The Hanging Monastery

In the early morning we flew to Datong and met our tour guide from the previous day. He had arranged our trip with the national travel agency, and when he was told that there was no english-speaking tour guide available in Datong he decided to spend twelve hours on a hard-seat night train and meet us at the airport in the morning.

Today's trip would be in some style: in order to avoid all the museum/arts-and-crafts/hard-sell business, we'd chosen to simply rent the tour minivan, with crew, for the whole day. It’s three times more expensive, but in China that remains a very reasonable price. Besides, sitting through another jade-carving infomercial was risking bloodshed. So we again spent most of the day sitting in a tour minivan, drinking iced herbal teas, gazing at the scenery and talking of nothing in particular. Contrary to the urban sprawl of Beijing's suburbia, the scenery in Shangxi province is mostly post-apocalyptic wasteland: an endless rocky dusty lunar desert which can't possibly support the few mud and stone villages it contains.

As Glenn, the team's civil engineer, remarked, the hanging monastery on Hengshan mountain is not actually "hanging". More precisely, it is a still-supported structure sitting halfway up a vertical cliff. It is also amazingly cool. We spent forty happy minutes walking on tiny boardwalks between a vertical cliff and a two-hundred-foot drop, peeking in alcoves to find wooden buddhas peacefully gazing towards the valley, climbing steep stairs that emerge on windswept platforms in the middle of a cliff face.

Sadly, we had to leave in a hurry in order to see the Yungang caves, a fifth-century BC buddhist holy site and World Heritage monument. Our guide had not seen the caves in the last three years, and it had obviously changed a lot. Access to the monument proper was through a huge construction site, most likely for a transportation hub and a couple hotels. That's tourism in China for you: three years ago one had to drive 20 miles on a dirt road to get to Yungang, but at most a year from now you'll be able to choose between several four-star hotels overlooking the great stone buddha.

The caves are magnificent, dozens of stone alcoves housing 30-foot high sculptures bathed in soft afternoon light. We got rebuked for photographing burning incense sticks in front of the statues, with no other explanation than "no photograph of incense!" Of course, we knew that burning incense is a devotional gesture, and thus one of those things people might get touchy about – but then the entire site was religious in nature, and we were allowed to photograph that. I had also photographed incense burning numerous times in Thailand and Japan, where as far as I know nobody minds. Apparently, China is complicated.

We had dinner in a typical Datongese restaurant owned by our tour guide's cousin, where we were very obviously the first Caucasian patrons since Marco Polo. The waitresses kept circling our table and giggling at our cluelessness about Chinese cuisine, our clumsiness with chopsticks, and our enthusiasm over beer drinking. As you can expect, this was very unnerving. I can understand why celebrities crave unknown places far from civilization. On the other hand the food was superb, even the soup with those strange gelatinous strands floating in it. We thought they might have been pieces of jelly fish or algae, but they turned out to be made of wheat and rice flour. Disappointingly plain maybe, but still excellent.