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Published: January 19th 2008
a big terracotta warrior...
...and no there isn't a real person inside!Our 'taxi' to the pick up point for the bus to Xi'an arrived and this time it was a cross between a milk float and a golf cart, but it didn't have any material around it to keep the cold out and it was freezing...when we say freezing we do mean below freezing! This cart went 10 mph at full speed and it drove us through the streets of Pingyao new town, dodging the cars, buses and lorries and had the locals laughing at us freezing, shivering and sitting on this cart! We arrived at the toll gates of the motorway just as the bus pulled up to pick us up. All 8 of us foreigners piled onto the bus much to the delight and stares of the locals on the bus, it caused quite a commotion. Seriously how long can these people stare at us for? The answer is the whole 6 hour bus journey, no we aren't joking...we put on our MP3 player and sat back relaxing for the journey and every time we opened our eyes we had the same people staring at us. Do we really look that strange?
We arrived into Xi'an unscathed but a
the warriors of the respect campaign...
we single handedly tried to teach people to have respect...we don't think we were successful though! little unnerved by the constant staring (even on the stop off and we had a pot noodle the staring continued!) and the bus actually dropped us off where it was meant to, a rarity in Asia! Things going well we walked to the guest house we had booked into near the train station, where the staff there had promised to book our onward ticket to Chengdu as we were only staying one night in Xi'an. We found Bob's Guest house no problem but it really didn't look like the pictures on it's website...it was a dump; dirty, cold and the staff were really, really weird. When we checked in we ended up having a 20 minute argument with them as to whether they had got our train tickets, the answers the staff gave ranged between, yes, no, they are at the train station or no we can't get. We seemed to be going around in circles and getting very frustrated we demanded that they have the bottom hard sleeper tickets we wanted within the hour or else. We finally got the tickets and were happy because the Mandarin characters showed they were bottom sleepers...this train tickets saga continues in our
next blog!
We had only decided to stay in Xi'an for one night as we had to change our itinerary and skip Tibet - it was going to cost so much to do (£21 each for the permit to enter, £52 for the train each and £130 each for a flight out) and so many people we were meeting were saying that Tibet wasn't worth visiting and they had bad experiences. Faced with these costs, us and quite a few other travellers we met, decided to miss it out altogether. We had also realised that our other travel plan to visit Myanmar was not going to be cheap either as the flights from China were around £200 each. So we spontaneously decided to book some flights to Jakarta from Macau as they were very very cheap £75 each and we were already wanting to explore Java in Indonesia. What a nightmare this itinerary planning can be!
Xi'an (like Pingyao) is another ancient walled city, it has huge, thick walls which are now a fraction of the size they used to be (apparently the city walls enclosed an area which was 7 times bigger than what they are today).
Quite impressive to see but at night the wall had some really cheap looking rope lights around the top of it, it looks like someone got a bargain on the rope lights at the £1 shop! We had a wander around the city and Xi'an had a really nice feel to it, the people seemed to be a lot more relaxed and friendlier here than any other city we had been to in China. Neil got some very curious looks from people, they all seemed to be looking at his blue eyes! The people were also slightly politer with not as much pushing in when queuing was involved. As it was getting late we couldn't be bothered hunting for food and took the easy option of eating in the Bell Tower hostel. We were pleased we did because the food was excellent with proper chicken in the curry instead of bone and hairy skin and the beer was so cheap at 5 Yuan (30p) for 640ml!
Xi'an, apart from the Terracotta Warriors, is famous for it's Bell and Drum Towers. Both of these were slightly disappointing. The Bell Tower was on a roundabout in the middle of a really
busy road, so most of the time it is obscured with exhaust fumes so getting a decent pic was impossible. The Drum Tower, a little down the road, has a McDonalds outside it, so it looks like the Drum Tower is sponsored by Maccie D's, maybe it is?! Walking around that night with the aim of finding a supermarket. Our impeccable sense of direction managed to take us through Xi'an's red light district, full of dodgy massage places, sex supermarkets and other 'shops' that we really didn't know what was going on in them!
The next day we had 6 hours or so before we had to catch our train, so we decided to check out of the grim place called Bob's early in the morning and head off to the Terracotta Warriors, around 30km outside of Xi'an. We jumped on the green bus from the train station and it cost 7 Yuan each (50p) and it dropped us right outside the complex that house the warriors. We should have known what to expect by the big Terracotta Warrior statue at the entrance, but when we reached the entrance we were shocked at how slick this tourist set up
was. There were posh ticket offices and turnstiles you insert your tickets into, metal detectors, x-ray bag scanners and loads of security! Again, like any tourist attraction in China, there are hoards and hoards of tourists on organised tours, but this time the rudest people were actually the Western tour groups who had no qualms shoving us out of the way to get through the turnstiles only to just mill around and get in our way on the other side! 'Quick, quick ...must get to the tourist attraction before it crumbles into dust!'
At the Terracotta Warrior complex there are 3 'pits' where the excavated soldiers are, we decided to go to Pit 3 first and save the biggest and best until last! But on our way to this pit we discovered that Pit 2 was closed...you guessed it, for renovation. Another tourist attraction which had failed to mention the renovations when we bought the 65 Yuan (£4.50) tickets! The Warriors were impressive if not vaguely unnerving to think that these statues were modelled on the Qin emperor's actual army, why did he think he needed these statues to protect him while he was dead...a little loopy if you
ask us! We did overhear one tourist turned history-buff-know-it-all who claimed that inside each warrior was the body of a real soldier, that the emperor had ordered his soldiers to be encased in terracotta...erm, we don't think so! We have found walking around these ancient Chinese sites that some people try and impress others with their knowledge or pretend that they know everything about the sites they are visiting, in reality they end up sounding very silly but it gives us a good laugh to overhear these things!
Anyway, Pit 1 was worth it, thousands of warriors housed in a huge aircraft hangar built around it. There were huge amounts of people in this hangar, there was even a very rude American lady who tried to stop Neil from getting to the barrier to take a picture by sticking her leg out...she ended up kicking him pretty hard but gave no apology and simply looked down her nose at us. So, so rude...even compared to the Chinese tourists there! We marvelled at the different faces of these warriors and spent even longer trying to figure out our camera settings (how long have we had this camera?!) to get the
light right for some pictures and dodge the other tourists jostling to have their pics taken in front of the warriors! There was also a museum there housing some of the warriors from the closed Pit 2, some similar ones have been sent to the British Museum in London. This museum was really good, although was difficult to tell if the artefacts were originals or replicas. We also had a tickets clipped going into this museum and told we were only allowed in once...this we didn't understand at all!
Deciding we had had enough of the warriors and the rude tourists we decided to head back to Xi'an...we were hungry too, so that was probably the deciding reason to leave! We discovered we couldn't go back the way we had come in, we had to go another way out. Discussing the possible reasons for this, it suddenly dawned on us why we had to come out this way as soon as we got through the exit turnstiles. We were hit by a barrage of touts selling tourist tat yelling at the tops of their voices all competing with each other to try and get us to buy their tourist
tat terracotta replicas. They were all shouting '1 dollar, only 1 dollar, looka-looka, looka-looka', see the video we took! We find that every tourist attraction in China is like this, these complexes are built to milk as much money from the tourist as possible...mostly the Chinese tourists who seem to love these souvenir shops/tat and big huge restaurants. This is the reality of tourist attractions in China, so as long as you expect this you won't be shocked or disappointed! It seems to us from travelling the rest of Asia, this is how tourism is going - to cater for the huge tour groups of Chinese tourists. We noticed in Thailand, Philippines and north Vietnam that there were similar shops and big restaurants designed to hold 17 coach loads of people at once to get maximum revenue in the smallest amount of time.
We had a jam packed few days in Chengdu planned but before that we had another 16 hour train journey to survive!
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