Xian - cycling the city wall

---

On our last day in Xian, we decided to cycle the city wall. The city wall of Xian is one of the few remaining complete city walls in China. It used to be surrounded by a moat - now the moat and surrounding area has been turned into park or has been completely removed to make way for city roadways that run near the outside of the wall. You can see the ever busy train station just outside the walls. Inside the walls, in the Northeast corner you can see a golden roofed buddist temple.
I also took several pictures of Chinese lanterns that had been left to die on the wall, the elephant, the mandarin, the lotus blosums and kittens. They may have been from the lantern festival.
We paid 40RMB to get access to the wall, then climbed about 20 feet and rented bikes at the top. The top of the wall is about 15 feet wide and made of rough cobble stones. We paid 25RMB for 2 hour rental of the bikes. Each side of the wall was about 700 metres so we went about 3 km in total.
The bikes were scary - rusty and old. Luckily no one got a flat, although Matt slipped his chain. It was great to stop and check out different views. Gordon made a video of our ride, he should be loading it soon. I'll try to direct you to it.

---