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OK, time for the next China installment!
I don't know what I was expecting Xi'an to be like, but certainly not the hugely busy place it was. Unfortunately we arrived at the start of Golden Week, a Chinese holiday, so everyone was out of work and thus wandering around, making the pavements very congested.
Olive (my tour leader), took us on an orientation walk, showing us the centre of inner Xi'an (inside the city wall), marked by a bell tower and a drum tower. From there we went to the Muslim quarter of Xi'an, where there were lots of bustling streets, full of shops and places selling an amazing range of food.
After that it was up to us what we wanted to do. Some of us decided to go to the city wall, hire a bike and cycle along the top of the city wall (it is pretty darn wide for a wall!). It was a 14km cycle ride to go all the way around the wall, and took us two and a half hours, but i absolutely loved it, even though it was drizzling a little! Although it was bumpy going, it was a great way
to see the city away from the horrible crowds.
We took our time, chatting the whole way. I had great fun trying to cycle with no hands, something I can usually do, so long as the road is very, very flat, so the bumpy and pitted cobbles were pretty challenging. Thankfully, none of us fell off while attempting this.
When we'd finished riding the bikes, and had given them back, we stumbled across some sort of performance. There were men dressed up as ancient soldiers; some with spears, others with a sword or a whip, and some demonstrating hand-to-hand combat. It was interesting to watch. After they'd finished their act, some Chinese drummers came on, and I was absolutely blown away by them. I had always thought drumming was boring, but these women made it into a dance, hitting every part of the drum, including the stand, to get different sounds from the drums. I could have watched them for ages. They had such timing, and a flair for performing. I felt so lucky to be able to watch them, and for FREE (which nothing ever seems to be in China...).
We had a lovely group dinner in
the evening, and all 16 of us sat down to play a card game called chase the ace (with 3 aces going round), with the losers having to down a shot of rice wine. That stuff does not go down easily!
The next day we went to see the Terracotta warriors. They were only discovered relatively recently in 1974, when several peasant farmers were digging a well and came across broken bits of terracotta and assorted pottery fragments.
When archeologists came, they found Terracotta warriors in 3 pits. There are approximately 10,000 clay warriors and horses.
The Terracotta army is over 2,000 years old and was built for the same emperor who unified China and started the Great Wall.
The warriors are pretty damn fantastic. Rows and rows of them, all with different faces, expressions and hairstyles. The Terracotta warriors had always been on my list of things to see in China, I just hadn't realised that they'd only been found so recently, which explained why there was still so much that needed excavating, and why the 10,000 warriors is only an approximation.
The have areas of soil just waiting to be excavated, however, they are waiting
for a certain type of technology to be developed. The army was originally painted; black hair, pinky faces, greens and reds and blacks on the armor. However, when the Terracotta warriors were exposed to oxygen, the colour quickly faded. So the Chinese are waiting for a way of preserving these colours to be developed before they unearth the rest of the army.
Sadly a lot of the warriors were damaged during their 2,000 years underground. Soon after they were buried, two of the pits were ransacked, after civil war broke out in China, after the emperor who commissioned the warriors, suddenly died. Weapons were stolen, warriors smashed, and areas of the pits were set on fire. If this wasn't enough, over the years the wooden beams that were used to create a ceiling over the pits, rotted and broke, causing the Terracotta warriors beneath to be crushed.
This means that as you walk around, you see lots of broken warriors, some so smashed, it is impossible to imagine what they once looked like. There is a warrior 'hospital' where some of the less badly damaged warriors are taken to slowly be put back together, the ultimate 3D jigsaw puzzle.
Though we couldn't go very close to the warriors, you could see that they were pretty tall (especially for Chinese people), I'm not sure if this was because they were just taller back then (seems unlikely) or if the emperor just wanted tall, strong warriors.
My favourite warrior was this one that was very different from all the others. He was very,very tall, and very, very thin. Almost waif like. He also had a small head. I could just imagine that this warrior was really carved based on a real person, and I love that I can see what this normal (ish!) soldier looked like, 2,000 years after he died.
The warriors are so detailed that you can tell what rank they are from their hairstyles, head wear and clothes.
After we'd finished with the Terracotta warriors, we headed back to the hotel doe some free time. I decided to go explore the Muslim quarter and look at the 1,500 year old mosque there. The Muslim quarter was this lovely, bustling area with narrow street full of stalls selling everything. It was great fun to walk along and see what was on sale, especially as it was
pleasantly busy but not overcrowded.
The mosque looked nothing like I thought it would, nothing like my image of a mosque. Instead, it was very oriental (though I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by that), much like a Buddhist temple, except with ancient Arabic carved into the rocks and written on some of the structures.
It was a very peaceful place to be, quite surprising since it was completely surrounded by the noisy, shopping streets of the Muslim quarter. I enjoyed walking around the garden and looking in some of the buildings, having a break from the hoards of people I'd been constantly surrounded by since arriving in China.
Once I'd finished shopping and looking around the mosque and Muslim quarter, I walked back towards the hotel, only to come across some of the guys from my group playing with this feather thing with a weight on it, that you kick from person to person, basically keepy-uppy . I joined in (and was awful), and we ended up playing it for two hours, though i bowed our after an hour when the boys wanted to try and get a high number of passes without dropping it.
As evening approached, suddenly music and water displays started in the park we were in. It was so nice to just sit there and enjoy the last of the sun.
For dinner some of us went back to the Muslim quarter and had yummy, spicy wanton soup, and spicy beef noodles for dinner. It cost about 90p in total each. Delicious and a bargain!
As we were catching a flight to Chengdu the next morning, we had to be up pretty early. Chengdu is the most densely populated city in China. On arriving, Olive took us on the customary orientation walk, down these beautiful old streets, called the wide and narrow street. We then went to a park where the Chinese were enjoying various recreations. There were people ballroom dancing to music, singing karaoke, doing aerobics, practicing choreographed dance routines, and old people taking exercise. It was amazing to watch. We never put our parks to such good use at home. Lots of Chinese people just circle and watch everyone else, when we arrived, we had a few make a circle around us, as we were Westerners and therefore fascinating to stare at.
In Chengdu, you
can get you ears cleaned for about 20 yuan (around 2 GBP). Olive had told us it was something you could only really have done here, so I went with some others from my group to have it done. You sit on a random chair and the men rush up to you to haggle a price, the tools of their trade in their hands.
The actual ear cleaning was really odd. They use sticks with fluffy bits on them, sticks with kind of scrappers and all other sorts of things. All of them end up in your ear! To begin with it really tickled, but after a while it started to feel quite nice in a bizarre way. At the very end, they put a metal stick in your ear and then vibrate some tongs gently on it.....a very,very odd sensation.
We weren't really sure if we could hear any better after the ear cleaning, but it had been a laugh!
That evening we went for a local specialty for dinner, sichaun hot pot... it was very,very hot! You have a pan with two circular sections put in front of you, and these are filled with oil. The
oil can be various levels of spicy. We put spicy oil in one of the sections, and then a non-spicy oil in the other circular section. The gas is turned on until the oil starts to boil, and once it is boiling it is time to add various meats, vegetables and tofu to it. You dump it all in, and once you have given it a suitable amount of time to cook, you (try in my case) to fish the bits out with your chopsticks. I found the food a little bit too slippery to grab, so had to resort to a ladle in order to get anything successfully into my bowl. The food cooked in the spicy oil was very tasty, but it was difficult to eat very much in one go as your mouth was on fire. We all had to have pauses between eating to allow our mouths to recover. This definitely wasn't my favourite meal (though it was a billion times better than the grasshopper!) but I was glad I had tried it and got to experience a side of Chinese cuisine that I had never know about before.
The next day, the 4th of
May, was the day I had been waiting for. It was the day we went to go see the PANDAS!!!!!! I was so excited, I'd never seen a panda in real life before, not even in a zoo.
They were even better than I had expected. They were so cute and fluffy, but ever so, ever so lazy. The reason behind their laziness is that their body only uses 20% of the bamboo that they eat for energy, so they dislike strenuous activities purely because their food doesn't give them enough energy to do them.....a convenient excuse!
There dislike of strenuous activities is so great that it means that pandas often can't be bothered to have sex (LOL!). This is part of the reason why pandas are endangered. Another reason for such a small population of pandas is that even if a cub is conceived and born, it is 1/11th of the size of it's mother. Tiny! By scientific standards, the size of the panda cubs at birth is equivalent to a premature birth with other mammals! However, panda cubs are always born when they are this minuscule size. Because they are so mall, and born blind, it is hard
for them to survive...add in the fact that most mother pandas are born without the mothering instinct, and often hit their cubs (as they have absolutely no idea what the annoying, noisy, little pink thing is), and it is a wonder that pandas still exist at all! Against all these odds there are 1600 pandas left in the wild, no where near enough, but still a small miracle in my opinion.
Still, they are an endearingly cute, with the adolescent cubs being downright adorable. We watched a couple of cubs playing together, play fighting and rolling and tumbling all over each other.
I then had the highlight of my china trip, I got to go hold one of the baby pandas! I had to pay for the privilege, but it was definitely worth it.
I had to wear this special gown , and had to wear gloves and funny plastic things over my shoes. All in all I looked as though I was about to perform surgery on someone.
I only got to hold the little panda briefly, and he was nowhere near as heavy as i thought he was going to be. He was just a fluffy
as he looked, with thick warm fur that your hands practical disappeared in.
He had this adorable little face, and kept sticking out his tongue. He was surprisingly gentle, especially considering he had these huge claws that he could have easily used on me if he had wanted to. But he didn't touch me with them once even though he did wriggle about a little bit.
I would have loved to just scoop him up and take him home with me, though he would obviously eventually grown pretty big (although nowhere near as big as I thought, especially considering they are called GIANT pandas.....)
After the pandas ( *sob*, bye bye baby panda!), it was back onto the bus to go drive and see a giant Buddha carved into the mountain.
The Buddha is carved into a mountain that overlooks where three rivers meet. It was carved there because lots of ships used to sink at that point in the river, so Buddha was put there to watch over the ships and to warn them away from coming too close to the land.
It is a pretty huge Buddha, 70 meters tall! You can climb down along side
Emei Mountain
Pictures taken while on the trekthe Buddha and thus see him from all angles. He is repainted every now and then, so that the colours remain, but the majority of him is simply the reddish colour of the rock he was carved from.
Around the Buddha are many temples, other carvings and caves where religious hermits used to live, so it is a nice place to wander around as you never know what you are going to stumble across.
Once we'd finished at the giant Buddha site, we drove to Emei mountain where we would be spending two nights at one of the monasteries there. The facilities were very basic, but it was a place with such atmosphere, and we felt privileged to be able to see the monks wandering around and hearing them perform Buddhist ceremonies throughout the day (some of us where woken up by the early morning ceremony that starts at 4am!).
It was up early at the monastery, as we were going to spend the day climbing around Emei mountain. We couldn't climb all the way to the top as it takes at least two days, so as we only had one full day, we planned and mapped
out a different route that would still allow us to see a lot of the main temples and monasteries on the mountain.
The scenery was very pretty, but my god did we have to climb a lot of steps. It sometimes feels like all I've done since getting to China is climb steps. The last bit of our route was the real killer, but it was worth it as we got to see rock carving and monkeys (a couple of who decided to jump on various people in my group. The reactions were hilarious, though I was pretty pleased the monkeys didn't decide to jump on me!). I slept ridiculously well that night after my 5-6 hour hike!
The next morning dawned bright and clear, and it was again up early as we needed to catch the bus that would take us to where the cruise boat that would take us down the Yangtze river was moored. It was a public bus and we were on it for 7 hours....not fun. The driving in China, although not as bad as Vietnam, is by no means great. The driver was honking the horn the WHOLE time, not pleasant if
you are trying to catch up on some sleep!
The toilets at the toilet stops were fun; the expected squats but with the add bonus of no doors.... You had to just squat and do your business with everyone watching....l decided I wasn't that desperate (little did I know how things would change when I got to Tibet).
We arrived at Chong Qing eventually to find it was 35 degree there. Very hot and very humid. Still, before long we were getting settled on our cruise boat, with it's lovely air conditioning! We were going to be staying on the boat for three nights, so we went out for our last dinner on shore for a little while, and opted for Pizza Hut. It was exactly what we were craving after so much Chinese food. Heaven!
It was then back on the boat for my first sleep on water, as I'd never slept on a boat before. I could hear the water and the slight groaning of the boat while in bed, and found it all quite soothing.
I was up relatively early to go on a cruise excursion. We went to what is called 'The Ghost Town'.
The chinese characters of the names of the two monks who first settled in that area along the Yangtze river, look similar to the characters used for the word ghost, thus how the place acquired it's name.
The place has several temples, and there are part of it called hell. There are three tests that if you complete correctly, mean you are a good person and will go to heaven.
The first test involves walking over a bridge, using the correct foot first (left if you are female, and right if you are male), and you have to walk over it in a certain number of steps (either 3, 5, or 7, and I think the lower the number the better.....not too sure though a I wasn't really paying us attention...oops!).
There were statues lining some steps leading to the next test, that show you what will happen to you if you commit various sins. Apparently, if you touch the stomach of the drunkard statue, you will never be drunk again.
The next test involved walking over a large threshold without touching it, again using the correct foot first. This test wasn't all that challenging.
The
last test involved trying to balance one footed on a ball shape for three seconds. We weren't all that great at this test, and unless we counted to three very quickly, most of us failed.
After you have completed all of the tests you have to walk into the judgment area, where there were these huge figures that pass judgment on the souls passing through. We then had to walk through a corridor that showed the punishments in hell that sinners received.
That afternoon, I just relaxed and sunbathed on the sundeck. All very nice except for every time the cruise boats horn went off and made me jump.
After enjoying a couple of drinks at happy hour, I went to dinner and then watched an entertainment show put on by the crew.
Later, we all sat on the sundeck and got to know some of the other people on the cruise boat with us.
I didn't get a chance to sleep in the next morning either, as I had to be up in time for breakfast (I'd paid for it so I was going to eat it). As the excursion was optional (meaning you had to
pay 260 yuan for it) everyone in my group decided to just relax on the boat (aka more sunbathing).
We started to go through the first of the three gorges that morning, and it was extremely pretty. There was another excursion that afternoon once we reached the second of the three gorges (wu gorge), which is famous for it's Goddess Peak. The story goes that there was a couple, greatly in love, and that every morning the man went off fishing on the Yangtze river. In those days (before the river was flooded by the three gorges dam project) it was very dangerous to fish the river, and one day there was a huge storm. The woman climbed to the top of the peak, and prayed for her husbands safe return. She waited, day after day after day but he never returned. She waited there so long that she eventually turned to stone, and can be seem today as the small rock next to the peak.
The excursion once we were in the Wu gorge was to the Shennon river, where we could see boat tracking and a hanging coffin. The Ba people, the ancestors of the people
who still live in the area, used to live in caves, and even as recently as 70 years ago, some of their descendants where still living in caves. When someone died, if they were rich enough, they would have their coffin put in a cave as high up as possible. The higher the coffin, the closer to heaven the dead person was, and therefore the more likely they were to get to heaven. Also, the higher the coffin, the higher the dead persons descendants would rise in society.
I loved seeing the hanging coffin and found the story fascinating. Most of the coffins washed away when the area was flood, but this one survived, and no one knows how old it is or exactly how they got the coffin up there.
We were then transfered into small wooden boats to experience boat tracking. This is where the men get out of the boat, put a rope made from bamboo over their shoulders and pull the boat upstream against the current.
Twenty years ago, when the area was still very poor, and supplies could only get to these villages by boat trackers, as their clothes were made from a
very coarse material, they used to track naked, otherwise the clothes rubbed them raw!!
Alas, nowadays they are dressed (which is actually just as well because they were all old!!!), but it was still interesting to watch them at work; I also felt slightly guilty being dragged along by a couple of old men.....
On the way back to our cruise boat, our local guide sang us some traditional songs from the area. She had a great voice.
That evening there was a talent contest and being an untalented bunch, we decided to sing 'frere jacque' in four languages; English, French, Norwegian and Chinese (though the Chinese version is about these two tigers, one missing an ear and the other it's tail) as a group.
It was hilarious to get up and sing in front of everyone, slightly embarrassing too, especially when it turned out that some of the other guests actually had proper talents. Still, we got some laughs and applause.
Then, late, late that night, we started to go through the biggest lock in the world. It would take us down 100 metres in total, involving going through 5 separate locks, each taking
us down 20 metres. I only stayed up to watch us go through the first two locks, after that I gave up and went to bed, as the whole thing can take over three hours!
That was it for our time on the Yangtze river, as the next day we were getting off the boat and then going on an epic journey to get to Guilin, so I'll end this blog here. Let me know what you think 😊 xxxxxxxxxxxx
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