China Trip - Luoyang

This is part 3 of our Western China trip.

After a 2-hour high-speed train followed by a very roundabout taxi ride to our hole-in-the-wall hostel, we went exploring for lunch. Our experience in back-alley markets from Chengdu came in handy, and we ended up eating dumplings for lunch in a wee shop. We were staying off the tourist path, and eating even further off the main strip (as much as Luoyang can be said to have a "main strip"). Our presence seemed to have disturbed a delicate ecosystem of noodle shops and regular customers, in that we basically had to wait for the owner/cook/server to whip up noodle soups for all of the locals taking their lunch breaks before he could take our order for dumplings.  Middle Child and Michael went exploring the fruit market and making friends with the feral kittens while we waited.

After lunch we crossed our fingers, dodged traffic across a busy street, and hopped on a city bus we hoped would take us the 7 KM down the main drag to the primary tourist attraction of Luoyang, the Longmen Grottoes. And it did! Score!

Luoyang was the imperial capital when Buddhism (and Kung Fu!) entered China from India, so Luoyang is where they started carving giant Buddhas into the cliff faces. Ranging in size between one centimeter to 10 meters tall, this was an impressive site that had been worked by hand for hundreds of years.  At the beginning of the site we met a friendly Chinese couple who asked if they could walk with us, and spent the entire afternoon strolling around and chatting.

So many Buddhas. 

Not quite enlightened yet.

Our children are masters at making friends.

Across the river, we stumbled upon Chiang Kai-Shek’s villa where he held the meeting (under the pretense of a birthday party) that would launch the offensive that triggered the Long March and solidified Mao’s leadership of the Chinese communists. It was all well preserved 1930’s decor, in stark contrast to the rest of the temple complex it was housed in.



 

We stayed until the grottoes closed, and wandered for a bit trying to figure out how to get fed and back to our hostel, when we spied the correct bus coming down the street. We flagged it and hopped on. Since we knew food was scarce near our hostel, we took a gamble and disembarked at a likely-looking street corner. There we wandered into a friendly-looking restaurant and pointed at pictures to order too much food. So good! (the highlight was tofu pillows in mysterious yellow garlic sauce) So cheap! So many cartoons and free lollipops for the kids!

The next day we visited the Shaolin Monastery. About an hour from Luoyang (the closest town was Dengfeng, which at a mere 0.6 million population was described by our tour guide as “tiny”), and passed by a number of “Ghost Cities” - enormous housing projects build speculatively that currently sit empty (remember that construction we mentioned last time? It turns out that if the skyscrapers are too far from public transit, nobody can afford to live in them).

The Shaolin temple (The name literally means “Temple in the bamboo forest (Lin) on the Shao mountain) is the birthplace of Kung Fu and Wushu, but also the first Zen Buddhist temple in China, but also an important imperial temple that played a part in choosing the emperor’s successor. The abbott of the Shaolin Temple is akin to the ArchBishop of a large area… about as much power and influence as a provincial governor. Families used to give their sons to the temple to be raised as monks and learn Kung Fu, but since modern families have fewer boys to spare for a life of poverty and dedication the temple has taken to adopting young boys from orphanages (there are between 200 and 300 monks residing at the temple now).

Families do still want their sons to learn kung fu, so the temple grounds are also home to a number of martial arts academies that teaching many hundreds of students (mostly boys). Students typically live at the academy for 4-7 years training in kung fu and wushu for 6 hours each day, and can also choose to specialize in police combat, western boxing, tae kwon do, or movie stunt fighting.

The tree in the back is filled with finger-sized holes from martial arts practice

SHAOLIN MAGIC!!

There are probably worse lives than being a ward of the Shaolin Temple.

The oldest remaining structure in the Shaolin temple.  Buildings in China seem to have a tradition of being alternately burned down and rebuilt by successive generations of warlords.

All that's missing is a super-villain's fortress.

Pagoda forest - resting place of Shaolin luminaries.

After strolling through the temple complex itself we took a cable car up to the peak of the Shao mountain, and were treated to stunning views of forested mountains and limestone cliffs.

We cannot resist a good cable car.

This trinket stand on the top of a mountain has a CNC milling robot.

This platform was used for performing Shaolin magic, faithfully re-enacted by Elizabeth ;^)

Hiking up mountains in China invariably means climbing many, many stairs. Which is more fun when you're chasing an older sibling!

Did I mention there were so many stairs?

Queen of the mountain! Not pictured - the guy offering to remove the cloth from that "Shao Mountain" sign for 20 yuan.

The full temple complex from above

The yellow gondola has an "A" instead of a 4.  In China the number 4 sounds like the word for "Death".  Strangely, no one ever wanted to take the death car so they had to re-label it.

Afterwards our very attentive guide brought us off at the smallest train station in Luoyang and reluctantly dropped us off - sure we were in way over our heads (we were fine. Okay, maybe we were in a little over our heads, but that's what travel is about!).

Most of the waiting area was outside.  The nearby public toilet was truly horrifying.

We hung out at the station waiting for our next train - the overnight slow train to Zhangjiajie. A very different experience than the bullet trains we had been riding thus far, and our last train of the trip, sadly. More like a summer-camp bunk room on rails.  A number of Michael's co-workers asked if there were chickens running around on the train, which leads us to believe there are yet lower classes of train service. 

The kids find this arrangement ridiculous. And awesome.

Eldest adding a new WeChat friend on Elizabeth's phone.

We eventually got to sleep and woke up just outside ZhangJiaJie, a national park that is home to stunning limestone and sandstone cliff formations.  More on that next post!