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We left Xiahe at 6am on the morning of the 12th to get back to Xining. A little girl vomited in the aisle early in the journey, which, as usual, took an hour or so longer than it was meant to, but we got into Xining in decent time and managed to shower and repack before getting onto our next bus, this one to Zhangye. We arrived at around 1am and immediately sprang into action as the world's most efficient travellers, organising a driver for the next day before we'd even arrived at our hotel. This hotel was much, much nicer than the last one - it had running water, working lights and everything! It did, however, have three flights of stairs for Hannah and I to haul our enormous suitcases up. The staff at reception took our bags off us when we arrived and gestured to the night porter, so we thought we'd got lucky and he would bring our bags up for us. What actually happened was that they dragged our bags behind the night porter's desk, and we waited in our room for forty minutes whinging about our lack of pyjamas. In the end, I went down to investigate and the night porter nearly crippled himself helping me bring the bags up - he tried to use the straps on mine to carry it like a rucksack, and toppled backwards under the weight of it. Oops.
The next morning, we woke up to rain - only the 7th day of rain Zhangye had seen that year, if claims made by local Project Trust volunteers are true - although luckily it had died away before we reached the Mati Si grottoes, which were about an hour's drive away. We headed straight for the main cluster of caves, where the famous hoof-print, supposedly, quote: "from a mystical fairy horse", for which the whole site was named can be found ('Mati' means horse hoof). Everything was pale, misty and slowly brightening as we walked through a short twist of small hills from the car-park to the caves; stopping at the top of one of these small hills, we could either look behind to a horizon of blue mountains, or down to where the caves were cut in a pyramid formation into the cliff-face. Amazingly, we were almost the only tourists. Navigating the caves would have been hell otherwise, as they were all connected by only the narrowest passages and tightest stairways - or ladders. At one point, you had to climb a near-vertical ladder through a hole in the cave ceiling, then wriggle about on a filthy wooden platform in a dark space probably the height and width of an armchair so you could twist yourself about enough to climb the next short flight of steps to the next real cave.
At each level, there was a corridor leading along the cliff-face with small individual caves at intervals further into the cliff. The differences between these caves were minimal: all were exactly the same size and layout, each with its own small gold Buddha statue against the back wall, painted, draped in bright fabrics and sat before a tray of incense sticks. In some of the 'rooms' the walls were decorated with painted patterns; in others, the paintings had faded and in others it seemed like someone had tried to hide the original paintwork with black paint. Most of the walls were badly scarred with black smoke stains and cracks. The outside corridor areas were, thought, brightly painted in the same style we'd seen at other Buddhist temples in Tongren and Xiahe. The highest of the grottoes is sickeningly high; I was shaking as I stood out on the uppermost balcony, which juts a couple of feet out from the cliff face. I think it probably is the height of them that makes the grottoes so impressive; most of the other tourists we saw didn't even bother looking into each room and there were some parts which I'd even say looked tacky (for example a larger chamber near the top, which had a huge dusty wooden dresser in it and was decorated with fake-candle lightbulbs and a huge sparkly cross-stitch of a Buddha. The worst was one of the main lower rooms, which was carpeted in wood-effect linoleum). The best caves were the lowest ones, which were separate from the honeycomb of smaller ones slightly higher up. These were much, much larger, the ceilings upwards of 20 feet high. The centre-piece of the main cave was the most enormous tangkha (still experimenting with how I'm meant to spell that. Tangkha? Tankha?) I've ever seen, covering nearly the whole wall, and an altar of candles, incense sticks and devotional offerings like white scarves. It's all a horrible fire-hazard really, but they seem to get away with it. Our favourite of the caves was the giant one with a wide hallway stretching back so deep into the cliff that you could barely see where you were going. The walls here were lined with rows and rows of Buddhas, carved into niches in the wall so high that their crossed knees were at eye-level. Each Buddha was a little different, in expression and pose but also because some had been painted and others hadn't, and some had been smashed and hacked at and others hadn't. It would have been great to have a tour guide for this bit, because we still don't know why the carvings had been attacked and others left. In some parts of the lower caves, plaster had been applied and 'the thousand Buddhas' painted on top of it; some Buddhas had had their faces scored across with big Xs, others had been chipped away whole. At first we assumed all of this was something to do with the Cultural Revolution, but apparently there have been big problems with people chipping away things like this to keep as souvenirs or to try to sell on.
Our next stop after Mati Si was the Danxia Landform Geology Park, which was another two hours' drive away. Luckily this passed very easily, as we all passed out within minutes of getting in the car. We slept like babies for nearly the full two hours, which you'd think would leave us refreshed and ready for the next part of the day, but no. We were barely out of the car before Hannah was announcing that she could see the landforms through the gate so there was really no need to actually go in. Ignoring Hannah, we bought our tickets and hopped onto the tour-bus, which drove us through the park along a winding brick road (unfortunately not a yellow one) and dumped us at various viewing posts along the way. The landforms we were there to see were the ridges of stripy orange and yellow rock. It all looked a bit like the surface of a different planet and, once the road had turned away from the park gates, it went on for as far as you could see in each direction. Unfortunately, our interest in geology is and was pretty minimal, so we mainly just rushed off the bus, nodded our approval and took a few photos before dashing back onto the bus and plonking ourselves back into our hard-won seats. The Chinese tourists were much more appreciative though - they gasped and shouted their amazement whenever a new part of the landscape was revealed, which actually might have been my favourite part of the whole bus tour. I should say, in our defense, we were trying to make our tour of the Geology Park as fast as possible so we could make it back to Zhangye in time to visit the Giant Buddha Temple. All of our efforts towards this were wasted though, as our driver was nowhere to be found in the car-park and we had to wait for him to get back from god-knows-where before we could set off again.
The Giant Buddha Temple was just about to close when we sprinted up to the ticket booth, but with some pleading we managed to convince them to hold off on chaining up the door just long enough to let us through. The Buddha in this temple is famous as the largest reclining Buddha in China and yeah, it's pretty big. A good number of anything you visit in China, particularly the Buddha sculptures, professes to be the biggest or the oldest something-or-other, but often they're the biggest or oldest of something very specific (largest, indoor, clay, seated etc. etc.) and so quite underwhelming, but this one wasn't. It's also about 1000 years old, which you can hardly believe when you see how well preserved it is. The rows of creepy erhats flanking the Buddha hadn't fared so well, but the crumbling away of clay from many of their arms meant you could see the wooden supports beneath and get an idea for how it had all been built, which was fascinating.
Throughout all of our travelling so far, Cat and I had had to put up with bragging from all the Gansu volunteers about how much better their noodles were to ours. Nold and Alex had been the most vocal in their boasts about the quality of their local noodles and, as Hannah was sceptical about their claims too, we decided for tea just to hop into a taxi and ask them to take us to a good (cheap) noodle restaurant. This worked pretty well and we had a really good dinner... although not as good as we'd been led to believe it would be. Tut tut.
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