Advertisement
A mere eleven and a half hour ride from Xiangyang is the ancient city of Xi'an. We were given three days off for the Labour Day Festival and given how close-by it is we decided to make the trip north for a short break. Labour Day is basically Mayday without Maypoles and other similar traditions or rituals. Although I say that as someone who has never witnessed Maypoling of any sort on any day, the most eccentric thing I have ever seen on Mayday in England was a brilliant Scarecrow Festival in a tiny village near Ripley in North Yorkshire, and let me be the first to tell you, you haven't lived until you've been welcomed into a pub by a scarecrow made to look like Rolf Harris.
We took the overnight train, alongside the wide variety of characters that brings with it and arrived in Xi'an about 7o'clock on the Monday morning. The first thing that it was impossible not to notice was that there were Westerners there. They weren't everywhere and were probably still comfortably less than 1% of the all the people we saw, but to our eyes it felt like the city was full of them.
Shamefully, this did make me realise how much I enjoy the novelty of people staring and waving at us in the street, as thanks to the tourism industry in Xi'an the local people seemed to be so jaded to the sight of foreigners that most of the time we weren't even worthy of a second glance, even from children. Quite a shock to the system coming from here, and it did make me think that if I do go back home in September I'm going to have to either get used to it pretty quickly, or else do something that will help me stand out in a crowd, like getting a facial tattoo or a colourful hat.
After the upset of not being looked at had subsided we headed for the ancient city walls. Like a lot of 'ancient' things in China, the real original walls had been destroyed in one of the wars, uprisings or revolutions that have happened variously in the last 1,000 years or so, so these walls were built in the last century, but in the same style as the old ones. They are about 14km round and unlike any ancient city walls I have
visited in Britain, they have a walkway on top, maybe 15 metres wide, so you can actually walk or run round them if the mood takes you. The particular mood that took us was to hire bikes and cycle round them, a far better idea in planning than it proved to be in practice when the baking hot sun and the lack of any exercise since leaving Costa Rica were factored in to the equation. The bikes could be hired for 100 minutes, meaning I felt pretty confident in us getting round in time with my foolproof calculations of - I can run 10k in an hour, I can cycle faster than I can run so this will be easy. Of course, I neglected to include variables like stopping to admire the impressive views, the fact that I haven't rode a bike since a holiday in Portugal two years ago and that I had a numb arse for three quarters of the trip thanks to a particularly unforgiving seat. Meaning that we made it back with only about four minutes to spare, and that was only thanks to a Lance Armstrong style sprint finish along the North side of the
wall - and still people didn't stare! It was well worth it though, an amazing thing to see and a must if you ever go there.
The city itself didn't feel like the imposing metropolis I thought it might, it just didn't feel as busy or as densely populated as other smaller Chinese cities. You could never stretch to calling it intimate or personal but it certainly never felt as overwhelming as one of the biggest cities in the country probably should do. This may have been due to the city walls and the kind of protective fence that this puts around the city meaning that unlike other places there is a clear idea of the centre and also a limit to how much can crammed in there, which means that to the lay person, it has the feeling of sprawling out for miles rather than being crushed into a smaller space than it should be. This undoubtedly gives it a much more pleasant feel than a city of it's size has any right to have.
Even outside the ancient city, this pleasant feel doesn't stop. The Wild Goose Pagoda, which I wanted to visit purely for the
fantastic name as I have little idea what a Pagoda is, is situated a mile or so outside the city walls, but is surrounded by a kind of park with fountains, a lake and people ignoring the prominent "no entering the water" signs. Some people find these man-made, unnaturally clean places a bit sterilised and soulless but I love them. Friends and groups of kids jumping in the fountains, older people sitting in the shade playing cards, fighting a losing battle with the wind and parents running around frantically vowing never to bring three generations of their family out on the same day again - I could sit and be around that stuff for hours. Sadly, only having three days in a city where there is so much to see meant that this wasn't an option, maybe next time.
The last place we saw, and again somewhere I could have spent a lot longer, was a Taoist Temple, called The Temple of the Eight Immortals - don't ask me who the eight are, I think one is Duncan Ferguson but your guess is as good as mine for the rest. One of our group observed that 'The Chinese do
serenity very well' which is absolutely true and is why places like this are worth visiting, although I suppose if you didn't have corners of serenity in a country of 1.3billion people, you would start to lose it. The Temple itself had a blink and you'll miss it type entrance just off a normal looking Chinese street, but inside this there were three separate buildings, all with different names and presumably different purposes. There were incense burning structures , walkways around the central part that were like Cloisters in old Monasteries or Cathedrals and lots of statues and paintings showing representations of various Chinese stories. Despite the usual hustle and bustle of the main street once you got into the grounds you did feel cut off from everything outside and there was a real feeling of just being enveloped by the calmness of the place. In England, I used to go to parks or to the beach to get this sensation, who knew that my Chinese equivalent would be a Taoist Temple.
Pura Vida
Dave
Advertisement
Tot: 0.237s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 9; qc: 45; dbt: 0.2012s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb