A year away: June 23-25 - Through Lanzhou to Zhangye, Gansu

From Xiahe I took the bus to the major city of Lanzhou where I did nothing much other than sleep a night, eat the compulsory Lanzhou Niu Rou Mien (Lanzhou Beef Noodles) and enjoyed the shockingly new, clean and organised train station on the way out (seriously, it was the best station I saw in all of China). Next stop a few hours hard seat train ride away was Zhangye, the stopping-off point for the not so commonly visited Mati Si Temple. I arrived very late into the city - after 12am, and was lucky to get a helpful cabbie who gave me the lowdown on where to stay cheaply, and even told me how to get back to the train station by bus for 1 yuan rather than spending 15 in a cab! Next day I began my mini-epic of getting out to the temple. After the bus dropped me off in approaching 40 degree heat 9km from my destination (yay!) I managed to hitch 2 separate rides with local Chinese (since this isn't a touristy place people will give you a ride and not expect money) and got into the temple complex at student price. Wandering around the area for the afternoon I started at the lowest temple complex, kind of a miniature of the main cliff temples as it turned out. These few-hundred year old structures are built half in and half out of hand-carved caves from a few to maybe 15m up the cliffs - some are super-precarious and creak as you walk around on the cantilevered sections, others are more stable. In one case the temple access was through a vertical tunnel carved inside cliff wall emerging into a tiny temple room some way up the cliff. I was the only person in this area looking around so it was pretty cool. Further up the road I checked out some cool small caves and statues carved into the cliffs and then reached the main attraction - a larger complex of bigger cliff temples. For some reason I was supposed to pay 35 yuan to access the part of the complex - in addition to the other entrance fee. After trying to skirt around on another path I was caught and directed to the ticket office. I asked for a student price and received a curt 'No' and immediately the woman took a phone call and proceeded to ignore me in the rudest Chinese style possible. At that point I had had enough and stormed away, ignoring her protests, walked straight past the other worker and up the stairs into the cliff face. If they were going to treat me like that, f%&k 'em, I am not paying. The climb up 30 or 40m meters in an out of the cliff face was pretty fun, and would definitely have taken a lot of work to design and built, but the cave temple at the top was kind of an anticlimax - although the creaking cantilevered terrace out over the cliff was certainly exciting!

Since the last bus had already left I ended up staying the night in Mati Si town for a fairly reasonable price; unfortunately nowhere could offer accommodation with a shower. Oh well. Next morning I got up super-early before sunrise and took a walk for a couple of hours up to a waterfall at the head of the valley. The scenery on the way with the sun rising and the freezing cold water which I dipped in at the top were very nice indeed. I was surprised to find some pretty big snow banks remaining near the waterfall in the shadow of the gorge - that explains why the water was so damned freezing!! I made it back to the town in time to be told that the bus I'd planned to catch wasn't coming...so I switched to plan B. Hitching. I walked a short distance down the road and managed to convince a guy in a small truck to take me as far as the junction, where I found the bus waiting to take me back to Zhangye. Again, no charge. How I love the non-touristy parts of China (as few and far between as they are)!