Xian - China

7/17/05
We became masters of 'hard traveling'; after traveling for the whole night from Beijing, we arrived in Xian at around 6 a.m, left our backpacks in the locker room at the train station and took a bus to the Terracota Warriors, 40 kilometers away.

It wasn't that simple though; first we tried to buy a train ticket for the same evening to Pingyao with no success; the station was super crowded and with long lines at the ticket counters the attendants didn't have the usual patience to try to understand what ticket we were trying to buy; Angie asked in Chinese for hard-sleeper tickets but it was full, so she asked for soft-sleeper, but it was full too. She asked then for standing tickets and without checking the woman answered no. We asked for the following day, but no matter what were saying from that point on, the only thing we got was an instantaneous 'mei yau' (don’t have in Chinese) and they sent us out of the line :(

But one thing we were sure of, we didn't want to stay in Xian, we just wanted to see the warriors and move on, so we tried to buy bus tickets to Pingyao; the buses are just outside the train station. But again, here we could not find someone who speaks English and our Chinese wasn't good enough. Although they understood where we wanted to go they couldn't understand we wanted to go only at the end of the day.

Not being successful with the bus tickets either we left to visit the Terracota Army around 8:30 a.m.

The Terracota Warriors

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Excavations at Banpo, not far from present-day Xian, show that nearly six thousand years ago a sedentary, agricultural society flourished around the future metropolitan region of the early Chinese empire, Xian, that was once the very center of the Chinese world.



The Army of Terracota Warriors is a perpetually vigilant force standing guard over an ancient imperial necropolis.



In 1974 peasants digging a well uncovered what turned out to be perhaps the major archeological discovery of the 20th century: an underground vault of earth and timber that eventually yieled thousands of life-size terracota soldiers and their horses in battle formation.



The 6000 terracota figures of warriors and horses face east in a rectangular battle array and are more than 2000 years old.



There are crossbow and longbow bearers...



... armored soldiers and every figure differs in facial features and expression.



Many of the figures held real weapons of the day.



The surface of the weapons was even treated for rust. They are kept away from public view.





The place has three major sites and other buildings working more like a usual museum with pieces exposed behind the glass.

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After that mind-blowing visit we took a bus back to Xian with a mission to accomplish, find a way to get to Pingyao. Back at the train station we tried again to ask for a bus but all we got was one just going to a city close to Pingyao; we took it anyway.

In the bus there were some passengers that were more than happy to talk to us, the conversation was held on a basis of broken English-Chinese and they showed up to be amazingly nice people.

Arriving at the city the bus driver did the unbelievable; he brought us to the train station, got off the bus and came to the counter to order our ticket to Pingyao and showed us where the waiting room was. He didn't speak any English but did everything to understand our broken Chinese.

As I have already mentioned before, meeting nice people makes the visit a delightful experience. Once we had our train tickets in hands the bus driver happily said goodbye and asked absolutely nothing in exchange.

Another 2 hours in the train and we got to Pingyao, at 1 a.m.

Beijing I - China

7/13/05
So we arrived in Beijing, much earlier then planned thanks to the speed of the Australian Embassy.
Beijing is a H U G E city, with a population of 14 millions. Right now the city looks like a immense construction park; several cranes are piling up buildings in a fast pace in preparation for the next Olympic games in 2008. Also, all the old neighborhoods with the little houses are being destroyed and replaced by modern skyscrapers.

Since it was Wednesday, the Australian embassy was closed. So, after checking in in the hotel, we walked around the old courtyard neighborhood just south of Qiamen, where the Front Gate is now left out of context without the walls but still impressive.



The streets of the old courtyard are a big contrast with the new tall glass buildings standing just by the wide avenues.



The houses in the old courtyard are in the super narrow and dusty streets, with plenty of family-run business, ranging from restaurants and souvenir shops for tourists to cyclos garage-factory for the locals.





Our first picture in Beijing was also our last for the day, we didn't pay attention and the battery was out of juice.

From Qiamen we walked to Wangfujing, the prestigious shopping street east of the Forbidden city. The place is an absolutely crowded pedestrian area. After some strolling inside shops and malls we went back to the hotel to finish the last preparations for the Australian visa.

7/14/05
We left early to the Embassy, that only accepts applications between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. We took the subway (metro) to the closest station of the Embassy, but it was still quite far, by the way, everything in Beijing is quite far, few things are within a walking distance.

From there we had to stop a couple of taxis until we found one that was ok to take us to the Embassy; even showing them on the map where we wanted to go it wasn't enough. Eventually one accepted the ride, but he didn't know how to get there and had to do a couple of stops to ask around how to get to the Embassy.

Despite all that, we got there on time and applied for the visa; when we asked if there was any possibility of it being processed faster than 10 days, we weren't given any hope but they recommended to send a fax asking, and explaining why that application should be done faster, we then attached the explanation and request with the application instead of faxing it. Ten working days would mean missing my next flight and being on the last day of my Chinese visa.

We were done with the visa by 10 a.m and left to visit the Tianamen Square and the Forbidden city.

Tianamen Square, a desert of pavement, is a creation of Mao.



It is perhaps most known in the west for the demonstrations in 1989 when army tanks and soldiers cut-down pro-democracy demonstrators. In 1977 Mao's mausoleum was built in the middle of Tianamen.

There is not much to see in the square besides the Mausoleum and the sea of Chinese tourists that come to visit it.

Right across Tianamen Square is the Forbidden City, home to two dynasties of Emperors, the Ming and the Qing.



The buildings from nowadays are from post 18th century. But the basic layout was established between 1406 and 1420.



It was off limits, for mere people, for more than 500 years, today it is the most visited tourist site in Beijing.



7/15/05
The third day in Beijing was reserved for main dish of the visit in China, the most insane construction mankind has ever engaged on, The Great Wall, 5.000 Km long.

Click here for a Great Wall Panoramic

Its construction began more than 200 years B.C. When China was unified under Emperor Qing Shihuang; the separate walls constructed by independent Kingdoms to keep out marauding nomads, were linked up.



The effort required hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them political prisoners, and 10 years of hard labor.



An estimated 180 million cubic meters of rammed earth were used to form the core of the original wall, and legend has it that one of the building materials used was the bodies of deceased workers.

The wall never really performed its function as a defense line, As Genghis Khan supposedly said. 'The strength of a wall depends on the courage of those who defend it'



During the Ming Dynasty a determined effort was made to rehash the whole project, this time facing it with bricks an stone slabs. This project took over 100 years and the cost in human effort and resources was phenomenal.



It is not by chance that it is the only thing built by man that can be seen from space.



The part of the wall we walked was from Jinshaling to Simatai, a 10 km section that passed through renovated and 450 years old parts of the wall.



Jinshaling is 3 hours away from Beijing (takes one hour just to leave the city) but it is absolutely worth as there are not many people willing to go that far to see it, most of the tourist prefer to go to another area much closer to Beijing.



The reward was that we had few people on our sight and 5 hours to walk 10 Km through its ups and downs.



Some towers are completely restored while others resemble to a pile of rocks.

Mongol farmers do try to make money there, they will walk the whole way (or almost all of it) with you in a attempt to sell books of the great wall, postcards, water, T-shirts or simple carry your backpack if you don't say NO.

We were done by 3 p.m. and were back to Beijing at 6 p.m.

7/16/05

Mao Zedong died in September of 1976 and we went to visit him in his Mausoleum on a Saturday, perhaps the worst day to do so. The line, made of four people per row, was unfckngblvbly long. Tianamen Square is huge and the queue made almost a complete loop on it; the mausoleum lies at the middle of the square.

Mao was the main responsible for China's engagement in what became to be the greatest failed economic experiment in human history. The Communists tried to abolish money and all private property. China embarked on a radical program of creating massive agricultural communes and drawing large number of people both from the country and urban areas into enormous water control and irrigation projects, but despite the enthusiastic forecasts for agricultural production there was little incentive to work in the fields and the low production combined with bad weather in 1959 plus the withdrawal of Soviet and aid in 1960 made matters worse.

China plunged into a famine of staggering proportions - an estimated 30 million Chinese starved to death.

As a result of the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao resigned his position as head of state, but remained as Chairman of the Communist Party.

There was a considerable staff watching and catching the ‘line-cuters’ and ensuring the line moves as fast as possible; they did a good job and despite the length of the line it didn’t too long.

Mao has a strange rate of approval in China, while outside its home country it is known as a terrible communist dictator, in China it raises mixed feelings; it is rather seen as an example of character than anything else. A proof of that is the memorabilia on sale all over China, it is possible to buy almost anything with Mao's face stamped on it, from watches to hats, T-shirts, dishes and his famous 'Little Red Book', a collection of quotations from the chairman, which I bought to read out of curiosity and I want to share two of his quotations with you:

- We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports

- I hold that is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party , an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.

After seeing Mao we went for lunch and had a specialty from Beijing, the Beijing Duck. The duck is fattened with grain and soy bean paste. The carcass is lacquered with molasses, pumped with air, filled with boiling water, dried and then roasted over fruit wood fire. Boneless meat with crispy skin is served with a side dish of shouts, plum sauce and crêpes.

In one of the tea houses we were invited to watch a tea ceremony. Tea in China is a serious matter and this ceremony is not a joke, they enjoy tea as a Frenchman enjoys wine.

Around 8 p.m. we took a train to Xian.

From Katoomba - Australia

Hey guys, sorry for the delay on the updates, but we are having a hell of a good time in Australia and not having much free time to publish. Also, internet here costs up to AUD 8 per hour.

Check later for the posts about Australia, we have been on Great Barrier Reef, Melbourne, Great Ocean Road, Sidney and awesome hikes and rock climbing in the Blue Mountains and Grampians.