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Published: June 10th 2007
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Spent a night to break the trip at Lanzhou, quite a big city, a bit smoggy. Had to go to Bank of China to use the ATM, found it and used the machine without any hassle. We dined out to a Korean restaurant next door to the hotel, it was very interesting and fun, there's a hot plate with coal underneath sunken in the middle of the table, you order your food and cook it yourself to your liking, we had veggies, different cuts of beef and squid, delicious! Only Susan and I had the squid, Anthony and Kit were squeamish about it and did not even try. Apparently you can also order dog meat says our guide but we passed on the opportunity. The next morning we drove to a town where there is a dam, cant remember the name of it at the moment, anyway this is where we get the speed boat to the awesome Bingling Si caves, this by far is the best Buddhist caves/relics I have seen ever. Very impressive, the scenery is gorgeous it is well worth the 1 hour boat trip. You need to walk half an hour or take a jeep to
the Tibetan monastery further up the dried up river, a few including me opted to hire a jeep and we were met up by a nice monk in the monastery and showed us around, he is very enthusiastic, offered us tea and rock hard bread. It was such a nice gesture we dont want to offend him so since we cant dig our teeth into the stick bread we discreetly gave it to Ameena to hide and put away in her fleece jacket pockets, to throw away later. Back to town he wad dinner at a local restaurant, had a big spicy whole fish, quite lovely but extremely bony for my liking, it was caught from the Yellow river so I was told. Albert broke the plastic chair he was sitting on, he got up too quickly for me to take a photo but quite funny, embarassing but he walked away from it with dignity still intact. It is quite hard to order when the server cant understand English, and the little bit of Chinese phrases we memorized is no help, we must be pronouncing it wrong, anyway it worked out in the end thanks to our guide John. Retired
early and head back to the hotel and watched the women's final of the French Open, had to turn the volume off, cant understand it anyway it's in Chinese, took a good 20 minutes before the match was shown, tons of adverts and they have to draw the lottery numbers first! Next morning we headed for Xiahe, we have to cross the Dam so the truck had to take a ferry for a 3 minute ride to the other side, as we go up the road once we crossed we got stuck in traffic, turns out a truck heavily laden with cargo got stuck in the mud, the imbecile of a driver who got himself stuck does not seem to know what to do and was just sitting there waiting for things to happen, to make things worse, the local crew is digging a ditch right in front of the truck to put a PVC pipe in as part of the bridge construction on the dam, so after a lot of wait, Claire and Tony, our drivers decided to help get him unstuck, through our guide John they told him how to dig himself out, and people started shoveling including
a few of our people, soon enough we are through, and off to Xiahe finally.
LANZHOU:
Lanzhou is an industrial city of about three million people. It is located on the shores of the Yellow River and was a major stop on the Silk Road, where it was known as the Golden City. From the 5th to the 11th century the city was a major seat of Buddhist learning, and it acquired its present name during Qing Dynasty in 1656. Until 19th century, Lanzhou was the primary point in crossing the Yellow River via a bridge made by chaining a flotilla of boats together with a road on top to cross on.
In addition to the three great grottoes in Gansu Province and the five other famous grottoes in China, the Bingling Temple Grottoes hang on a Jishi Hill cliff in the upper reaches of Liujiaxia Dam. Originally engraved in the year 420, the grottoes frequently changed names. Finally during the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644), its name became Bingling, which in Tibetan means ten thousand Buddha.
Today people attach more and more importance to these treasured Bingling Thousand Buddha Caves. These grottoes divide into three
parts as upper temple, caves, and lower temple, distributed on the cliff. Totally there exist 196 shrines, 694 stone statues, 82 clay sculptures and frescos covering over 900 sq meters (1,076 sq yards). These exquisite stone statues with themes of culture, dance, decorative patterns and Buddhist art, including pagodas and frescos have a reputation as great as that of the Mogao Caves. The representative figures are a lying clay statue of Buddha of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386 - 534) and the 25-centimeter-high stone statue of a maidservant of the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907), one of the most precious artwork sets in China today.
The trip out from Lanzhou to the Buddhist caves of Bingling Si is one of the best excursions you can make in all of Gansu Province - enough in itself to merit a stay in Lanzhou. Not only does it offer a glimpse of the spectacular Buddhist cave art that filtered through to this region along the Silk Road, but it's a powerful introduction to the Yellow River .
The caves are carved into a canyon beside the Liujiaxia Reservoir on the Yellow River, and can be reached only by boat at certain times
of the year , the whole trip takes up to twelve hours, which includes less than two hours at the caves, but the scenery en route makes it all worthwhile.
From Lanzhou, the first stage of the expedition is a two-hour bus ride through impressively fertile loess fields to the massive Liujiaxia Hydro-Electric Dam a spectacular sight poised above the reservoir and surrounded by colourful rocky mountains. At the dam you board a waiting ferry, which takes three hours to reach the caves. From the ferry, the views are excellent: of fishermen busy at work, and peasants cultivating wheat, sunflowers and rice on the dark, steep banks. During the trip, the ferry enters a tall, hung gorge , where the river froths and churns; you'll see sections of the bank being whipped away into the waters. It's said that the Yellow River carries some 35 kilos of silt in every cubic metre of water - hence its constant murkiness and its name.
The ferry docks just below the Bingling Si Caves. Cut into sheer cliff, amid stunning scenery above a tributary of the river, the caves number 183 in all. They are among the earliest significant Buddhist monuments
in China - started in the Western Jin and subsequently extended by the Northern Wei, the Tang, Song and Ming. Since they were spared through inaccessibility from the attentions of foreign devils in the nineteenth century and the Red Guards in the twentieth, most of the cave sculpture is in good condition, and some impressive restoration work is in progress on the wall paintings. The centrepiece sculpture, approached along a dizzying network of stairs and ramps, is a huge 27-metre seated Buddha, probably carved under the Tang. The art work at Bingling Si reached its peak under the Song and Ming dynasties, and though the wall paintings of this period have been virtually washed away, there remain a considerable number of small and exquisite carvings.
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john
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you got my good side gilbert. :)