Week 2- Xi'an, Terracotta Farrior, Shaanxi Province

Day 7
Another funny bus incident later , we leave Yangshou and arrive in Guilin. It's a pretty grim city and the only reason we're stopping here is to see the Longshen Rice Terraces which are about 2 hours north up in the mountains. Ourt hostel organises for a taxi bus up to Longshen. This is probably some of the nicest scenery i've ever seen.The mountains and forests we drive through get greener and lusher as we ascend. It would have been even more pleasant if our crazy driver wasn't weaving all over the road and playing this awful,awful Asian techno they seem to love here, on repeat, at full volume. He didn't speak any English so when there appeared to be a problem with the car battery we started to sweat a bit. Our favorite song from the CD was entitled Sex Crime...Lisa managed to find it on the web....with some other various dubious findings also.I don't think the driver understood the lyrics, at least i hope he didn't as he had some small kids with him in the car at one point. I know i mentioned this previously, but the driving system here intrigues and scares the living Christ out of me. They overtake three cars at a time, It feels like they are all playing chicken with each other but nobody seems to stress out about it. I was doing an awful lot of the fake breaking - hand on dashboard thing that my mam does when i drive. Anyway, the battery, nor us, didn't die before we got to Longshen. The rice terraces are pretty spectacular and we end up having dinner in some locals sitting room, that we thought was a restaurant. It was really good food though. Infact, so happy we were there, we didn't even mind when the couples one year old peed all over the floor. The hawking again is really intense though, our driver stops and dumps us into a group of local women for five minutes to sell us more tat. They seem to have a system of helping each other out in this department and it's really begging to tick us off. Back in Guilin, Aoife gets chased around a shopping centres by two sketchy ladies so we're really glad to leave the next day.

Day 8
Instead of getting the 26 hour train journey to Xi'an in the north, we unanimously decide to screw that idea and book flights instead. They only cost about 90e and we get an extra day in Xi'an. Our hostel here is lovely, it's got a bar and we get the opportunity to meet some other people travelling. China doesn't appear to have the same amount of back-packers as other countries in Asia and up until now we really haven't met any other people. We end up in this awful American-themed bar close by, they had an open-mike night when some local guys do covers of American Classics. I asked them for some Bruce Springsteen, who they've never heard off.........WHAT? Alot of people here don't know where Ireland is but not knowing who The Boss is..... well...that's just backward.

Day 9

We check out Xi'ans Muslim quater the following day. It's inside the old city walls and we spend hours here in the markets, buying loads of stuf we don't need but can't put down as its so cheap. The girls seem to have the haggling technique perfected and are coming up with all sorts of elaborate ways of getting more money off. I'm pretty rubbish at it to be honest, i just don't have the balls and feel intensly guilty about the whole thing.The people here are much more relaxed and friendlier than the south. The kids are disgustingly adorable and wave and say hello all the time. We go to a bird market in the back alleys of the city, it's bordering on the cruel side the amount of birds they have confined in one cage but interesting as hell. It's hard dragging ourselves away from this place and decide to come back later for food. In the meantime, we hire bikes and cycle the perimeter of the old citywalls, hight up on the parapets. It measures about 22km in total the whole way around and as it was really peaceful up there. I get a good look at the bamboo scaffolding they have on all their highrise building, it's unbelievable. It seems to be just knotted together with twine but i assume it's perfectly safe. Lisa has a deadly photo of some construction workers wearing bamboo hats with hi-vis peaked caps on top.That'll save you from some falling depris alright! I don't think they have the compo-culture we have in Ireland here....somehow.

Day 10

If anyone ever reading this decides to come to China, avoid getting yourself into any organised tours. They invariably are rubbish, over-priced and unnecesary. The public transport here is top notch and cheap and it's much pleasanter, we've found, not being part of groups and to do things at your own pace. Today was a good example of where we should have taken our own advice. We join a tour from our hostel to go and see the Terracotta Warriors that also includes a trip to the crazy emperors grave, who built the warrirors, to protect said tomb in the afterlife. I've been really excited about this as the whole thing sound completely barmy. Aside from being shovelled about by our guide like a first year school trip, it's raining and us girls are inappropriately dressed. We stop off at an ancient neolithic town remains first. I'm unconvinced about the validity of the whole place...to start with. There just a real sense of stuff not really being like it appears here. It's probably a throw back to the communist regime, but facts and details don't add up. Me and my big cynical head carry on in this manner for the rest of the day. The Terracotta Warriors are impressive, or at least the work they are doing is extremely impressive: they are piecing an estimated 6000 broken warriors back together, in what must be the world biggest jigsaw. Unfortunately, after 20 years they have only completed 1000 and the rest of the complex is a very elaborate excavation site. The complex was build in the 1970's and sort of remembles what went up around the Shrine in Knock....if anyone of familiar with that architecural beauty? I had this romantic impression that we would be able to walk amongst the warriors, in some sort of cave. You really actually view them from a balconey about 20metres away. BORING! They have self-appointed this the 8th Wonder of the World. Note the word self. To top the whole thing off, our trip to the tomb, does not infact turn out to be the tomb, but an impression of what, they believe, the yet unexcavated tomb might look like. What we behold is a Miniature golf-style model, in a Community Centre with blinking Christmas lights all over it. It's completely nuts! Some crazed lunatic obviously got a grant from the equally crazed government to commision this and pass it off as a valid historical commodity.We're breaking oursleves laughing but our guide is taking the whole affair very seriously. I want to get into the model and re-enact some scenes from Beetlejuice.

Day 11

We don't do mcuh today but chill out and book our train to Beijing, leaving later in the evening. We're really excited about leaving and moving on. Three days seems to be the most we can hack in anyone place. We get another overnight train with comfy beds and arrive to a bustling Beijing at about 7am.