Pingyao Day 1

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Hello everybody

Still having computer problems, so there will be no photos again until we get to Datong at the earliest - I don know whats going on, it downloaded some updates automatically and now everything is stuffed. I love computers. Especially old ones.

Anyway, not to worry. Weve had adventures.

I was reading another blog on this site and they were talking about catching a train in third class in Thailand, and the different tribulations they went through. After reading that I realised that Im a complete wuss and that I shouldn be complaining about our trip - and Im not complaining, its just that its a good story and Im not going to pretend that it was the best thing weve done in our life. But it wasn a massive hardship by any stretch of the imagination - I just want to make that clear - some of my very cruel friends say that I complain too much :-).

Anyway, when we arrived in Xian a couple of days ago we booked our tickets to Pingyao. Let me explain the system for booking tickets in China. The short version is - its organised by a near-sighted pack of morons who have no concept of reality, have no interest in people, and absolutely no concept of how to increase tourism in a country.

The more detailed versions goes like this: If you want to book a train ticket, you have to book it from the place you e leaving. So for the trip from Beijing to Xian, we had to book our tickets from Beijing. You can book the tickets at all sorts of times, some of them you can book a week in advance, some two, some of them even a month in advance if they e the really fancy new trains. In Beijing thats not really an issue because theres a lot of ticket offices and the trains all go from Beijing so theres no drama, as long as you can speak a bit of Chinese. Even then, its not so bad, you just have to go to the railway station if you want to speak English. The trouble starts when you e out of Beijing, and the trouble particularly starts when you are only in a city for a day or two. Since tickets go on sale a week or two in advance generally, if you try to book your tickets the day before you want to leave, you e more than likely setting yourself up for a fall, because by then the good tickets would have been bought and youll be stuck with whatevers left. The tickets come in 5 classes, from best to worst, they are soft sleeper, hard sleeper, soft seat, hard seat and standing. You would have to be either nuts or Chinese to take the standing tickets for anything over about 5 minutes on those trains. Hard seat isn much better because thats where the standing tickets are sold and I don think theres a limit on how many standing tickets they sell, so you will be pushed from all angles by people trying to sleep standing up. Soft seat is nicer - comfortable seats and a bit more room, and no standing passengers. Hard sleeper is a step up where you have a set of bunk beds with partitions on one side and a space with another set of bunk beds. So theres six bunks to a cubicle, although its not a closed room, it all opens onto the corridor. Hard sleeper is the tickets we got for Pingyao.

Not only were they hard sleeper, but they were the top bunk. There is about 2.5 feet between your eyes and the roof of the train, and on the older trains you really need to be a contortionist, or at least the size of an average Chinese person. Im neither. Hard sleepers are not kind to me, they hurt to get into, they hurt to get out of, and my feet hang off the end. But the beds are pretty comfortable, the bedding is good and, when you get on when its dark, it seems pretty clean! I sort of slept for most of the trip to Pingyao, which left at 11:00PM and arrived at 7:00 the next morning. Susie didn sleep at all the poor thing because the train was stopping every hour at the different stations and insisted on blowing its horn at every stop. Trains aren easy to miss, I don know why it had to blow its horn. Its a good class to go on if you e just wanting to go to sleep though, so everything worked out OK, and we saved a bit of money out of it too.

On to Pingyao!

Pingyao is very, very ancient. It was the first city in China to open a bank, and from then on became the richest city in China. A few hundred years later, the banking all moved to Shanghai, along with Pingyaos fortune, and the city was left virtually destitute. Luckily, destitution is what saved the city. When Mao and his marauding bands wanted everything destroyed that related to the past, Pingyao would have destroyed its ancient houses and the city wall, but the simply didn have the money to do so, so they stayed. Now, when you come to visit, you see a city the way it was hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And since its been listed as a world heritage city, that will be the same way for a very long time.

The city is magical. You really feel like stepping back in time. A lot of the reviews of the place that I had read said that it was a bit overrun with tourists, but I didn really think that was the case. I guess that now isn the really high peak season, so that might have something to do with it, but although we did see more westerners than usual (are Australians westerners? Technically we e East of China), it didn spoil the scene at all. First thing we did was to walk WAY further than we needed to to pick up a pass to see all the historic sights in the city. You need to buy they whole ticket so that you can visit the places, you can visit just one, but it does save you a bit of money in the end because theres stacks of places to see. We visited some of the old Buddhist and Daoist temples, and then went to a really cool place that was the first armed guards to operate as a business in the city. I don know why I liked that place so much, but the building itself was really cool.

Theres a rating system here in China for all the tourist attractions from A to AAAAA. AAAA means that they e culturally significant and authentic. To get the extra A I think they have to provide exceptional services and transport too, so AAAA is still brilliant, and theres at least four of them here. Most of them are just old banks that were opened in the city. They are very important, but they e not massively interesting. There are a couple of temples that are rated four As too here, and they are pretty spectacular.

We saw so many things here today, everythings a bit of a blur to be honest, but if you are interested in Pingyao, youll be able to find out some pretty cool stuff about it on wikitravel.org.

Thats all for today, tomorrow we e heading out to an ancient residence that is absolutely gigantic from everything Ive read, should be good.

Hope everybodys well - for everybody thats asking, we e coming home on the 21st. Not sure what time we get in actually but we e leaving Malaysia at 9:00 that morning I think.

Hey, Ive got an idea - we are now accepting tenders for the best offer to pick us up from the airport! Send us a message on this blog for what you have to offer and well make a decision!!! :-)

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