Our train to the next destination of Louyang left Xi'an at 3:30pm on the afternoon of the 10th. The 5 and half hour journey passed very quickly as the friendly Chinese family next to us insisted on feeding us apples, meat and pomegranate with Amy's language skills having really broken the ice. The alarm went off at 6:45 so we could catch an early bus to the Longman caves, a complex of
hundreds of man-made with Buddhist carvings. It really does pay to make such an early start, not only to avoid the worst of the tour group crowds but also to make the most of the cool of the morning. The caves were fantastic and well worth the detour to Louyang in themselves. They varied in scale from small depressions in the cliff face to huge caverns with the Buddhist
figures ranging from a couple of centimeters to tens of meters. In all we spent 4 hours at the site, including a separate burial site with garden and another temple, before heading to another complex dedicated to a warrior whose head had been sent to a local warlord. It was quiet, peaceful and beautiful, were it in Beijing it would have been rammed and was worth a peak inside especially for the brightly painted, gaudy, cartoonish statues dotted around. After some successful menu guesswork we headed back exhausted.
Our train to the next destination of Louyang left Xi'an at 3:30pm on the afternoon of the 10th. The 5 and half hour journey passed very quickly as the friendly Chinese family next to us insisted on feeding us apples, meat and pomegranate with Amy's language skills having really broken the ice. The alarm went off at 6:45 so we could catch an early bus to the Longman caves, a complex of 
hundreds of man-made with Buddhist carvings. It really does pay to make such an early start, not only to avoid the worst of the tour group crowds but also to make the most of the cool of the morning. The caves were fantastic and well worth the detour to Louyang in themselves. They varied in scale from small depressions in the cliff face to huge caverns with the Buddhist 
figures ranging from a couple of centimeters to tens of meters. In all we spent 4 hours at the site, including a separate burial site with garden and another temple, before heading to another complex dedicated to a warrior whose head had been sent to a local warlord. It was quiet, peaceful and beautiful, were it in Beijing it would have been rammed and was worth a peak inside especially for the brightly painted, gaudy, cartoonish statues dotted around. After some successful menu guesswork we headed back exhausted.
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