New Year's Trip - Henan Province, China

For this New Year's I traveled with Adam, Ana and Isabella to Henan province, north of Nanjing.  We visited a number of towns and tourist locations on the very long road trip.
Adam has a driver's license for China, so now Ana and him rent cars and drive to destinations rather than taking trains, which is how the rest of us travel around China.  The drive from Nanjing to Xinxiang (our first stop) took just under 10 hours.  We left the car rental place just after 1:30pm and got into the hotel by 10:30pm that evening.  We rang in the new year watching fireworks in Beijing on the TV. 
On January 1, we left the hotel on our way to Guoliangcun, which is a famous mountain range area where the locals of a village on the top of the mountain carved out a tunnel on the side of a cliff face.  Here are the pics.

First sight when we reached the top of the mountain.

A famous village where a movie was once filmed (not sure which one). 

Walking along a wall, at the side of the cliff.

In the distance you can see a "skiing" area, which had no slope whatsoever.

The tea at lunch was so hot that I could only hold the rim of the cup to drink it.

Ana was so cold, Adam had to help her put her hood up. 

The famous tunnel road, there are tiny people walking along the open areas of the cliff face.

Another shot of the tunnel road.

And another.

As a group we decided to drive to Luoyang to see a number of sights in the vicinity. We turned on our numerous GPS devices and worked on finding a route out of the mountain range and towards our new destination.  As we were driving back we came across a traffic jam on a small highway.  We slowly made our way up to where a tunnel had been located on our way in, it was there we were turned down an even smaller road on a detour.  We drove for over an hour following all the other cars that were as lost as we were.  At one point all of our phones lost track of our location and could not route us out of the area.  Later we thought that it had been a forest fire that caused the detour as I remembered seeing a small one starting on the other side of the tunnel that we had been turned away at.
 The next morning we made the decision to visit Shaolin Temple in the morning and then the Longmen Grottoes after the sun had set since we heard they were lit up at night.
On our way to Shaolin Temple we were driving along one highway.  At three different points we were forced to take a detour.  The first was a tree was felled right in front of us, but that only took us off track for less than 5 minutes. The second was a bridge out on the highway this one forced us to go off route for almost an hour.  On this detour we found a random Muslim Chinese town that seemed to be the place where the red drums of China are made and painted.  They were so cool and random I had to buy one for myself.
Here are a few pics.

After that detour we had another one shortly after but nothing as interesting as the drum town.  We finally made it to the Shaolin Temple, a 3 hour journey that should have only taken around 1.5 hours.
Here are the pics.

Tiger feeding a frog.

Finger stabbing tree.

Pagoda Forest

Pagoda Forest

Stairs that from this angle seemingly went no where.  The woman was not having anything to do with them, despite her husband's urging.

After the Shaolin Temple we headed back to Luoyang to see the Longmen Grottoes at night.  When we got there (taking a different highway than earlier that day) it was to find that the place looked closed so we headed back to our hotel in Luoyang for the night and decided we would try to go there again first thing in the morning before heading back to Nanjing.

Smiling Buddha!

Chinglish!

There is a ladies washroom down the trail but the sign says "Male Only".  

We left the Longmen Grottoes and then started the 8 hour drive home.  But we first stopped off at the remaining Communist town honoring Mao during his 1950s time in power.  The village was cleaner than the area just outside of it.  There was a statue of Mao and some speakers playing Mao speeches over and over.  It was distinctly different but still similar.