Dozing Budha of Mogao
Jiayuguan, Gansu, China, July 2
As a clarification to my previous entry, I really don't mind being stared at while traveling. But I do know it bothers some people, and I thought my experience might be of use to others. An email correspondent has pointed out that traveling with a 6-foot black woman (or man) in China would probably be an even better way not to be stared at. I would be happy to test this method also if the opportunity presents itself.
The sleeper train to Dunhuang (June 29/30) was actually more comfortable than I expected, although there was no air conditioning and the electric fan did not turn on until pretty late at night when it had already started to cool down anyway. We had obtained our tickets through the hotel in Urumqi without having to fight through the lineless ticket scrum at the station. I was expecting we would have to battle our way onto the train, but the ticketed passengers formed a fairly neat line, albeit with a certain amount of cutting.
It turned out the sleeper cars were way at the front of the train, and we did not have time to walk all the way there before the train left the station, so we walked through 5 or 6 cars to get to our reserved places. Our bunks were not large (Leslie had to scrunch up a bit to fit), but definitely better than on the sleeper bus. A little girl traveling with her mother in the bunk just across from us didn't take her eyes off the bizarre foreigners for at least 90 minutes straight.
I think it was a new record for my trip.
I had hoped to arrive in Dunhuang early in the morning, get to the Mogao caves soon after opening, and head on to Jiayuguan (western terminus of the Great Wall) in the same day. But the train took several hours longer than I had thought, which made that timeline impossible.
The Mogao caves are artificial caves dug into a canyon wall near an oasis. In the Silk Road days, the complex was at least a week's detour off the main route to Central Asia, but many merchants made the trip either to pray for help in crossing the demon- and bandit-infested howling wilderness to the west, or to give thanks for having successfully crossed it from the east. There are Buddhist wall paintings and statues representing different eras spanning over 1,000 years, although most of the remaining statues date only from 1700 or after.
Mogao was also the site of the (in)famous Library Cave, which had about 50,000 old paintings and scrolls. About 80% of them, including most of the best ones, have ended up in museums in Britain, France, the USA, and Japan. The PRC government is understandably upset about this, but I didn't think our guide overdid the subject. All visitors to the caves must be guided, and the caves have their doors closed when not being visited to protect the paintings from sunlight. There are about 500 caves which have paintings or statues left, but on the regular tour you only get to see 10 of them. If you want to see the depictions of Tantric sex in one cave, you have to buy a special ticket that costs $65, 5 times as much as the regular ticket for 10 caves. We decided to forgo this dubious pleasure.
I hope all the guides are as good as the one we had. Her English was excellent, and she could answer all our questions, both about the art and about the history of the complex.
Unfortunately, Leslie started to feel violently ill after we had visited four caves, having not felt entirely well all morning. The only likely reason was the previous day's dinner, which we had eaten at a guidebook-recommended restaurant. I seem to be back luck for her with regard to restaurants: after we met for dinner just before I reported for basic training in 2001, she ended up hospitalized with a temperature of 103 F (I didn't notice any problem with my food then either). She insisted that I finish the tour after getting her to a good place to lie down and wait. I allowed her to convince me after a few minutes.
The massive seated and reclining Buddhas are awesome. The reclining Buddha looks kind of strange because accumulated dust makes it look like the left eye is closed and the right eye is half-open. Both eyes are actually half-open.
After the tour, we went to the best hotel in the vicinity of Dunhuang, since (as Leslie pointed out) if you're sick in a foreign country it's a lot better to be in a good hotel than a bad one. She slept for about 14 hours straight and felt much better afterwards. I watched some of the World Cup coverage and also the ongoing festivities for the Chinese Communist Party's 85th anniversary spectacular. The CCP's celebration was amazingly bizarre, and I wonder if it's being covered in the Western press much. Massive choirs of children, uniformed soldiers acting out scenes from politically inspiring actions, and a huge assembly of dancers representing many of the PRC's ethnic minorities (including Koreans) were among the highlights. A musical number that I'm pretty sure was about the early completion of the railroad to Lhasa was the highlight. Male dancers in hardhats carrying pickaxes and railroad ties pranced around in various configurations on the massive stage as a man and woman sang about (I presume) their achievements. If I hadn't felt perfectly well I'd have assumed it was some kind of fever-induced hallucination.
The next morning (July 1) I set out on what was supposed to be a six-hour bus ride here. Leslie, fully recovered, went back to the caves in the morning and took a plane to Beijing in the afternoon, thus rendering me visible to the Chinese again.
It ended up being the trip from hell, taking 11 hours and involving hours of bone-jarring travel over dirt roads because the main road was being fixed. Also, someone took my watch. Not off my wrist, but off my backpack which was next to me on the seat when I dozed off for a second (I had taken the watch off to let it dry since the band was completely sweat-soaked). It was no Rolex, and in fact I had paid nothing for it at all but got it from a barracks-mate who was going to throw it away because the battery had died, but the incident still put me in a foul mood. At the end of the ride, well after dark, the driver and ticket collector tried to get me to exit on the outskirts of town and take a taxi rather than drive me to the bus station in the center. I refused.
It wasn't all bad, though, since we did get to see some blasting in progress. A guy with a walkie-talkie stopped the bus, and for a few minutes I couldn't tell what was going on. Then there was a huge spout of dust from the ground about 200 yards ahead, closely followed by the boom. There were 5 or 6 blasts in total, and the kids on the bus loved it.
This morning (July 2) I visited the Jiayuguan Fort, the western end of the Great Wall. Only the fort has been preserved, not the wall itself, so you don't quite get the end-of-the-line view, but it's still an impressive structure in a good setting. The fort blocks a pass between two ranges of snowcapped peaks. At an adjoining museum, the entry sign instructs visitors to "study the Great Wall in order to develop national pride and internationalism."
In a couple of hours I'll be taking an overnight bus to Langzhou, capital of Gansu province. From there, I'll most likely head to the Tibetan monastery at Xiahe (also in Gansu), and then on to Xian.
As a clarification to my previous entry, I really don't mind being stared at while traveling. But I do know it bothers some people, and I thought my experience might be of use to others. An email correspondent has pointed out that traveling with a 6-foot black woman (or man) in China would probably be an even better way not to be stared at. I would be happy to test this method also if the opportunity presents itself.
The sleeper train to Dunhuang (June 29/30) was actually more comfortable than I expected, although there was no air conditioning and the electric fan did not turn on until pretty late at night when it had already started to cool down anyway. We had obtained our tickets through the hotel in Urumqi without having to fight through the lineless ticket scrum at the station. I was expecting we would have to battle our way onto the train, but the ticketed passengers formed a fairly neat line, albeit with a certain amount of cutting.
It turned out the sleeper cars were way at the front of the train, and we did not have time to walk all the way there before the train left the station, so we walked through 5 or 6 cars to get to our reserved places. Our bunks were not large (Leslie had to scrunch up a bit to fit), but definitely better than on the sleeper bus. A little girl traveling with her mother in the bunk just across from us didn't take her eyes off the bizarre foreigners for at least 90 minutes straight.
I think it was a new record for my trip.
I had hoped to arrive in Dunhuang early in the morning, get to the Mogao caves soon after opening, and head on to Jiayuguan (western terminus of the Great Wall) in the same day. But the train took several hours longer than I had thought, which made that timeline impossible.
The Mogao caves are artificial caves dug into a canyon wall near an oasis. In the Silk Road days, the complex was at least a week's detour off the main route to Central Asia, but many merchants made the trip either to pray for help in crossing the demon- and bandit-infested howling wilderness to the west, or to give thanks for having successfully crossed it from the east. There are Buddhist wall paintings and statues representing different eras spanning over 1,000 years, although most of the remaining statues date only from 1700 or after.
Mogao was also the site of the (in)famous Library Cave, which had about 50,000 old paintings and scrolls. About 80% of them, including most of the best ones, have ended up in museums in Britain, France, the USA, and Japan. The PRC government is understandably upset about this, but I didn't think our guide overdid the subject. All visitors to the caves must be guided, and the caves have their doors closed when not being visited to protect the paintings from sunlight. There are about 500 caves which have paintings or statues left, but on the regular tour you only get to see 10 of them. If you want to see the depictions of Tantric sex in one cave, you have to buy a special ticket that costs $65, 5 times as much as the regular ticket for 10 caves. We decided to forgo this dubious pleasure.
I hope all the guides are as good as the one we had. Her English was excellent, and she could answer all our questions, both about the art and about the history of the complex.
Unfortunately, Leslie started to feel violently ill after we had visited four caves, having not felt entirely well all morning. The only likely reason was the previous day's dinner, which we had eaten at a guidebook-recommended restaurant. I seem to be back luck for her with regard to restaurants: after we met for dinner just before I reported for basic training in 2001, she ended up hospitalized with a temperature of 103 F (I didn't notice any problem with my food then either). She insisted that I finish the tour after getting her to a good place to lie down and wait. I allowed her to convince me after a few minutes.
The massive seated and reclining Buddhas are awesome. The reclining Buddha looks kind of strange because accumulated dust makes it look like the left eye is closed and the right eye is half-open. Both eyes are actually half-open.
After the tour, we went to the best hotel in the vicinity of Dunhuang, since (as Leslie pointed out) if you're sick in a foreign country it's a lot better to be in a good hotel than a bad one. She slept for about 14 hours straight and felt much better afterwards. I watched some of the World Cup coverage and also the ongoing festivities for the Chinese Communist Party's 85th anniversary spectacular. The CCP's celebration was amazingly bizarre, and I wonder if it's being covered in the Western press much. Massive choirs of children, uniformed soldiers acting out scenes from politically inspiring actions, and a huge assembly of dancers representing many of the PRC's ethnic minorities (including Koreans) were among the highlights. A musical number that I'm pretty sure was about the early completion of the railroad to Lhasa was the highlight. Male dancers in hardhats carrying pickaxes and railroad ties pranced around in various configurations on the massive stage as a man and woman sang about (I presume) their achievements. If I hadn't felt perfectly well I'd have assumed it was some kind of fever-induced hallucination.
The next morning (July 1) I set out on what was supposed to be a six-hour bus ride here. Leslie, fully recovered, went back to the caves in the morning and took a plane to Beijing in the afternoon, thus rendering me visible to the Chinese again.
It ended up being the trip from hell, taking 11 hours and involving hours of bone-jarring travel over dirt roads because the main road was being fixed. Also, someone took my watch. Not off my wrist, but off my backpack which was next to me on the seat when I dozed off for a second (I had taken the watch off to let it dry since the band was completely sweat-soaked). It was no Rolex, and in fact I had paid nothing for it at all but got it from a barracks-mate who was going to throw it away because the battery had died, but the incident still put me in a foul mood. At the end of the ride, well after dark, the driver and ticket collector tried to get me to exit on the outskirts of town and take a taxi rather than drive me to the bus station in the center. I refused.
It wasn't all bad, though, since we did get to see some blasting in progress. A guy with a walkie-talkie stopped the bus, and for a few minutes I couldn't tell what was going on. Then there was a huge spout of dust from the ground about 200 yards ahead, closely followed by the boom. There were 5 or 6 blasts in total, and the kids on the bus loved it.
This morning (July 2) I visited the Jiayuguan Fort, the western end of the Great Wall. Only the fort has been preserved, not the wall itself, so you don't quite get the end-of-the-line view, but it's still an impressive structure in a good setting. The fort blocks a pass between two ranges of snowcapped peaks. At an adjoining museum, the entry sign instructs visitors to "study the Great Wall in order to develop national pride and internationalism."
In a couple of hours I'll be taking an overnight bus to Langzhou, capital of Gansu province. From there, I'll most likely head to the Tibetan monastery at Xiahe (also in Gansu), and then on to Xian.
posted by jeros | 1:12 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home