D48: 上肖 → 泾川

June 3, 2021

Inside the last cave of the Zhangba Grottoes

Everything I tried to visit today was closed.

Technically, the one thing I succeeded at visiting was also closed; however, I'm not the person who broke the lock on the gate.

I really mean that to and not in the usual "if they really wanted to keep me out, they would have tried harder" sort of way. The broken lock¹ on the gate in the fence around the outside of the Zhangba Temple Grottoes had been in such a condition long enough to have gone all rusty.

Striped sandstone caves of Zhangba Grottoes

The various holes would have been used to support additional statuary or decorations

The apparent husband of the woman who was seriously bent out of shape the previous night because registering me wasn't going to work without an ID card to run across the scanner² and who didn't like my being mean to her (I called her a blithering idiot) talked road info with me and suggested that I take a different road from Honghe to the main road as it really wasn't all that necessary to go back up to the plateau only to go back down again as I'd done last time.

One of two figures that flanked the Buddha at Zhangba

To all residents of the village: Happy New Year. For the health and safety of everyone and the prevention of Covid, the custom of visiting people over the holidays may not be practiced. It is STRICTLY FORBIDDEN for anyone who is not a resident of this village (yes, that includes close friends and family members of village residents) to enter the village. Be responsible to yourself, be responsible to others, be responsible to society.

His road info not only cut a climb and a descent from my ride, it also meant that I didn't have to take a detour to get to either Hot Springs Town or the South Grottoes Temple. Being as one was in the process of being demolished and the other under renovations, I'm grateful to him. However, I still think his wife is a blithering idiot.

Called Shrine of the Five Saints, these five are actually fairly common in this region and in this configuration and I later figured out who they are

However, my notes aren't with this set of pictures so.... um.... the guy with three eyes isn't Erlangshen

She had nothing, though, on the staff of tonight's hotel which had clearly gone a great many years since whenever it was chosen by whoever makes the choice of "hotels to send foreigners to".

I'd thought since I was in a County Seat in a province that has clearly shown a tendency to be actively maintaining the unwritten extralegal rule of "Foreigner Hotels" that starting at the police station and specifically not arguing with them (only because the place they wanted to send me was in my price range) was going to simplify matters.

Cliff niches between Zhangba and South Grottoes

I don't know if you can tell in these pics but they're numbered in "museum curator script" so while it's likely they've been empty for a while, something is happening with them

Instead, it just changed the content of the argument³. At some point the manager called the police who must have then told her to pull her head out of her ass and to just let me stay as, moments later, we went from "bicycle as an nonnegotiable obstruction" to two staff members helping me carry the bike upstairs.

¹ Technically, the broken latch really. The lock was still locked.

One of the less dreadful examples of what was done to Wangmu Grottoes

One of the very nearly done okay examples

If it weren't for the rest of the site, I might even call this good

² The photo I'd taken inside the police station of the police registering me at her establishment and the explicit instructions that she should call them if she had any questions was insufficient to convince her that my lack of an ID card was not a problem

³My bike isn't spending the night outside unless I do and if I run into any more hassle, I give it another week tops before I start camping rather than continuing to put up with these frustrations. However, although the days are pleasantly warm (trending towards hot), the mountain nights are still quite nippy, and a serious wind had sprung up while I was outside my spur-of-the-moment visit to the Wangmu Grottoes⁴, so I'm not entirely sure that camping is quite the way to go yet.

Surely, there must have been other options

The bits that weren't destroyed were stunning

⁴These weren't closed in the slightest. However, the stabilization work done on the frangible sandstone was rather inexpert, exceedingly ugly, and more or less as complete a destruction of the site as you'd have gotten if you'd set a batch of Red Guards loose inside with hammers.

Today's ride: 49 km (30 miles)
Total: 1,794 km (1,114 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	1
Comment on this entry	Comment	0