Huangdu Hotel Xianyang

... always
at times of indecision we go and have some food, that seems to clear
our heads. We headed on a taxi (the only one that'd take us) on the
short journey to a motel. The driver however was a bit thick or
intent on ripping us off. I'm inclined to think it was the latter,
however he wasn't to know that we had a map and compass so started
shouting at him to stop taking detours.



We couldn't find anything
at a decent price so we wandered around a park ...

... to look around. Later in the day we had some dumplings for dinner, visited the market and i got to see the Drum tower lit up at night.

Day 13

Today was an early start, as we headed out at 8:30am to see the Terracotta warriors, the 8th wonder of the world. It took us 2hrs from our hotel to get there. The warriors were in a huge warehouse and quite deep down in the excavation areas, so we were not able to get that close ...

... Pojun along with the Upper Star Qusheng. They are all housed in intricate wooden cabinets. On either side there are murals of mortals and gods.

The Hall of Lu Zu has a statue of Lu Dongbin (one of the 8 Immortals). He assists living creatures to attain Tao. He is located way back in a wooden shrine and is surrounded by murals (scenes of his life?).

The Hall of the Master Pharmacist, Sun Simiao, was next. He lived during the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907).He is also known as ...

... We stopped outside an had lunch at The Hong Kong Star Restaurant. Bill had Hans Beer (Chinese, not German) and I had a Coke Light. We shared dumpling soup and beef with noodles.

Outside the restaurant I see that I can buy an Asiatic bear pelt. This is the endangered bear that we saw in the park near Luang Prabang. There are other pelts too that I would swear are dog and cat. One looks like a German Sheppard... I could be wrong...

We bought our tickets and ...

... for 46 yuan ($8).

We returned to the spot where we had lunch the first day, Tibetan Kitchen. I had the yak salad again and masala tea. Bill had yak curry, naan and Lhasa Beer. It was 65 yuan ($11.50) for lunch.

We walked around the North side of the temple to find a silver coloured bracelet that I found the other day. It has flowers and prayer wheels on it. I was able to buy it for 5 yuan ($1), the asking price was 15 yuan. Bill bought the ...

... with me asking "sorry, you called me....do you know why you called?!" with this girl repeating "you have laundry back?" "no, I don't" "you have laundry back?" "no, I don't" "er...this is housekeeping..you have laundry back?" "no. could we have it back tonight?" "No, so...you have laundry back?". One night water was dripping from our ceiling - the air con was leaking at 3am. A call to reception resulted in them asking me "water?? How many bottles you want ...

... in Xian was spent exploring the city on our own which included a bicycle ride on the 640 year old wall surrounding the city center, walks through the Muslim quarter and a visit to a theme park. The theme park was designed to re-create the entertainment of Tang dynasty era. I was fun to walk around the massive park and just admire the architecture. Xian is also famous for its dumplings and on our first night in town we had dinner at a famous ...

... but who can go wrong with deep fried pork! I thought I'd try out some of the drinks on the menu, since they were so reasonably priced! I tried a long island iced tea, which tasted like coke and gin, not so good. Then I gave their "pink lady" a try, it was quite yummy for a martini and only cost 18rmb or $2.50. After hanging out for a bit we decide to head down to the bar for happy hour ...

... markets, the muslim quarter, and the city walls. The city walls are 14km in total, and we cycled round them on tandem! We had some good food, as more places seemed to have english menu's, and we saw the warriors. The warriors are rather dramatic, though i found pit 2 and 3 rather borring, pit 1 was amazing. Thousands of teracotta warriors lined up was quite spectactular. what was also spectactualr was the amnount of time it took for the screaming chinese tourist to really ...

... see the city from above; Surprisingly there is no hill or a very high building in the centre of town - but a bicycle tour on the restored city walls would be an excellent substitute. So, we walked to the south gate of the city, which was located 200 meters next to our hostel. We bought tickets to go up to the gate, and rented bicycles. We knew that the ride should be longer than an hour and a half, but we believed we could make it in a little ...