河南 Henan Province

DAY ONE

This day mainly consisted of waking up, packing, getting on a bus, getting on a train, meeting our tour guide, getting on another bus, having dinner, and then sleeping in our hotel room.

Some interesting but not very long-winded points of interest from this day:
1) The train trip was 8.3 hours long! I spent most of it reading a philosophy book the American guy in my class recommended to me called 生活的艺术 or, The Importance of Living, which I am not afraid to pass on the recommendation, even though I'm only about a fifth of the way through. And don't worry, I'm reading it in English.
2) One of the Korean students spent most of his time playing with his 气 qi, but before you think that sounds dirty I'll remind you all jovially that it's the internal energy all of us has. You can mold it into a ball and feel it if you're well-practiced enough, and the feeling is definitely real and you can even impose it on other people (I put my hand between the imaginary ball his was making and there was definitely a moment when I felt something!)
3) On the way out of the train station you have to present your tickets, but one of the Korean guys lost his! So he had to pay Y70 for the equivalent of a ticket back to Xi'an just to get out of the train station!
4) Spent most of the night sitting up with Niki and Malcolm (the Belgian guy, who had cut his hair the night before leaving - he used to have a ponytail and he shaved it all right down!) playing them music from my iPod and talking about other music with them. Malcolm has some really interesting tastes, he's into a lot of new-wave folk, alternative folk and antifolk... which you'd think would make him into the regular kind too, but apparently not! Though he does like 12th century French folk music....

Okay, so I try not to be long-winded, and look what happens.

DAY TWO

We set out at 8AM from our hotel to see the Henan Museum. Mostly when you go to museums in Australia there are lots of different sections of historical artifacts: there's the Egyptian room, the Pacific Islanders room, the Chinese room... not much from Australia but plenty from all over. Chinese museums, though, just have Chinese stuff, which is cool because there's plenty of history and it's all interesting, but after a while, every pot starts looking the same. There are always interesting objects you can't quite figure out, and I always like the pottery scenes of everyday life, but after a while even the signs start to look more interesting than pots. Some highlights were: the world's first seismograph, and a burial shroud made entirely out of jade.

Then it was time for lunch, and we set off again, this time to the Yellow River, one of the two most important rivers in China (the other being the Yangtse River, or 长江 Changjiang which is much more boring as "Long River").

The Yellow river is said to be the mother of China, but not, as you'd imagine, because it feeds the people of China. It's really a rather dirty river, so you wouldn't want to swim in it or drink from it (even though it is nice to look at), but it's the mother of China because about thirteen dynasties have had their capitals and/or other important cities along its banks.

The most interesting thing about the Yellow River, though, that we found was the elastic quality of its mud. After a protracted period of decision about who was coming along, we all trundled onto a hoverboat and made our way out to an island in the middle of the river. The island was basically a patch of mud that had been dried out, but as we found out, it was really quite malleable if you pounded hard enough on it. Apparently, the water and mud underneath bubbles up to the surface and you're able to walk on ground that isn't particularly steady - I've only been able to describe it as walking on a pool when a tarp has been pulled over the surface. Your footsteps make waves in the mud and you feel as though the ground beneath you isn't steady, but it's a lot of fun once you get used to the feeling.

Then we went to the top of a mountain that overlooked the Yellow River for a nice view, but the climb was very steep so by the time we got there we were utterly exhausted. On the whole, though, it was nice to be at such a picturesque peak when it was just about dusk, 4-5pm.

DAY THREE

The only thing we did on this day was go to see the famed 少林寺 Shaolin Monestary. During the course of a phone call to my parents, though, it seems that the Shaolin Monestary isn't really that famed after all. The basic run-down is, though, that back in the day, the dude who brought the Buddhist scriptures from India to China lived here. Somewhere along the way, or maybe before that, it was a place to learn martial arts, and the combination of Buddhist teachings and martial arts have strengthened his place's history and it's now considered probably the best school of martial arts in the world. You can most definitely get a better description over at Wikipedia (and it probably won't include the word "dude", either).

The first thing we did was catch the 10AM demonstration of some of the various types of martial arts taught at the Shaolin school. The most memorable of which was the animal gongfu (gongfu = kung fu, just as Beijing = Peking), where the fighting styles took on the various fighting behaviors of different animals. They demonstrated the scorpian, tiger, and praying mantis, but apparently there are many others, such as bulls and rabbits as well.... There were also people using their gathered strength to do incredible things: one guy had two steel spears sticking into his throat and he bent the wooden poles, another threw a pin through a sheet of glass to pop a balloon without breaking the glass, yet another broke iron sticks over his head.

Then we went on to the actual Shaolin Monestary, which was funny for Niki and I because we had just accidentally watched a TV show the night before, a period piece, that featured a big crowd of people storming the Shaolin monestary for one reason or another. Within the Shaolin monestary, our tour guide told us lots of stories, some of which I understood and some of which went over my head. It was a little tiring to hear so many stories in Chinese, but he was very patient with us and didn't fuss about repeating things, but he sometimes found it difficult to find simpler ways to say things.

One memorable myth was about a turtle-like creature, a descendant of the dragon, who was said to bring good luck. There were a few statues of these, and the story goes that if you touch its head, your life would know no worries, if you touch its neck, you'll never be sick, and if you touch its teeth, you'll be prosperous in the future. So of course, everyone went and touched each of these places, and they have done for so many years the stone is smooth. There was also the thousand year-old tree with no gender, the smallest cooking pot for Tang dynasty Shaolin students, and carvings of the Shaolin morning exercises.

But my favorite story explains the reason why Shaolin monks only bow with one hand beneath their chin instead of two pressed together. The story goes that Batuo (the dude with the Buddhist scriptures) came over from India will all this Buddhist knowledge to teach and help translate. When he arrived during the Northern Wei dynasty, he first had some questions and felt he wasn't entirely right in his understanding, so he went to the mountains for nine years (there's another story about leaving his impression on a rock that he sat against for nine years - if you're able to see his outline in the rock, you're more Buddhist than anyone else), while everyone started work on the translations. When he came back, there was another young man who wanted to become his apprentice. During the winter, when the grounds were covered with snow, this young man went to Batuo and said, "Will you teach me the way of the Buddha?" Batuo replied, "Only when the snow falls red will I teach you the way of the Buddha." So, the young man thought about it for a while. After a few days, he found the solution: he cut off his right arm and sprayed the snow of the ground with his blood, so that the entire courtyard of snow in front of Batuo's lodgings was red. Only then did Batuo consent to have the young man as his apprentice. So now, all the Shaolin monks bow with just one hand under their chin, signifying that their right arm has figuratively been cut off to learn the way of the Buddha.

Then there was the Pagoda Forest, which is the burial site of Shaolin's most famous monks. The levels of the pagoda indicate the ranking of the individual, and the highest pagoda was seven levels tall, reserved for a man who helped stem off a coup (or something - that story got a little lost in translation). The pagodas have little doors in them, where the ashes of the dead are put, and if the door is open, then it's a public grave (there was only one that we saw there). The children's grave was also public, there was only one of them, and it was very small and much less valued than the others, even the public grave. The oldest pagoda still standing was one from the Tang dynasty, and was built in 781AD. There was a new one, with interesting inscriptions and engravings on it - there were engravings of a television, computer, video camera, aeroplane, train, and a car on it. All the things needed for an enjoyable afterlife!

Then it was off to lunch, which was interesting because the place we had lunch was right next door to one of the other martial arts schools in the area, and the children were practicing just outside. After lunch we shopped a little with mean shop assistants who wouldn't let us haggle them down too much, and I was very frugal and only bought myself a t-shirt. Which, incidentally, I'm wearing right now! It's grey and has a picture of the Shaolin temple on the front, with the back describing all the different types of gongfu they teach at Shaolin. After lunch we attended one of those sales pitches for some Shaolin medicinal products, mostly hand creams and muscle ache remedies, all of which smelled like Tiger Balm, but the sales guy was pretty crazy! There was this one hand cream that helped with burns, so the guy got this red-hot metal chain, shoved his hand on it, showed us the burns, and then slathered his hand with the cream! I mean, talk about insane! About ten minutes later he washed it off and you couldn't see even a mark of the burn, which was pretty cool, but man. Talk about believing in the products you're hawking.

DAY FOUR

We woke up at 6:30AM on the last morning of our trip, in order to get in enough time at 龙门 Longmen before our train departed. The drive there was long, and mostly boring because we had to cut through a big industrial area, which all seemed to be deserted, even early in the morning, and by the time we got there we had napped off most of our early-morning blues. We were woken up even more by the freezing cold temperatures outside (it was 9C when we arrived and only 13C when we left), but it was all right once we started walking around.

Longmen is the site of many Buddhist carvings in little grottoes in the side of a mountain, along the banks of the 伊江 Yi River, dating back to the fifth century AD. There are nearly three thousand niches and caves, big and small, and nearly eleven thousand individually-carved Buddhist figures. Some of them are big, carved for people in particular, but there are lots and lots of smaller ones, no bigger than dolls, but the most impressive one was the Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas. Here, the wall of the cave looks to be covered with little dots, but in fact they're all little Buddhas, no bigger than a couple of inches tall, and it was really impressive. Almost as impressive as the twenty-metre tall Buddha, the main attraction. We spent a happy fifteen minutes arranging (almost) everyone for a big group photo in front of the big Buddha.

After that, we just went to a jade shop, where half of the group stood around looking bored and the other half bought things, and I got in my obligatory fire hydrant photo (it seems that almost everyone has one of those "must-take" photos - Niki's is a photo of her with her foot sticking out, because her father can't seem to take a photo without doing that, sort of like Asian students can't help making the peace sign).

Then after lunch we took the train home, fought for a taxi that wouldn't charge us Y5 more than it was worth to get back to the university, and collapsed in our beds at around 10PM. Overall, an outstanding trip!