Xian is about 1000Km SW of Shijiazhuang so we were expected very cold, hostile weather when we arrived- Hiliary even knitted a scarf for Dave to keep him warm. So imagine our surprise when we landed and it was bright sunshine and it stayed that way for the whole weeked. We flew on the thursday,spent thursday afternoon, friday and saturday until mid day there and the weather was superb! Hardly saw a cloud all weeked!
Xian used to be the capital city of many of the old Chinese dynasty's and so the walled city centre is full of many acient artifacts. On our first day there we explored the city inside the walls and found the Bell and Drum towers situated smack bang in the middle of the city where the four main roads convereged. Built orignally in 1384 and then relocated in 1582 the Bell tower was beautifully and intricately decorated with some fantastic artwork and also home to some quite interesting history, we paid 15Yuan for a audio guide to get the full story but got fed up after the first 4 minutes and decided not to use it again so we just made our ways around ourselves-always the best way. The view from the top was quite interesting and Dave and I spent a few minutes watching the lunancy that is Chinese Lane Discipline and general driving skills. At 5 'o' Clock there was a performance of the bells being rung inside the tower, accompanied by traditional instruments from the time, which we enjoyed listening to for some while.
We stayed at the Shangri La Golden Flower as even though it was slightly outside of the town walls it was the closest decent hotel to the Terra Cotta's and on the main road for easy access. The hotel was great and got even better when we realised that we had been upgraded to 'Horizon Club' members. I didn't have a clue what this meant, but due to Geeky Dave spending an innordinate amount of time on the internet researching such things he knew that this meant we were entitled to something. Boy was he right. Between 5.30pm - 7.30pm each day we had free food and alcoholic drinks and soft drinks and tea,coffee and hot chocolates were free all day. They even served breakfast in the morning. Superb and, rest assured, that they free alcohol was well and truley abused by all 4 of us on the saturday night!
Remember what I said about the hotel being the closest to the Terra Cotta's? Well we got in our taxi saturday morning, that we had ordered the day before, the concierge had pulled him over and given him instructions so we felt we didn't have to. We started what we believed would be the very quick-30 minutes max-journey to the museum. However,some way along the line we started to realise where we were going and didn't want to admit that it was the wrong way, but sure enough it was and we ended up at the airport:on the other side of town completely. This lead to a few irate phone calls and the driver shouting into his phone and then driving at break neck speeds, but we got there eventually.
The Terra Cotta Warriors were bult some 2,200 years ago in order to guard the tomb of despotic ruler Qin Shui Huangdi-the ruler who had unified China. They were only discovered in 1974 when some farmers were digging a well and accidentally dug brought up one of the heads with one of their bucket loads. Since then excavations have found three pits of soilders and found a total of 7,000 Soilders, but work is still on going and it is believed that they will find many more. Though I may not agree with the sentiment that the warriors are the '8th Wonder of the World' , they certainly were damn impressive and the sheer amount of detail that had gone into each warrior and the huge number of warriors were breathtaking. The warriors were origianlly coloured Blue and Yellow-the colours of the Emperor's Army Uniform-but when the Armies were destroyed by fire the paint melted away.
Of the three pits I think we all agreed that the first pit was the most impressive purely because of the scale and the amount of Soilders. Pit 2 was good but very dark and Pit 3 was only very small and not yet excavated fully. The museum was a little bit of a let down. Its main purpose is to serve as a home to the 2 Horse and Charriots that they unearthed. These were impressive but also quite confusing as they were said to be in 1:2 scale. We looked at the size of the men, and whilst I know the Chinese have a reputation for being on the small side, this would have made them rediculously tiny! The rest of the museum was a museum to the museum which was boring. With the warriors only being 30 years old to the public they still havn't really capitalised on them quite as much as they could, but China is addressing that problem as it is currently building a huge shopping plaza that you must walk through in order to reach the pits- all the chinese tat and imitation warriors you could ever wish for!
After our visit toe Terra Cotta's we went to a Hot Spring that was just down the road from the site. Mum and Dad had visited a few hot springs in New Zealand and so Dave and I were keen to go and see what they were like for ourselves. We turned up fully prepared with swimming trunks, towells and Dave even had his arm bands. However our face dropped when we got there and we discoverd that it was more of a museum to the hot springs, and the closest you could actually get to any water was to pay to take a shower. The museum itself was quite beautfiul and set picturesquely in the valley of the mountains so we enjoyed walking around for an hour or so, but we were annoyed as neither Lonely Planet or DK China had said that they were not bathing springs-GUTTED!
Saturday night we made the most of the free alcohol and Dave and I ended up in a English Themed pub at the hotel, complete with snooker table and darts board-SUPERB! On Sunday we had time to have a decent fried breakfast, a dip in the pool and then caught a taxi to the Airport to catch the train to return us back to the Shiz-thankfully it didn't try taking us to the Terra Cotta's again!
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