I arrived in Datong on Friday evening by train from Beijing. Next morning, it was raining, so I left a bit later than planned and I took a taxi to the site. After drinking a coffee prepared by a rather fancy robot machine at the shopping complex, the rain had actually stopped.

The route starts with the temple which stands in the water and from there the route now starts with cave number 1, which I think is also the oldest one. It seems most of the caves have been renovated or cleaned up recently as everything looked quite stunning to me. It was busy in few of the caves but once I finished my tour, I revisited those caves as it was significantly less busy in the afternoon. There is also a museum building but I did not find the exhibition about the silk road interesting.

One can see an old coal mine from the caves and there are few old factories around but the surroundings these days seem rather clean at first sight.

I took a bus back to town and visited the Datong museum which was very interesting and is free to visit, though I did not see anything related to the Yutong grottoes. I had also planned to go to Datong old city but another heavy thunderstorm gridlocked all traffic for a while and I could not get any transport, so once things started to get going again, I went back to my hotel.