As of this morning, and for the next "while", I'm no longer redoing stuff I've previously done before. It's all new. No more "well this place was nice six years ago" or "I think I'm going to take this other road because I remember that one was boring". After approximately a month of riding places I've been before and seeing things I've seen before (even if they've all changed), I'm kind of excited to be someplace entirely, completely, and totally new.

It's a beautiful morning. Colder than I like but, even in the early hours of the morning, when my body is determined that I'm ready to wake up now despite it being far too early to even conceive of leaving the nice warmness, I don't even have to wear too many layers. On top, I go with my silk knit as a base layer under two jerseys, the windbreaker, and the thermal vest. On the bottom I have one of the extra thin pairs of Decathlon bike shorts and the non-thermal full length tights. By the time I've eaten breakfast, made coffee to drink, made more coffee to drink later on at the Zhongshan Grottoes, and actually gotten moving, it's warmed up enough that I can put the windbreaker, thermal vest, and one of the jerseys back in my panniers.

I know next to nothing about the grottoes other than "they exist". According to TripAdvisor, they are #5 out of 6 possible things to do in Zichang. There's also Baidu Baike article with some astonishingly crappy photos and a very in depth scholarly article on the paint composition of some samples. The scholarly article has the best photos of any place I looked which is not to say that it has good photos, just that everywhere else has worse photos. Of course, since my research on potential detours was done months ago, and since my #1 criteria for a potential detour be that it not be something famous with lots of information easily available or loads of tourists, I don't remember if I actually got that far into reading about the site or if I just decided "yeah, that looks cool".

Hella cool.

Hella super awesome cool with coolness sauce on top.

I mean, I was having a pretty good day already even before I got to the grottoes. The sun had come out, I wasn't stuck in a hotel room waiting for a new wheel to arrive, the sky was brilliant blue, I wasn't attempting to regurgitate badly written Chinese language vomit into something that resembled coherent English, the road was so gradually uphill it was practically flat, the mountains off to either side were doing all kinds of dramatic rocky mountain things with the way the little river had eroded away the loess, and I had a sealed container with good espresso and heavy cream waiting for me when I got to my first stopping point along with chocolate chip fudge cookies that had come from the American Bakery along with the warm clothing I was currently wearing.

There were signs, when I got to the entrance and the parking lot, that the grottoes are starting to be developed as an important cultural heritage type tourist destination. I hope this will be a good thing. I fear it will more likely mean that the carvings will be placed behind glass or that the caves be made off limits. Maybe, maybe not. They do have the advantage of being a fairly small site not especially near anything else that people want to visit.

Cross the bridge, there's a Ming Dynasty paifang in the parking lot. Paifang are a sort of ceremonial arched gate. Sometimes they have three entrances, other times they have five. They usually have guardian lions as well as other kinds of statues and they can get to being quite ornate. This particular paifang has the look of something that's been restored many times, with most of those restorations having happened probably a century ago or more. I'm not keen on the incense seller who keeps nagging me but other than that, I'm liking this place already.

The ticket office lets me bring my bike in and park it inside the park. I grab my zoom lens, a few cookies, the plastic jar of espresso and cream, and head up in the direction of the caves. It's not much of a walk, I've got my hands full of coffee and cookies, and most of the stuff on the way to the caves is clearly modern so I don't stop to really look on my way up thinking that I'll look on my way down only to forget when I finally get around to heading down an hour and a half later.

The first cave (Grotto #3) is the largest. It's also the best preserved. Some of the smaller grottoes are basically just empty niches in the rock without any visible carvings or statues to be seen. I step inside and my jaw drops. This, this is not what I was expecting. And not only are there no barriers to keep wandering hands from just touching the art, somehow, in the thousand years that the art has been here, the stuff within touching range hasn't been worn smooth by a million curious hands. There's a figure with a broken head here, another one with missing hands there, but the wear and tear is mostly natural delamination of the limestone caused by water seepage. Entire carved figures, especially along the rear wall, have begun to melt into vaguely human shaped stalactites.

I make a quick run through the first cave, exiting and going to the next caves. I have to see all of it first. Then I have to come back and see it again, slowly. I have to savor it. My timing is perfectly on point since there's some government people doing some kind of promotional thing with a TV camera and a professional(ish) photographer and the only other cave with mostly intact figures is, right this very now, unlocked. I stay in there just looking and very carefully not touching anything until they kick me out. 

Then, after confirming that the remaining grottoes are basically empty, I go back to the first cave and stay there until they insist on my coming out into the sunlight so they can interview the Foreign Visitor. Then I go back in the cave some more first with a docent officially giving me a tour (and saying nothing I don't already know) in front of the TV camera and then just to look and see if there was anything I missed. I'm reeling at the differences of all the little Buddhas and Bodhisattvas carved into the walls. 

Thousand Buddha Walls are usually boring repetitions of the same figure again and again and again and again and again. I want lights, a tripod, a book explaining the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of what I'm seeing. But since I can't have that, I'll settle with a fifth walk around the interior of the cave.

Somewhere in talking to the government people someone said that they were going to invite me to join them to lunch but no one seems to be remembering it when I'm getting my bike and I'm already a little worried about making it to a place with a hotel by sunset so I don't remind them. I knew I was going to end up on the G307 for a bit but it looks like I'm going to have to go 10km in the wrong direction to Qingyangcha if I want a place to stay. A few people think that maybe one of the villages along the National Road will have something but no one is super sure.

That lack of certainty is part of why I did only the most cursory of explorations at Anding Fort and Anding Town another two or three kilometers past the Grottoes. (Anding Town is on all the maps. Even knowing that Anding Fort exists because I was there, and knowing the correct characters to write the name, I can only find a single not very informative article about Anding Town's development as a "Beautiful Countryside Village"). It's also the excuse for why I didn't stop to investigate the Ancestral Home of General Xie Zichang or his grave at Lijiacha Town an hour after that. (The excuse mind you, not the reason. Cause even if this guy was a big enough hotshot to cause his home county to be renamed after him, ancestral homes of dead heroes are generally kind of repetitively boring after you've been to five or six of them.)

The road continues to be just the slightest of uphills along a mostly flat valley sandwiched between two ranges of loess mountains. I stop once for a little temple at an intersection where I'm sufficiently unclear about which way is still the main road that I need to check the online maps. Then, almost immediately after, I stop again to check out a single grotto carved high in the wall along the road. Immediately after climbing back down the ladder stairs to my bike, I see a second grotto and have to climb back up.

The river gets smaller and smaller until, eventually, it goes away altogether and I find myself crossing a low mountain pass. Having a freewheel that isn't worn out is like getting myself two additional gears on my rear cluster. I smoothly pedal almost the whole way up, stopping only because I grabbed for a drink of water, lost my balance, and couldn't get enough momentum to start again.

Some while later I come to a fork in the road with an interesting looking temple just a short ways down the obviously wrong branch. AMap thinks that if I take the fork that isn't the main road it'll get me farther north up the G307 about 5km away from Shiwan. Shiwan, like Qingyangcha, is known to have hotels and I like the idea of five unnecessary kilometers on the National Road much better than I do the idea of ten. Plus, it's actually about the same distance and the topo maps seem to think this is another little river valley. As I pedal off down the 'wrong' fork, I realize, I forgot to check out the temple that caused me to stop and check my maps but I hate u-turns and it's too late now.

As I bike more and more, it gets harder and harder for a road to be a candidate for "the most beautiful road I've ever ridden on" but this one is trying hard. The yellow tint to my sunglasses particularly brings out the colors of the autumn leaves, the loess, and the rock formations. Most of the time, it's even very well paved. Sometimes, that good pavement is underneath a thick layer of dusty loess soil that's been tracked there by farm vehicles, and other times from dirtslides, but it's still good paving nonetheless.

Also, because I'm heading towards a larger target (the National Road), the few signs which have been put up at intersections generally tell me which way I want to go. This is important as I frequently have no signal on my phone and, somehow, all the people disappear every time I come close to an intersection.

With the exception of a horrible scary bit with an unleashed dog rushing at me as I whooshed downhill on my way to the National Road, it was wonderful. Then, when I got to the National Road, there was no traffic and it kept being wonderful. Shiwan had lots of hotels to choose from but few restaurants. Since the restaurant had rooms and the rooms had sprung mattresses with electric mattress pads, the first place I looked was the only place I looked.