Trip to Henan Province: Part Two

I was woken up just before our stop, and spent most of the time leading up to the stop looking out the window. Everything had changed drastically overnight. The soil was a different colour, there was a ton of poor housing, the land was all farmer fields, and the air... oh, the air. I thought it was foggy out. Good Lord, was I wrong! The smog was so thick in this area, your view of buildings less than 100 metres away was obscured. All my pictures from this trip look like I was taking pictures of things from far far away, but they were way closer than they appeared.

Once we left the train station at Luoyang, we were immediately harassed for tourist trips, buses, etc. This was a recurring theme on this trip. One man wanted to take us on a bus to the Shaolin temple, which was on our agenda, but not until later. He followed us to the ticket office, where we bought tickets to return to Wuxi on Sunday, and followed us back, continuing to harass us and tell us we need to get on the bus or we won't ever be able to get there (they're a little drastic in their sales approach - a now or never sales pitch). We made our plans over his voice, and headed off to the Grottoes.

The Grottoes were all in a mountain in Luoyang, and were essentially little man made caves all with Buddha carved into the rock. The carvings were so intricate and detailed, but largely very similar. I have a lot of pictures from that day, and I'm sure a lot of the Grotto pictures look very similar. What was interesting though, was that almost all the Buddhas had no head. This was because during the Cultural Revolution in China (See: Chairman Mao), anything discovered to be Buddhist (among other things) was destroyed. So because the Grottoes were all carvings of Buddha, they smashed the head off of each of the Buddhas (except the really big ones, as I would imagine it's quite difficult) so they now all have no face. However, apparently, the Europeans have many of these heads, mostly serving as paperweights. I guess they were a big touristy souvenir back in the day.

Once we had walked for hours, and we were all exhausted, we headed back. On the way back, we had come across a few interesting things. We stopped at a temple, which featured two memorable sights: A large bell, and a pond. The bell was huge, and had a hanging log used to hit it with. You were allowed to hit the bell, and apparently the number of times you hit it meant something. 3, 6 and 9 hits all meant different prophecies for you. I believe 6 was for long life, and 9 was for wealth. Most people hit it 9 times. The unfortunate part was that the bell had clearly become nothing more than a tourist attraction, as they had slapped all sorts of gawdy Chinese crap on it (cheap poster like Chinese Characters, etc) to the point where it looked more like fake pirated shit than a historic bell. You can never be sure what's a real attraction, and what's fake and unimportant here.

The other cool part was the pond. Once again, who knows if it's real or fake, but the Chinese love to throw money away for luck, so it's at least plausible. It was a pond full of fish and money, and you were supposed to throw in bills. If your bill floated, it meant long life. If it sank, it meant wealth. I don't know why they're mutually exclusive, but they were clearly popular. The weird part is it was full of coins as well. I'm not sure why, since it's quite clear that coins will sink. I don't think it's much of a prophecy, but what do I know? I'm just old whitey.

Also on the way back, we stopped at this little area, for lack of a better word. I'm not sure what to call it, but there was stairs leading down to water, about waist high, and a small tunnel, leading to who knows where. I don't know the purpose of this thing, but there were a bunch of boys playing there. They were mostly wet, and spraying water at each other. They also had a bag of crabs that I assume they had gathered from the tunnel. What was funny was that a few of the boys were swimming in the water, and they were butt naked. We hung out with the kids a bit, and Thomas was snapping pictures of everything he could. If it didn't cost so much to get into the Grotto grounds, I would have assumed they were very poor kids, as they were dirty, and showed all the signs of beggar children. They did hit us up for money eventually, but that's because Thomas was taking so many pictures of them. Thomas eventually let them take his bottle of juice, by telling one of the boys asking for money to take the bottle out of the side pocket on his bag. They all grabbed for it and started yanking on him as much as they could, like vultures over a carcass, until the bottle got loose and they all ran off.