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When we arrived in Xi’an, it was cold and raining, and that’s pretty much how it stayed for the 3 days we were there. Xi’an is a funny town, the centre of town is surrounded by 14km of city walls that are fully restored, and that you are able to walk all the way around if you like. The city inside of the walls tends to be old and rundown a little, although there are plenty of new buildings around as well. Outside the city walls tends to be a bit newer and cleaner. Also, there were noticibly fewer people that spoke any English at all here, compared to say Beijing or Shenzhen. Nothing wrong with that of course, their national language is Mandarin, but it does make getting around as a tourist a little harder.

On the first day we were in town, we went for a walk into the centre of town to try and find something to eat. That’s tricky in itself, none of the resturaunts had any menus in English, and very few had pictures of the various dishes that you could point to. We were walking along the footpath, it was very crowded, and Angie felt someone pulling the zipper on her backpack down. She stopped straight away, but whoever it was was long gone. We panicked for a minute, thinking they might have gotten the camera or something, thankfully they didn’t get anything. It did teach us a valuable lesson though, we had been too complacent! Not any more…..

Anyway, the highlight of Xi’an, and the whole reason for us coming here in the first place, was to visit the Terracotta Warriors. What an amazing place! Back in 1976, a local farmer was digging a well on his farm, and ended up uncovering the most significant archaeological discovery of the 20th century. There has been much excavation since then, with thousands for warriors, horses and other artifacts having been found, but that’s still just the tip of the iceberg.

I started to feel pretty sick in Xi’an, running a fever, so we decided that we would make some alterations to our holiday plans. We had planned to spend 2 days in Chengdu and then 2 days in Jiuzhaigou, but decided that we would cancel the time in Jiuzhaigou, and spend 4 days in Chengdu resting so that I could get over my cold. This turned out to be a really good idea.

Check out our photos of Xi’an

While on holidays in China, we got to learn some of the road rules over here. Not that we ever drove over here of course, but these are just some of the observations that we have made:

• You must never, ever, ever, let anybody in, ever. Doesn’t matter if it is a pedestrian, another car, and ambulance, whatever, you must not let them in.
• You must never change down gears until you are right on the threshold of stalling. It doesn’t matter if you are going so slowly that you are holding up miles of traffic, that’s OK, just so long as you do not changes down gears
• There is only one item that is checked in a Chinese roadworthy examination, and that is that the horn functions correctly.
• If you are at a T intersection, and you need to turn into the crossing street, then you are free to do so at any time. Looking to see if anything is coming first is option, but is largely considered a sign of weakness. It is the obligation of the traffic driving along, minding their own business, to get out of the way from traffic charging at them from all directions

And the holiday finally begins! I’ve been planning this thing since about January 2007 when I booked the flights to and from China, and at last it’s here.

We woke up at 3am, and caught a taxi at 4:15am out to Avalon airport, ready for a 6am flight to Sydney. We were supposed to catch a flight from Sydney to Beijing at 10:30am, but they had problems with the plane, and so we didn’t leave Sydney until 2pm. Then after an 11 hour flight, and getting though customs, and then a half hour taxi ride to the hotel, we finally got to our room at around 1:30am Beijing time (3:30am Melbourne time). Angie had slept most of the flight, and was OK when we arrived, but as always, I couldn’t sleep on the plane, and so was pretty grumpy when we arrived, I was knackered! One thing that really annoyed me, the guy at Avalon airport was coughing quite a lot into is hands while he was handling our passports, and that couple of minutes would come to have a major impact on our holiday….

We stayed at the Hilton Hotel in Beijing, which was up to the usual high standards of the Hilton, much better than some of the so called 5 star hotels we’ve been to in the past.

On Tuesday morning, we asked the concierge for walking directions to the nearest subway station so that we could get into the centre of town. They couldn’t believe that we would even consider walking! The Chinese are funny like that, even our Chinese friends at home think we are very brave going to China by ourselves, they seem to think that China is a very dangerous place for foreigners. Our experience in China last year was exactly the opposite, and so far, this year has been the same. Sure, there are traps and dangers abound, but by applying a bit of common sense and awareness of your surroundings, you can avoid most of them.

The Chinese people, even in Beijing, seem to see very few foreigners (laowai), they just stare at you in amazement a lot of the time. Not that they intend to be rude of course, they are largely genuine, friendly and welcoming people. A smile will always be returned, and people will go out of their way to help you.

Anyway, on Tuesday, we went to Tiananmen Square and had a walk around. It was packed! October 1st is National Day in China, and most Chinese take the whole week off and go and visit all of the famous spots. The Chinese tourists outnumber the foreign tourists by about 1000:1. We walked all around Tiananmen Square (Quote from the Lonely Planet guide to China: It is illegal to ride your bicycle in Tiananmen Square, but apparently, tanks are OK) and then went across the the road to the Gate of Heavenly Peace (the big red building with the huge portrait of Chairman Mao that you will have seen on TV a hundred times). When you go through the gate, you can pay a 15 Yuan (about $2.30) entry fee to go up to the top for a view of Tiananmen Square, and in the opposite direction, the Forbidden City, which we did. We had to check our bags into the bag check though, because you can’t take bags up into the gate. when we came back down, we decided to walk around a little before we went and collected our bags, just in case there was somewhere else that we wanted to go that demanded that we check in our bags again. We walked through the second gate toward the Forbidden City with a huge stream of people, and then realised that we should have gotten our bags before doing that. We tried to turn around to go and get our bags, and were stopped by the police. They made us walk all the way out the rear exit, walk all the way around to the front, and back through the front gate again, a distance of about 3km. What’s worse, is that we had just 35 minutes to get back to the bagcheck before they closed, and about 1 million meandering Chinese tourists to get through. We *just* made it back in time, but it was pretty tough going. A bugger of an ending to an otherwise good day.
On Wednesday, we went on a private tour of the Great Wall, that I had organised in Australia. Our tour guide Picked us up at about 8:15am from the hotel in a taxi, and we drove about 90 minutes out of Beijing to Mutianyu, one of the restored sections of the wall. We spent about 2 hours walking along the wall, taking photos, soaking up the history. It’s an amazing place, and it was fantastic to finally see it up close. On the way back, we stopped by a very nice restaurant, and had a fantastic meal. On Wednesday night,sitting in the hotel, I started to get a deep chesty cough, no doubt in my mind a result of the guy in Avalon Airport handling our passports. Why can’t people with colds  just stay home and get better instead of  trying to be a hero and go back to work?

On Thursday, we went out to the Summer Palace. It was OK, but we were both a bit disappointed. It was a nice enough place, but it was just packed solid with Chinese tourists, so it was pretty hard to move around. We had a nice time, and we spend about 5 or 6 hours walking around, but we kept comparing it to the New Yaun Ming Palace that we visited in Shenzhen last year, it it kept falling short, despite the historical significance of the place. Maybe we would have enjoyed it more if there were less crowds?

Our final day in Beijing was spent doing the obligatory walk around The Forbidden City. It’s a pretty amazing place, but it is just so huge, that after half a day, it all starts to look the same. It was a great day though, we really enjoyed ourselves.

One final observation of Beijing, there seems to be a drastic over-abundance of very beautiful young women everywhere you go, they are just everywhere! All of the guys seem to be old and ugly, and the women are all young and beautiful, I just don’t understand how that works!!!!!

Check out some of our photos of Beijing