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Published: August 8th 2007
Waking up at 7am on a hard sleeper, after a fitful nights sleep only to jump in a rickshaw to the Hostel we were to pick up our onward Train tickets to Xi'an from was not that nice, especially as Pingyao appeared to be yet another uninspired Asian town, full of smog and road rage. But how wrong I was! How I should have learned by now not to judge too quickly! A huge great grey stone wall came into view, the outer edge of the ancient city of Pingyao, under a deep tunnel and it was breathtaking on the inside, like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia, or at least Diagon Ally with an Eastern touch.
We had foolishly booked an onward night train to Xi'an, the idea being to save on accommodation. We hadn't counted on not sleeping on the sleeper trains and I wish we had had at least a night in Pingyao as the accommodation was all in 400 year old traditional Chinese buildings, full of wooden courtyards with bonsai trees and wells. It would have been like sleeping in the Forbidden City! but we didn't, so we dropped out stuff off at the guesthouse we
were picking our onward train tickets up from, grabbed a shower for 20 RMB, some banana pancakes with a Dutch family, hired some bikes, met up with Lauren, Dylon and Wade, the New Zealand guys we met in Datong, and spent the day tearing round Pingyao's dusty backstreets and main streets, buying punching puppets of world dictators and narrowly avoiding the tourists. A quick dinner with the other people we met on the train and we legged it for the station.
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