There was no time to rest after the Great Wall trip, later on in the evening we met up again (not Marco) to go by the night train to Zhengzhou. The train had a better standard than the one I travelled with between Zhuzhou and Guilin so it ended up beeing a good trip even in the hard-sleeper.

Got a huge problem when we got to Zhengzhou, all the train tickets were sold out. Can say that we were shocked to get info that we were stuck in Zhengzhou but then i remebered that the bus station is next door to the trainstation. We were lucky to find out that they got tickets for a night bus.

After some bargaining we found a taxi that agreed to drive us during the day. HEaded for the Shaolin temple first even if we wanted to start with Longmen but the driver didnt want to… Since we had a limited amount of time we had to skip to go up on the holy mountain Song Shan. So instead we started by visisting the PAgoda forest, its actually a grave yard with pagodas that have different heights and then we headed for the actual temple.

The temple looked like the ones i have visited in Beijing but with the difference that the monks were younger. Met a guy from France that lived there and was going to be a monk for 3 years. Wonder what you say to your parents if you are going on such a trip. Took some pictures and Jan got to try to be in a chinese family photo. It would probably had been a better choice to go up on Mt Song and then rush throuch the temple for 15 minutes but always easy to say afterwards…

Found our taxi and headed for the Longmen Grottoes, its a lots of  small caves with buddist statues. Can imagine that it has taken a lot of time to construct them. Had to climb some stairs and the legs hurt a lot after yesterdays trip on the Great Wall but just to suffer a bit and continue… The site is nice but they should have had some help when creating the english signs, i didnt see one that was correct. They even put up the information sign about the caves reading from right to left…

Had dinner at McDonalds back in Zhengzhou and bought something for the trip before going on the bus. The beds were contructed for people reaching a maximum of 170 cm so can say that the night wasnt to comfortable. Got some sleep after watching a dubbed movie from the eighties with the swedish actor Dolph Lundgren as the main character. Woke up later on in the night and could see that it was snowing a lot and we almost didnt move.

When the sun rise (about 6 or 7 AM, were suppose to be in Beijing at 5AM) i could see that we still had 190 km to go so just to try to relax and not freeze to death in the cold bus. Arrived in Beijing about 5 hours late and then it was just to go back home to lay down and get some rest.