Shaolin and Luoyang
We took an overnight train to Luoyang from Shanghai and then got a bus to Shaolin, home of Chinese martial arts. Shaolin is not really a town, more of a school and a temple with thousands of students studying Kung Fu. The temple itself is quite impressive, especially so because of the moutain range it has as a backdrop. The school is the main attraction though. On our first day we saw a demonstration by the students and it easily matched the travelling show by Shaolin Monks I've seen in London. One act involved a guy smashing an iron bar into splinters off his head!!! The next morning we went to the school and watched the students practice and be instructed. If you can image hundreds of teenagers doing backflips and jumping 4 feet in the air to perform round house kicks, all at the same time, thats what its like. A Bruce Lee movie in front of our eyes.

From Shaolin we visited the Longmen caves, which consist of hundreds of caves with a total of 15,000 Buddha statues in them. Very impressive but unfortunately many of the Buddhas had been defaced due to looting or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, depending on who is telling the story.

We then went on to Luoyang, a small town by Chinese standards but with a population of over 6 million!! This town was probably the most untouristy place we visited in China. Two of the Dutch guys in our group were over 6 feet tall, and as you can imagine, this is pretty strange to the Chinese. The poor guys were pointed at and stared at everywhere we went. It was obvious very few non Chinese people ever visited. So this was our taste of proper rural China.