Henan: "South of the River"

Early last month I began my 6 week backpacking journey around China, with the intention of visiting six of the country's provinces. I worked my way counter clockwise around the central and southern provinces, starting in Henan and finishing up in Guangxi before returning home to Wuxi, in Jiangsu.

I started my journey by leaving Wuxi on a 16 hour overnight train to Henan's capital, Zhengzhou, with the intention of then taking another train the day I arrived to Luoyang. However, right from the outset the cards were not stacked in my favour.

The apartment where I currently reside is on the very outskirts of Wuxi, in an 'up and coming' district, which basically translates to lots of construction, minimal taxis, buses that do not run past 8pm and no one actually knowing where I live. Do not get me wrong, I like how clean, quiet and new everything is, but it can make life a little difficult. 

The night I was planning to leave, my train was departing Wuxi station at 10:45pm, and being as anally retentive as I am about being punctual, I planned to leave at 8:30 in order to allow for the 30 minute taxi journey to the station, and to leave myself a spare hour and 45 minutes just in case. What exactly I consider to be this 'just in case' scenario is, I will never know, as I inevitably arrive far too early to everything and end up twiddling my thumbs for ages... This particular time it turns out I would need this time. The taxi sent to collect me could not find my apartment and ended up taking nearly an hour to turn up. I arrived at the station with minutes to spare. It was all very dramatic, running through the station, knocking people over only to arrive at the gate just as they were closing the ticket check. However the surly train attendant took pity on me and allowed me through, with a tut and an eye roll, before I ran over to my almost departing sleeper train. 

It had been close to ten years since I last took a Chinese sleeper train and could hardly remember the journey I took from Shanghai to Beijing all those years ago, but I do remember being quite impressed with the experience. Clean beds, lovely staff, room to move and free food offered at regular intervals. Oh how different this experience was...

I know what you are thinking... "Oh Katie, what are you complaining about, that looks fairly reasonable!". Reasonable indeed, but bear in mind that I was travelling during peak season and was only ever able to book upper berths. Just take another look at how much room there is between the bed and the roof. It is physically impossible for me to sit upright at all, and in order for me to to get in and out of my bed I was required to do some pretty amazing gymnastic moves, the likes of which I'm pretty sure would have left Nadia Comaneci impressed.

Being that high up had some upsides though... I hardly ever felt like my bad was going to be stolen as I spent all night hugging it and also - no, no that was it. 

Having a bed placed so high up meant it they were never cleaned properly and I would often spend the first 5 minutes of each journey picking bits of food off my mattress. I also had the air conditioner  about a foot away from my face, afforded me a great of the impossible filthy filters, allowing me to not only be freezing cold all night (despite being provided with bedding) and to be able to think about all the black crap coming off it that I must be inhaling. And the bedding.... oh the bedding.... I'm so very glad I decided to take my own pillowcase. Unidentified stains were many and varied and frequently smelt of urine. Consequently I often chose to forgo the filthy items and shiver under the delightful AC.

Once I managed to get past these initial setbacks I was all set for a night of peaceful slumber before starting my real adventures the next day. How wrong I was. 

On the whole I find Chinese people can be quite loud. Taking a phone call between the hours of 11pm and 5am in a train carriage where people are sleeping is perfectly acceptable. Doing so at a volume verging on shouting? No problem! Sufficed to say that between the yelling, the crying babies, the music being played (the Chinese also seem to be partial to sharing their music with others.... or an aversion to earphones, I'm unsure which) and the early morning wakeup call of spitting, minimal sleep was got that first night on the train.

Anyway! 16 hours later I finally arrive in Zhengzhou, but I was unable to get a train to Luoyang and needed to catch a bus instead. Four hours later I'm dead on my feet but finally at my destination. Now to find my hostel! My taxi driver left me outside a large apartment complex and my hostelworld instructions were quite vague so I decided to call the owner. Somewhat typically this is the point at which my phone decided to pack it in. 

After standing in the sweltering heat in the apartment courtyard, shouting down my phone (Chinese style!) to no avail, I finally found a local to help me locate my "hostel". It was in fact some Chinese guy's apartment on the 8th floor. Good fun with a huge backpack in 40 degree heat. But at least my room had air conditioning!! Or at least it did for a few hours. The first night of my stay in Luoyang the electricity cut out in the middle of the night, and didn't come back on the whole time I was there. No AC (try sleeping in a 35 degree room with no breeze), no wifi to book the next leg of my journey... and no hot water!! 

However I wasn't in Luoyang for the hostel. I came here for one reason, and that was to visit the Longmen Grottoes. Considered one of China's top three grottoes and a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Longmen caves are an enormous and epic sight to behold. The caves run along a 1 kilometre stretch of the Yi river and carving first began in AD 494 during the Northern Wei dynasty.

West Side Caves at Longmen

In the 200 years it took to complete over 100 000 images of Buddha and his disciples were chisled into the limestone cliff faces on both sides of the river. The sizes of the figures vary greatly, from thousands of tiny one inch carvings, to the epic 20 metre high Losana Buddha. Coming up against the Cultural Revolution, anti-Buddhist purges and in influx of ruthless collectors in the early 20th century has meant that many of the figures have been badly damaged, decapitated or been removed entirely over the last two hundred years. Despite all this there are some truly amazing sculptures to been seen here.

For perspective you can see that the small squares carved into the
cliffs are large enough to crawl into. 

Ten Thousand Buddha Cave, each Buddha is an inch tall.

Unfortunately, this one sight was the highlight of my 4 days in Henan. I found both Zhengzhou and Luoyang to be big ugly cities, with possibly the worst air I've ever encountered in China. One day into my Henan trip and I was coughing like a hard core smoker first thing in the morning. The rest of my time was spend desperately trying to avoid the stifling heat, which was only made more intense by the constant haze generated by the pollution in the atmosphere. I can't even say that I enjoyed the food, as everything I tried was stodgy, fatty, dripping with oil and generally unpleasant.

Four days into my big adventure and I was already missing home and feeling quite disenchanted by my experiences. If not for the gentle encouragement of my dear friend Zoe via text messages ("Katie, don't be a dickhead") I might very well have given up at this point. Nonetheless, I continued on to my next province, taking a hard seat by train to Xi'an in Shanxi. Best decision I ever made.

Standing in front of my favourite Luoyang statue.