By Norma and John
We have done so much in the last few days that we have decided just to concentrate on the highlights. We took a night train from Nanjing to Keifeng for a 10 hour trip, traveling soft sleeper. Hard sleeper folk sit up all night but we softies got bunk beds in a four bunk compartment. The corridor of the carriage was filled with cigarette smoke and we were apprehensive about our roomies-to-be. Fortunately when they turned up neither of them smoked and we were able to get a decent nights rest, arriving in Keifeng at 7.20 a.m. I had woken at 6 and we stopped at one or two stations, none of which had their name anywhere in English and so I was worried that we would not know when we reached our stop. Fortunately the young woman in charge of our carriage came and called us one stop before ours - very efficient in a full train !! 
The Shaolin Temple was our next significant visit and was quite an eye-opener. I expected it to be isolated and small. Instead there was a nearby town in which we passed about thirty residential martial arts training schools. Each was a large building which teaches the skills for half the day and academic subjects for the other half. Outside the school buildings are extensive clay surface training areas full of students doing acrobatics, stick fighting etc. In total there are 50,000 students from all over China training in the town at any one time !!!! Two weeks ago in Xiamen I heard on TV about 500 American students who have come for the summer to train - in the restaurant where we had lunch there was a huge banner welcoming them to Shaolin. The temple itself was in the hills outside the town and very impressive. We watched a performance by the most promising students and they were amazing - throwing a nail through glass like a bullet, breaking iron bars on their heads, acrobatics etc. We had great seats, front centre, and hope to have good video and photo coverage but just in case we bought a DVD too.
The following day was another great day as we went to the Longmen Caves and Grottoes, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the great centers of Buddhism. It was a very hot and humid day as we parked the minivan and walked along the banks of the Li River towards the caves. The humidity was incredible and this causes some problems with the cameras. If we try to use them too soon after getting out of an air conditioned vehicle or building the lens mists up on my camera and the Dew Warning comes on the videocam and it shuts down until it dries out. The number of statues of Buddha in the hillside caves runs into the tens of thousands, ranging in size from postage stamp size to many meters in height. They are made accessible by a series of granite steps and are truly amazing to see. All the people meeting us as we walked in to the site were soaked and I wondered if there had just been a rainstorm, but after climbing those steps we looked just like them. As I raised my digital to take a photo the sweat ran down my arm and off my elbow. Gross but true. The statues in the large caves still retain some of the original colors from when they were carved some fifteen hundred years ago. I have seen photo of them before but to actually see them was incredible.
Our next leg is by train to Xian and the Terra Cotta Warriors !!!!
4
