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| The Suspended Temples | |
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Do you plan for your trips? Do you research on the Internet before you take off? It becomes so natural for us these days to get the travel information we need on the Internet. But I still remember how we traveled in China, without the assistance of the Internet just a few years ago.
On a hot summer night around 11pm, we left Beijing train station and headed to this old western city - Datong. We learned a little about the city from a man who sat next to us. He said we should be careful, for some areas were quite dangerous. He recommended a place at where we could consider staying. He seemed to be an honest person, so we took his word for it. The next morning, we arrived in Datong. Datong is the capital city of Shanxi Province in China. It's also a city that produces and supplies a lot of coal for Beijing. We went to the place that was recommended and settled. It was a very economical guesthouse near the train station. A big room with three beds only cost each of us two dollars a day. |
In the afternoon, we got on the bus to Datong suburb to see Yungang Caves. Unlike buses in America, the buses we took had no air conditioning. All the windows were rolled down so passengers could catch a breeze while the buses were moving. Every time a coal truck went by, it blew the dusty air into our bus. We covered our noses and mouths with our hands while local people simply ignored it. It took us about an hour and a half to get there. There were hundreds of caves that had different sizes of Buddha carved inside. As you can see in the picture on the left, we are very small in comparison to the biggest Buddha statue.
We didn't seem to care about the poor travel conditions at all. All we enjoyed was the splendid heritage of the Chinese culture. After spending two days in Datong, we headed to Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. (To be continued...) |
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In
August of 1994, I went on a trip with my best friend Jung-eun Lee and
her sister. Jung-eun is Korean. In February of 1994, we met in a Catholic
Church in Beijing and became very close friends ever since. At that time,
she was studying Chinese in Beijing Language Institute.
In
1994, we, three college girls, managed the whole trip in the northwest
part of China. The goal of the trip was to see Yungang Caves, Suspended
Temples in Datong and visit the Inner Mongolian Prairie, within a week.
The conditions for traveling were not good at all at that time. I don't
know how much better they are now, either. Traveling by air was unaffordable
to us. Even though train tickets were always hard to get, we decided to
give it a try. I went to the train station early in the morning and waited
in a long line for more than two hours before I got three tickets to our
first destination city — Datong. Can you believe how lucky I was?
The tickets I bought were the last three tickets to Datong for that day.
My friends and I had no idea where we would stay once we got there. We
were going to wing it. 
We
made it back to the guesthouse with no problems. The next morning, we
took a bus that was going to Mount Heng. There was no direct bus going
to the Suspended Temples. We had to transfer to the local transportation
after the bus dropped us off in a small town near the temples. We took
a three-wheel scooter to the site of Suspended Temples. The maximum
capacity for the scooter was three people. It had a hood on top and
the back was open. I still remember on our way back, we kept on laughing
because we couldn't stop hitting our heads against the top. It was a
bumpy dirt road with gravel far from the city. No wonder no real vehicles
would come this way. 
The
Suspended Temple was built more than a thousand years ago. There was
only one way going up and one way coming down. Some areas were quite
narrow. Everybody had to follow the tourist route posted in the major
traffic areas. It didn't take us long to complete the tour. As you can
see the temple is built into the mountain. Wooden posts support every
temple. Those wooden posts are buried into the mountain. One can never
stop questioning how it was done a thousand years ago without any modern
machinery and technology.