With only a few days left in the area a few of us ( a Chinese born Kiwi from Australia, a West Australian and his Chinese bride and yours truly) decided on a road trip out to see what there was to see down the road towards Taiyuan. Every exit on the highway has a sign to some sort of attraction so off we went without a clue where we were going. The only thing that saved us was having a local girl, Tian, along for the ride to ask directions, constantly.
First stop was the gate in the Great Wall at Yanmen Pass. Even though it is a bit run down and the visibility was down to pea soup it was evident why the gate was put here. Easy to defend and bloody hard to go around. As you go through the actual gate itself the wind rushed through to blow our hair back as it got sucked up through the 20m tunnel. There was no other way through unlesss the wind went up over the top.
After amusing a few more locals, distressing Tian, and having a good look around we set off to a village on the other side of the highway that is still inside a square wall. Same as the Forbidden City, only much smaller and nowhere near as grand. These people do it tough !
From there it was down through the 5650m Yanmenguan tunnel on the highway to a place with a hot spring .. apparently. The 'spring' is an enclosed hot water pool that would be good in the freezing winter time, but with the outside temperature at 35 deg C it wasn't too popular the other day.
On the other side of the highway, we were trying to get the most out of our toll money by doing both sides of each exit, was Yang's Ancestral Temple, or so the sign said. We, or at least Tian did, asked a few times where it was but nobody could tell us, so we ended up in another city called Daixian. After a walk around a closed of bell tower, a tour through a jade buddha shop and entertaining the locals at the fruit shop, it was time to poiint the car towards home.
