| I have officially caught a cold/flu. I was pretty sure about it yesterday,
and had an idea about it the day before, but today it’s undeniable.
To tell the truth, I feel quite miserable. I’ve got a bit of a fever
with shivers and aches, my throat is sore, my sinuses itch, and there’s
lots of coughing. I’m not exactly sure where I got this cold/flu.
It may have been that MaBing’s cold has been with me since I was
at Heavenly Lake, and only now did it surface because of the amount of
exercise I’ve been getting and how cold it’s been. But it’s
just as likely that I caught it from anyone else. Since the Chinese here
love to spit, especially when they are sick or have lots of phlegm, I’m
exposed to MUCH more disease than is healthy. In addition, for some reason
Chinese people don’t seem to think that having a cold counts as
being sick. Therefore they take no precautions to protect others when
they have a cold. People go to work (even in the food service business),
attend school, and eat from the same plate as others with their diseased
chopsticks, shake hands, etc… All of this happens with no increase
in their hygiene habits, such as hand washing. It really gives me the
creeps to think, just by being around all these spitting people, how much
other people’s bodily fluid I’ve been in contact with. I’ve
tried very hard to use disinfectants and such to keep myself relatively
germ-free, washing my hands whenever possible, but out here in the less-developed
areas, it’s quite impossible to do a good job. And apparently I
haven’t done enough. Partly due to this sickness, I almost decided
to go back to Shanghai today. I’m glad I didn’t. Here’s
the story.
There’s only one place left that I had been wanting to go to on
this trip. It’s called the Binglingsi Temple Caves. They’re
another set of “Thousand Buddha Caves”, 70 km outside of Lanzhou.
Getting there is rather difficult. You have to get yourself from Lanzhou
to a certain spot along the Yellow River, and then take a boat 54 km along
the river to the caves. In the end it requires around 8-9 hours of travel
for only one hour of cave browsing. From what I had read, it might also
have cost me anywhere from 600-1000 RMB for the entire trip, and when
the most I had spent so far on a day of sightseeing was around 300-400,
I felt very reluctant.
Another issue I was faced with was the possible lack of flights tomorrow
to Shanghai. I had read that flights to Shanghai only flew every other
day, and I really didn’t want to stay in Lanzhou for three nights,
catching a plane on Wednesday.
These two possible monkey wrenches and my lack of health were slowly convincing
me just to go back to Shanghai today and forget about Binglingsi. Somewhere
inside me, though, there was a voice saying to me, “Wah, wah, my
body hurts… You little whining wimp. You get a little sick and things
get a little inconvenient, and you decide to run back to Shanghai, giving
up an amazing opportunity to see some pieces of history that no one you
know has ever seen before. How sad.” So here’s what I decided.
I would look for a less expensive way to get to Binglingsi, and go to
the airline ticket office to see if I couldn’t get a flight for
tomorrow. If both of these things worked out, I would go. Otherwise, I
thought, fate and my body must be telling me that it was time for my trip
to be over.
Well, it all worked out. After calling a couple of local travel agencies
about getting me to Liujiaxia, the place where you catch the boats, and
getting quoted around 550 RMB just to get me to that point and back, I
finally talked to a travel agent in my hotel’s lobby who said I
could just catch a bus from a place right near the hotel, all the way
to Liujiaxia, though it would be a little slower. I found the spot and
confirmed this information (the tickets were only 11.50!!!). Heartened,
I went immediately to the airline booking office, which was able to get
me on a flight tomorrow afternoon. Perfect!
I hopped on the next bus, which was a 10:15 AM bus. It took over three
hours to get there, because of bad roads (literally driving through a
riverbed at one point), but mostly because the bus had to troll the streets
of Lanzhou at 5 km/h looking for more riders, sometimes looping over the
same street twice. Being sick made the smoke on the bus especially hard
to handle.
 When I got to Liujiaxia, the bus driver let me off and pointed me down
a random road. I walked down it, having no idea where I was going, as
there were no signs regarding Binglingsi, until a guy waving a picture
of a boat approached me. He quoted me 200 RMB to get me there and back,
50 minutes each way, on his little speedboat. After that, it was the Taersi
Temple situation all over again, but far less severe. A bunch of guys
showed me pictures of boats, quoting me prices, etc. I went with the first
guy again, mostly because he could get me there in a timely manner (one
guy wanted me to stay there overnight), we could leave immediately (another
guy was going to wait for 6 or 7 more people, though he tried very hard
to deny it), and just like at Taersi Temple, he was the first to approach
me, unlike the others who were trying to steal his business.
200 RMB seemed like a lot, as
back in Turpan 100 got me a car for the day, but I had heard of a whole
boat costing 400 RMB, so I decided not even to haggle with him. It turned
out to be worth it. The view from the boat would have been worth the entire
trip itself. We went westward along the Yellow River for 54 km, through
a couple of gorges and lakes, and all different kinds of terrain. In some
places, the river valley had rocky, jagged walls, some places had smooth
and multi-layered red and yellow hill-like walls, and in some places,
like where Binglingsi is, there are tall skinny towers of stone, like
a stone forest, carved out of the rock by the Yellow River over thousands,
maybe tens of thousands of years. In my original post that I put up before
I started my trip, I listed some terrains that I’d be going over,
but I had no idea I’d be riding a speedboat along the Yellow River.
A highly satisfying surprise.
The caves themselves weren’t a disappointment, either. There are
a couple of basic differences between these caves and the ones at Mogao
in Dunhuang. The caves at Mogao were carved out of the sandstone rock
face, but the statues were all wooden frames with mud/straw/stucco coverings.
Here, most of the statues are carved directly out of the rock wall, so
that the statues and the caves are all one solid piece of stone. Another
difference is that, since the rock here is much harder, the caves aren’t
NEARLY as large. The only ones you can actually walk into are the naturally
formed caves. Many of the sculptures and engravings are even on the surface
of the rock, not really in a cave at all.
There were once three levels of caves (here’s the top two). All
of the caves on the bottom level have been covered up by silt deposits
from the Yellow River (due to dams built in the area, of course), but
luckily a number of the best statues were saved, and placed elsewhere
in the area. The paintings, however, were lost.
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