Took me 17 and a half hours to get from Shanghai to Xi'an on an overnight train. Thank god for IPod's! I liked Xi'an the moment I got to the hostel. People there were really friendly, both the staff and the punters in my dorm. There was a lot of stuff to do in Xi'an. I walked around the huge walls that surround the city, 13k in total. There's 4 ...

After our last trip to the historically rich Nanjing we decided to keep the trend going by making our way to the cradle of Chinese civilization near the banks of the Wei River in dusty Shaanxi province. Xi'an and environs served as the epicenter of dynastic doings from the time that Qin Shi Huang unified warring fiefdoms and lent a westernized v...

After a very restful night and another fortifying western style breakfast at our hotel, we had the morning to ourselves to explore. Weather was lovely, shirtsleeves, but we always carry our fleece jackets (yay RRI) just in case. The sun was once again trying very hard to poke through the "fog" without success. I say "fog" because each of our gui...

The dirtiest city we have ever been to- breathing in dust and dirt, having to cover your nose for the smells and your ears for the disgusting spitting noise of the locals! The terracotta warriors and horses were amazing though and worth the 15hour train journey!

Xi'an was actually not on my list of cities I wanted to go to. The terracotta warriors have never interested me much but of course when I ended up in Xi'an I did go see them. You can't go to Xi'an without seeing the army. Maybe it was my lack of interest or maybe it was the heat combines with tons of tourists but I wasn't that impressed. I did r...

Xi'an Overnight Train Wreck Our adventure in Xi'an actually started the evening before with our first overnight train in China. With most of us taking a overnight train or two in Europe, we felt pretty confident of what to expect. Well we quickly realized that this wasn't Europe! We got to the train station around 8:00PM or so and it was packed....