Xi'an

We arrived in Xi'an without any hassle, getting dropped off by the airport shuttle bus outside a hotel minutes from our hostel, around midnight. Not wanting to make things too convenient for ourselves though we took a wrong turn and walked for an extra 10 minutes down a beggar ridden street before realising our error and making amends. The hostel was good, and got even better after we moved to a nicer room the following day.

Xi'an is a town of historic importance though we paid little attention to the details of that - our little heads have become saturated from our travels to date and have invoked a safety mechanism that now flatly refuses to care any more for such details. It was the capital city for a while though and has a big wall surrounding it and a bell tower and drum tower in the middle of town which banged drums and rang bells at appropriate times throughout the millenia. It has a large and distinct Muslim population, a lot of whom live, funnily enough, in the Muslim quarter and we stayed not too far from there.

In the Muslim quarter were old streets riddled with alley ways and signs with Chinese and Arabic script. Mutton was the dish of choice which made a pleasant change from the familiar rows of tanks of sad looking fish and crabs awaiting their fate that normally occupies windows and pavements. Inside the restaurants, patrons make their way through lamb skewers which they buy 30 of at a time in preparation for the sizzling hot-pots that follow, which get placed within a brazier, built into the tables. Outside the shops, chefs are busy cooking the skewers over fires and hot coals within trays, or pipes or big clay pots with flames shooting out the side at a furious heat like an open door on a furnace. The only saving grace for pedestrians is that there is so much activity you couldn't dream of walking on the pavement anyway, because if you did, you'd be coming home well cooked yourself. There was also a dried fruit market which we found a little odd. There must have been nearly 50 stalls, but they all sold exactly the same thing - exclusively dried fruit and nuts, which you bought by the kilo for not a lot of money and were great. It was like pick and mix because all the fruit was the same cost and all the nuts were the same cost so all you had to worry about was the final weight, and although not cheap by Chinese standards, was a steal by prices back home. Everyone had the same range from the usual suspects through to things like dried kiwi-fruit and berries and the nuts were bountiful across the board too. We stocked up on a kilo of macadamias for 20 yuan and a load of fruit too that would see us good for nearly a week.

We had come to Xi'an for one thing in particular though, the Terracotta Warriors. The excavation site was about an hour out of town and there were plenty of tour companies offering the trip. We decided to do it ourselves though on the public bus which would leave from the train station and save us a small fortune. We got to the station, and got on a public bus with the right number got on it and realised it was a different public bus with the same number so got off a stop later and walked all the way back to find the right one. Attempt number two was much more successful and an hour later we followed the masses of megaphones towards the entrance turnstiles and got in. The warriors were built by Emperor Qin Tse-Huang a couple thousand years ago. I say built by him, built for him, and then everyone who built it was killed so they couldn't tell anyone else about it. As a result, this subterranean collection of 8000 life size soldiers and horses lay forgotten about until a couple of boys digging in a field for water in the 1970's fell through a hole and decided they should probably tell their dad what they found.

The site isn't quite what we had anticipated. Firstly, the pit containing the army, isn't very deep so it's not like a cavern you can walk through. What they have done is clear away all the ground above them and plonked a big hangar over the top so that you walk around the sides looking down and into the pit. Also, although there are a lot of the chaps standing to attention, the majority is still to excavated. A lot of the pit isn't a pit at all but a continuation of the ground from one side of the hangar to the other. The ground caved in at some point in the centuries so the army, rather than standing underground, found themselves standing in the ground, completely buried. This is probably in part because the roof of the cavern was made of tightly stretched fabric with earth on top so it was kind of inevitable, and has resulted in severe damage to most of the soldiers who have fallen and broken and such like. The hangar was also very bright and full of natural light streaming through the many windows around it so there was no sense of eerie gloom, and being in China, no thought of silent wonder. There were a couple of other pits too, smaller than the first, these were better preserved and housed within much more atmospheric buildings. We left a little disappointed but not so much so as to have had a bad time. A brief disagreement with the bus driver, who didn't want white people on his bus followed, but soon enough we were on our way back to the hostel.

The smog in China is bad, but in Xi'an it is worse than anything else we have seen. There is no such thing as blue sky or clouds here, just a consistent grey haze, which you can watch the setting sun through without squinting or any discomfort what so ever. A distance of less than a kilometre will be fully lost to the haze so it is not possible to stand from any vantage point and look around. We decided the best thing we could do for our health in this atmosphere was to put ourselves on a bike and cycle around the perimeter of the town on the wall, at a height just perfect for maximum smog intake. It took about an hour and a half to cycle all the way round the square circumference . The wall is about 10 meters wide on the top, with a wall either side again to stop you falling off and the surface is cobbled - not ideal for bikes but not too bad. We picked a good time to do it too, choosing sunset which showed us the city in the day and night and meant we weren't fighting the fierce heat of the day, also unexpectedly, there was almost no-one else on the wall at all so we just about had the whole thing to ourselves.

Having had a good time in Xi'an it was time to head on to our next destination, Chengdu. We had our sleeper train booked and we settled into our berth wondering who we would be sharing it with, it turned out we would be riding with the PLA.