Shanxi Landscape

More morning meanderings before getting a minibus to Taiyuan and then a train to Beijing. For an hour or so, before the dark closed in, we looked out onto a weird, bleak, treeless 'countryside'. A brown, parched landscape ravaged by what seemed to be open-cast mining, and pitted by riverless gulleys, forlorn looking buildings and the occasional industrial town to break up the monotony.