Sightseeing

On Monday the same foursome that shared the birthday dinner went on a sightseeing excursion just outside Yulin. We took a cab to a place called Zhen Bei Tai, a fort located a few miles outside Yulin on the section of the Great Wall that runs just north of the town. In this stretch, as for a lot of its length, the Wall has crumbled almost into invisibility (see pictures here), but the fort still stands tall and it’s possible to climb to the very top of it, which we did. Slowly, in phases.

It was fun to get outside the city and to get a sense of where it sits geographically. To the north and northwest there is nothing but dry, reddish, desert-like empty land -- all the way to Inner Mongolia. To the southeast is Yulin, sitting in a bright haze of dusty air in the springlike weather. To the east there is construction -- Jingjing said some of it was housing and some might have been factory buildings. There are still people living in cave houses not that far from Yulin, but the government is building housing and trying to get the people to move out of the caves. Jamie saw some of the cave houses on his hiking trips last spring.

From Zhen Bei Tai it was maybe a fifteen minute walk back down the hill to the main road, then down another side road to a place called Red Stone Gorge. This is a spot where a river has carved a gorge, into the sides of which caves have been cut, and onto the sides of which inscriptions have been carved. Inside some of the caves are Buddhist statues, and the ceilings are painted with symbols, some of which seem to be from the Chinese “Book of Changes” (an ancient book), and many others of which I didn’t recognize (not surprising). In one of the caves, all the statues were female, and Jingjing said this was a place where women would come to pray for a healthy child. Each statue was holding some kind of tool or scroll.

These “caves” are cut into the rock and range in side from small to very spacious. They are dry squared off, and not anything like what I pictured last year when Jamie said he had seen places where people lived in cave houses. They could be made quite comfortable (no indoor plumbing, I dare say), especially since they would be cool in the summer and relatively warm in the winter.

My camera ran out of memory halfway up Zhen Bei Tai, so I don’t have pictures of Red Stone Gorge. My traveling companies took some pictures, so I’ll post some as soon as we trade our pics around.

After all this walking we were dusty and hungry, so we caught a bus (my first bus ride) and went downtown for dinner. The streets were jam packed with people, unlike on the day when Jamie and I walked there last week. This was apparently a more typical day, even though it was also a work day for most people. There were people in the park, some of whom were flying kites. There were street vendors selling kites right outside the park. I bought a couple of small ones that with any luck will fit in my suitcase.