Silk Road Adventure: Day 2 Tianshui to Lanzhou

We arrived to Meijishan at around 8 am. Not many people this early. The temperature was cool and there appeared to be light fog over the moutains. We paid our entrance fee, parked the car and walked up to the base of the mountain. It was, indeed, a strange looking "hill" mostly round with red colored outcroppings of rock (appeared to be sandstone). We walked to the entrance but they wanted over 50 yuan to get in. As I had already read about the images, we decided not to pay to go inside the grottos and just buy a book or a DVD of them. If you have seen one Buddha image, chances are pretty good you have seen the majority of them.

The huge Buddha carvings on the outside were truly nice. These things are really big and look to be very old. I took several different pictures from different angles. This one shows the size and gives a good idea of the general overal positioning of the two giants.


We left Tianshui on schedule after shopping for some souveniers from Meijishan. My wife bought some huge toaist worry beads which I planned to take to my office at Abac. We turned down an opportunity to by a VCD of Meijishan at 30 Yuan. A bit too much, especially when we felt we could find it a lot cheaper elsewhere. The trip to Lanzhou of 347 KM was made up entirely of more loess. More loess. More loess. I will never want to see anymore brown loess as long as I live or until our next trip to Xian in March 2006.