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Published: August 31st 2008
Xi’an 西安 16th - 18th July 2008
We left Nanjing for Xi’an on another overnight sleeper train, a 20 hour journey this time and our longest yet! This time it was soft sleeper time! Soft sleeper carriages contain individual compartments each with 4 beds, 2 sets of bunks. Both top and bottom bunks have ample space to sit up and move around comfortably in, as well as personal reading lights and individual storage space. Some soft sleepers even come with personal TVs (very luxurious!), although unfortunately nothing of interest (or in English!) is really shown. Our first soft sleeper experience was slightly marred by the middle aged male snorer who was in the 4th bed! He left early the next morning though so thankfully we were able to get a few hours of decent sleep before we arrived in Xi’an in the afternoon.
A trip to Xi’an would not be right without seeing the famous Terracotta Army, which we did on our first full day there. Even though I’d seen the Terracotta Army the year before with some friends from Fudan, I as still amazed by it the second time around. Seeing hundreds of clay warrior fighters all different
from each other, lined up in trenches ready to protect their emperor in the afterlife really is breathtaking. The story behind the construction of the Terracotta Army is pretty insane and makes me wonder what life would have been like during that time.
The tour we joined to see the Terracotta Army also included a visit the Banpo Village museum, a little ancient village which was run by women (!), the Terracotta Army replica factory and a replica of the Emperors underground tomb, which was pretty impressive as it was more like an underground city than a tomb!
The Muslim Quarter area o Xi’an is well known for its huge variety of foods of Islamic and Chinese origin and we made it our mission to try as much as possible! A lot of what we tried was excellent; meat, bread, desserts. There was one dish we tried that we couldn’t quite figure out what it was, it could have been some sort of marrow vegetable but it felt too smooth… or it could have been vegetable flavoured jelly, but at the temperature it was served, jelly would have surely melted! Whatever it was, it was pretty good, if
a little spicy.
I had my first tandem bike experience on the Xi’an city walls. The centre of Xi’an is surrounded by a 14km intact wall which you can walk, or in our case, ride around. Unfortunately, to our dismay, they had no 3 seated bicycles (although probably a good thing for us!) so we had to make do with a single and a tandem; Stacy on the single and myself and Amy on the tandem with me up front. A little wobbly at first, myself and Amy soon got to grips with the tandem-ing and I’m pretty sure we could have gone pro! We tried a swap around with me on the single and Stacy on the tandem with Amy, but the single was way too big for me - I could barely get on and Amy refused to pick her feet up off the ground while screaming that Stacy was trying to kill her… so for the safety of all of us, we stuck to our original configuration!
And so after 3 days and 2 nights in Xi’an, it was time to head to our final destination in China - the capital, Beijing.
Beijing
北京 19th - 23rd July 2008
Our last overnight sleeper train in China took us from Xi’an to Beijing in just under 12 hours. We were in another soft sleeper cabin and this time we lucked out with a non-snoring girl sharing with us. The Beijing accent is very pronounced, a lot of rolled “R’s” are stuck onto the end of words and for the first time since I left Shanhgai to travel I had trouble understanding what people were saying to me. Apparently it worked both was since the taxi driver who we took from the train station to our hostel didn’t understand a word I said! I do wonder how Beijing as a whole will cope when it is swamped with a lot of non Chinese speaking foreigners during the Olympics.
We stayed in Beijing for 4 days and 4 nights, our longest stay in China (other than Shanghai) and it was nice knowing we had a few days before returning to lugging our homes on our backs again.
We met up with Rich (who we first met in Nanjing) in Beijing, it was good to see a familiar face in an unfamiliar city and
the 4 of us did a fair bit of sightseeing together. The Summer Palace was first on our list and I was amazed at the size and beauty of the place. Seeing Tiananmen Square for the first time is something I’ll always remember. The morning we went was swelteringly hot ad we soon noticed the absence of any shady areas, the openness of the square with big imposing buildings in the centre of Beijing, so sterile and precise, left nowhere to escape from the sun.
I had read about the Forbidden City in novels and I was quite excited to go there and see for myself where the old Emperors used to live. The Forbidden City is beautiful, a lot of halls with large elaborate thrones for the Emperor and Empress, but having read about it I’d expected it to be a lot larger than it actually was! But I also put that down to having been to the Summer Palace the day before and being awed by its beautiful palace buildings and stunningly large gardens. It was law that no buildings outside the Forbidden City in Beijing could be built to stand taller than that of the tallest
building within the Forbidden city, and so from the highest point within the walls, you can see low lying old traditional buildings in the surrounding areas.
We checked out an evening Kung Fu show at the Red Theatre which was absolutely brilliant. The performers showed such a high degree of strength, stamina and agility that I could only imagine how many hours and years they had trained. Some of the children performers looked like they couldn’t have been more than 12 years old and I wondered at what age they had started their Kung Fu training as some of them were equally as good in agility and acrobatics as the older performers. Strength of course would only come with age and more straining, I would have been somewhat concerned if the younger performers started breaking metal rods over their heads!
Of course a trip to Beijing wouldn’t be complete without going to the Great Wall of China, which we did with Rich on his last full day in Beijing (our second to last day). Beijing had just started a new road policy to help clear the air pollution in time for the Olympics where you could only drive
your car on alternate days, dependent the last digit of the car number plate (odd one day, even the next). This new policy gave us a few problems when it came to finding a tour to the wall, as our hostel’s minibus wasn’t able to go on the day we wanted. However after some searching, we managed to find a hostel running a tour for the day we wanted.
Our Great Wall of China day began with a 2 hour cramped minibus ride to the Mutianyu section of the wall at 7.30am. we got to the base of the wall and I was quite surprised (and a little excited!) to see a camel being lead up the road, none of the locals seemed fazed by this though… I didn’t realise camels were an everyday occurrence at the Great Wall!
We opted for the traditional route to the wall, climbing the stairs as opposed to the cable car and well, what a killer! 30 minutes of steep step climbing left our legs a little shaky and achey when we finally got to the wall and that climb pretty much set the tone for the 3 hour walk we had
amy and me on the tandem
riding around xi'an city wall on bikes...along the wall. Mutianyu is known for being a less touristy but one of the more physically demanding sections of the wall to walk and we soon understood why as it had a lot of slopes, dips and steps that reeked havoc on our knees and made our calves and thighs burn. But it was all definitely worth it to be on the Great Wall of China and see it stretch out for miles on either side of us on such a gorgeous day, the sun high and bright in the clear blue sky. We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day, although a constant cool breeze would have been nice!
We had a relatively easy last day in Beijing that started with saying goodbye to Rich who was heading back home to Edinburgh. We spent an hour strolling around the local hutongs before heading to the Temple of Heaven. The buildings there are beautiful and so intricately designed, definitely living up to the “Temple of Heaven” name.
And so our time in China had come to an end. The 2 weeks we’d spent travelling through various parts was fantastic, it amazes me how different areas of
the same country, only a few hours away from each other can be so totally different in terms of food, architecture and people. The size and diversity of China is what makes it such an interesting country to travel and it was a shame we didn’t have more time to spend there. Maybe one day in the near future I’ll be able to return, practice and improve my newly acquired Chinese language skills and see more of what China has to offer. But for now, it’s time to head over to Japan for a little over 3 weeks!!
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