When one takes the night-train out of Beijing West, one misses out on much of these sensational beauties, and travels through the utter dark of night, seemingly into the nothing, then... to be awakened by the morning sun shining on a bleak and dusty, moonlike landscape. It is a near calming and much humbling experience, to come from the by now modernised, imperially majestic and metropolitan-like busy bustle of Beijing, then turn the page to a new and very different chapter and landscape.

In North-Shanxi there is no overcrowding of cars,nor of people. There is hardly any modernity. In the wide-open landscape far away mountain-ridges to the North and South travel with the train and -somewhere outside the window- the great wall of China. Two modern mig-fighters make white-lines in the deep blue sky, traveling with ease across the rough lands, then arch north-west and - supersonic- pointing the way to the Chinese Border at Inner Mongolia. Somewhere there, beyond the Wall atop those Granite Ridges, once were the wild territories of the Nomad Tribes (Toba,Manchu,Huns,Nguyen,Mongols,etc). Here,still inside Great Wall life suddenly seems not so different. On the one main road that meets the tracks ,every now and then in an otherwise empty dust-scape, a slowly moving donkey-cart travels between far between villages, the driver tucked deeply away in his old army coat. Small brick trainstations are the gate-ways to dusty agricultural villages displaying corn harvest on their porches. Pigs walk freely between the small white houses and walls. Dirty and dusty locals carry huge bundles away while the train is leaving the station, traveling again, westwards on this iron line to Civilization. Where abandonned Watchtowers come down from the High Granite Mountain-ridges to mark the progress of the train in a broken line, the once Great Wall melted away by time,  the train nears the city of Datong. Roads and even some trees appear, the land marked by small man-sized grave-hills. In between villages, hills and grave-sites scrawny sheep are tended by their shepherd. Small caves, dug out in the loess land mark the resting places of local farmers working their small patches along the railway-line.The Wall moves North again climbing it's Granite Seat still visible near then far. Just outside Datong the train meets a seeming maze of railroad-tracks marking the cities activities and title as Coal Capital of China. Many of China's rough industrial materials wind their way along here. Other than this, nothing much reminds of real modern day life, there is just loess, hills and blue mountains near.

When the sun has just climbed above the granite horizons of the Damaqun Shan, the morning train arrives between the clear white houses on the Eastern outskirts of Datong. A new kind of Chinese City emerges in the Yellowish Hillscape. This is Datong ! Moving between the difficult to define, post-revolutionary chinese city housing, the wide landscapes and the view of the City and Northern Mountains is lost. Time to pack up and arrive at the typical main-provincial-city Train Station of Datong.

(To find what can be next in this experience, browse online at Datong Report and see for yourself !).