After collapsing on the last seats on the Pinggu local bus 25, I showed the ticket lady my notes to let us know when the cave stop is. She asks to see the paper again, so I give it to her. She shows the whole bus, apparently noting the Japanese influence of my attempt at writing the hanzu(kanji). First time I've ever heard that before.
If you ever find yourself going here, the local buses are 2rmb w/o card, if you use card it will take the 2rmb if not swept when you get off too, it's only .80 if you swipe the card when you get off the bus like a distance fare bus, but this is not posted and they won't tell you to re-swipe.
All the websites I looked at also showed the cave entrance fee as 60 rmb. It was 85rmb! We walked to the entrance and waited will enough people qued for a guide to take us in. This also was supposed to be 1.5 hour guided tour. It was recommended to bring a coat due to the cold of the cave. It was glorious, like a/c. I never even pulled it out, as we were sweating from the heat and walking at the gorge.
Kyle, my fellow Michigander travel companion enlighted me on the Chinese temperature superstition. You will get sick if your body or the inside temperature is 5 degrees different than the outside temperature. Thus when it is 95 degrees outside, they won't let it get cooler than 90 degrees. And if the kids are sweating after playing recess, you cannot turn on the fan or a/c because that will cause them to get sick.
I would not recommend the cave, I don't know how much is fake. One of the rocks had a hole in it and I could see the metal frame. Added rough cut statutes around the staligmites. Lots of the cave walls looked puttied or cemented over. I didn't risk touching it, for fear of fine(sign in English). Even though I saw the Chinese tourists all touching.
Every so often we saw some forgotten staircases. I joked these were the entrances to the vampire lairs. Nearing the end of our journey we had to pay another 10 rmb to ride a shallow metal boat in a short tunnel. After that if you didn't buy the additional 10rmb to keep going through more caves(possibily leading back to the entrance), you were led to the back exit.
We came out at 1 or 2 bus stops before the cave. I remember the bus letting some other people off here, close to the whatever tourist destination we came out at. We saw the 25 bus lumbering down the street and waved our hands but they didn't even look at us. So we decided to keep walking at least back to the cave bus stop.
We didn't have to though as a little yellow sports car with a young couple stopped and asked if we wanted a lift. At first for 10rmb each. We said no. They countered with 10rmb total. Ok. I figure they were on their way to town, saw us foreigners(we were the only ones we saw the entire day) and thought lets make some extra cash. They dropped us off at the bus station in Pinggu.
It's now 3:30pm and the lines are long to go back to the city. There were over eight 852 buses that left in about 15 minutes time. We got in the long line to que for the bus. As we were waiting, the buses would half fill up with the que line, but forward a bus length and fill the rest of the way up with people standing on the side of the road. I don't understand this, I guess queing is optional? When we got toward the front on the line, people just stopped getting on, it's not full and I didn't hear anyone saying anything. We just pushed ourselves forward and got onto the half empty bus.
We were stuck in traffic for a good 30 minutes, but I was home by 6:30. A busy 12 hours I had!
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