked more deserted jajaja.
The driver dropped us in the middle of nowhere with a slightly confused face. We got really lucky and found a paved trail leading to a really opened area with a big funeral bowl in the middle. We slept there
Hengshan Mountain - 1 July - Dia 11
Yesterday night we realized we all needed to take a good shower and wash our clothes. We were getting quite stinky.
We took a bus back to Datong and went in search of the only Hostel in the city. We
literally had to beg the landlady to let us use her showers. Accepting to let us use her facilities for an hour we quickly took showers and washed our clothes. How nice does it feel to smell good again. Before taking a bus to Hengshan Mountain we walked around the city square a bit. It was extremely similar to the one in Beijing.
It took us a couple of hours to get to Hengshan, which it is a mountain devoted to Taoism. Quite a touristy mountain with the option of hiking or talking a gondola up.
The bus dropped us off next to a river which was being controlled by a huge dam upstream of it. We took advantage of the water source of course. I started filtering water meanwhile Bean and Leo washed our shoes. Definitely attracted more attention then we wanted to. A lot of questions and worried faces regarding us drinking the water from the silty river. The Chinese dont seem to understand filters.
When we moved farther upstream I did understand the concern of the Chinese citizens...the public bathroom was literally next to the river. We kept on walking hoping that the sanitary water was not being discharged on the river ?
By the time we got to the base of the mountain it was 4pm. We decided to hike up another nearby mountain instead of Hengshan since we where getting worried about finding a camping spot in such a touristic attraction. We looked at the nearby mountains and one across the lake caught our eye. It had big ladder fields climbing through its face. Resuppling ourselved with ramen noodles for dinner, we went for it.
Crossing the lake was a whole experience by itself. It was more muddy then we thought so... causing us to make the fatal error of stepping all the way through the mud and getting our cleaned shoes dirty again ?
Throughout the way up we found a group of chinese workers pumping water from the river to some small trees. When we told them about our idea of camping a bit higher up, they just laughed. Committed, we kept on climbing until finding a perfect camping spot. We set up camp and tried to boil water for our ramen noodles. Since white gas is banned in China we had to resort to another technique which did not use our traditional gas stoves. By using a modified beer can and pure alcohol we had our own little stove Boling water in a matter of 15 minutes. A bit slower but efficient ? After the sun set behind the mountains we happily went to bed
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