The following morning we walked a short distance to the tourist centre for the fabulous Maijishan grottoes where the carving of Buddhas into the hillside of a mountain shaped like a haystack (and called “Haystack Mountain” for some reason) began in 386 AD and continued until the 11th century. Little buses took us up to the foot of the mountain and we climbed up a zig-zag of wooden platforms until we reached the highest level with the most dramatic sculptures.
eThe road from Tianshui to Xi’an in Shaanxi Province runs through uniquely Chinese landscape with high forested hills with almost vertical sides, and the motorway passes under the mountains (the Qingling Range which divides northern from southern China) through a succession of tunnels, the longest being 12.29 kms, the second longest tunnel in China.
The mountainous landscape stops as abruptly as it began as we exit from the Qingling Range. A huge flat plain involved some intensely boring driving to Xi’an through a succession of major towns I had never heard of. With a population of several million, Baoji is small by Chinese standards but looked larger then it was because it is a long thin town along the banks of a river. Mile after mile after mile of tower blocks 30 to 50 storeys high. A huge factory on its eastern edge is, we were told, the world’s biggest robot manufacturer. Then a succession of small (Chinese definition) towns of 500,000 to 800,000 people: Meixian, Talbaixian, Yangtong, Yingling etc. strangely attractive in their horribleness: tower blocks, power stations, oil refineries, huge factories, shopping malls, flyovers that make Spaghetti Junction look pathetic. The new China – as different from the old China as you could get.
And then Xi’an, with a population of 8 million. Utterly boring until we saw the huge walls of the square old town from which the Silk Road began 2,200 years ago during the reign of the Emporer Qinshihuang of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC). The ancient walls are still intact and Green found us a surprisingly cheap hostel close to the West Gate through which the Silk Road camel caravans passed. You can cycle or walk all the way round the walls, about 10 miles.
Looking for somewhere to eat, we tried a succession of places where nobody spoke English and the menus were in Chinese, amazingly for a town with huge numbers of Western tourists, althouh they tend to stay (and eat) in their posh hotels. So we finished up in a hotpot establishment. Hotpots are an excellent way of eating as a group if you know what to do, and we didn’t. Bit of a disaster but at least we ate some under-cooked or over-cooked food and went to bed.
