Xi'an...

I will apologize in advance, as I am not going to say much about Xi'an because I am too excited about Tibet, but I will give you the highlights and A will have some things to say for sure. It's not because it wasn't great!!!! We had some amazing experiences in Xi'an.

We arrived in Xi'an on a bus and it wasn't much different than our other bus journeys except that it was over an hour later than we expected. The bus guy tried to stick us for some extra cash and make us pay for extra luggage, but we weren't having it (we are seasoned travellers and we know better :) - and he tried as we loaded them and as we unloaded them, the cheeky boy! :) We put the bikes together and a very helpful drunk fellow tried to take my bike for a spin as we moved on to putting A's bike together, but he couldn't get his leg over....

We loaded the bikes and rode into town. First, we were impressed by the modernity of the city - it was very fresh! Secondly, we were very much thinking of D&B back in MK and thinking about them having been in this very same town not all that long ago :) We found the first hotel that we liked the look of in the Rough Guide and went in to see if they had anything in our price range - the book lists them in our price range, but it was looking very posh! We sorted a room and my decision was made not on the price (which was not cheap! but it wouldn't break the bank) but that it was rapidly getting dark and that there was some fabulous food in the downstairs restaurant :) They had no bicycle parking but they immediately agreed to let us keep the bikes in the room....yes, it was a nice place and we had to walk them in through the restaurant in ground floor (hilarious! :)

The food was excellent - one whole wall of the place was food on display and there was immense variety - one whole section of steamed buns and dumplings in both meat and veg varieties (can you see A smiling? She was in heaven! :) Then we went out on the town! We walked towards the center of town and stumbled upon a youth hostel. We went in and asked about Tibet permits (the first thing on our mind!) and ended up having a beer in the bar and booking in for the rest of our stay in Xi'an (we didn't want to stay in the posh and uninspiring hotel).

Ok, enough about all that, the rest is highlights! Let's see...the first night in the youth hostel we were woken by some rustling in the room (well A was, I sleep like the dead but she woke me up to listen :) and after a few bouts of turning the lights on and having a look around I spotted the cause with a quick flick of the light switch - there was a rat eating some biscuits on the desk!!! We were both rally unnerved and went downstairs to ask to change our room...it was 4am. They had no other rooms!!! So we went back upstairs and lay there with the light on until the morning. We then went down and got our room changed. Wow, that was an experience!!! Now, this is not a bad thing to say about the place at all, the youth hostel was very clean and the people were very friendly and helpful....I have no idea how it got there and we did leave the biscuits out.

We got our act together to get the Tibet permits quite late on the Saturday and since the one place to get a photocopy was shut we were led to another hotel to meet a travel agent that would sort it all out for us. Everything was going smoothly, the guy was really helpful and he faxed off the permit applications for us, but when we went to leave we couldn't get out - the area of the hotel is locked that late at night. The travel guy called the front desk and we waited...no one showed up, he called again...no one showed up. Twenty minutes passed and we were running out of conversational topics :) The lights were on motion sensor so we spent most of the time in the dark...what if there had been a fire???? Finally someone showed up and the travel guy gave her a piece of his mind (rightly so, I thought) and we were on our way back to the hotel...it was nearly 10pm!

On the way back to the hotel we were approached by two women, one spoke English. She was a teacher of English and it seemed that she wanted to demonstrate to her student that she could in fact speak English to foreigners. But we were having such a good conversation and the student went on her way....we had just met Julia :) We were both really tired and we arranged to meet up with her the next evening for more conversation and dinner....which we did.

Then we went out to see the Terracotta Warriors....we wanted to ride, but the route finding was more troublesome than we expected and we had done 20kms and still had at least another 30 to go and we were running out of time (and I was feeling the effects of a potential cold) so we turned around and headed back to the bus station where we parked the bike in the bike barn and hopped a bus :) The warrior experience you will see in photos - we took a ton :) Suffice it to say that it was tourist hell - that mass market scene that the Chinese have chosen - of a huge mall shopping area, very channeled routing of the masses to see the sight, followed by another trip to the shops. Ugh. That said, the Terracotta Warriors are indeed an amazing sight - they have done a really wonderful job of protecting them from the huge crowds and also letting you see them, which is a huge task. There are three big buildings covering the three very different groupings. You can see that this is still very much a work in progress - there is a lot (the vast majority) that they have not started uncovering. In building number 2 they have also put several of the different warriors and some of the artifacts recovered in the pits behind glass - museum style so you can really see them up close. I was totally impressed by the high-tech crossbow mechanism that was so well preserved and the warriors are truly amazing up close - so close you could touch him if the glass wasn't there. It was well worth being fodder for the tourist machine :)

Once we got the Tibet permit - which was a fax with 4 names on it, 2 of them ours (of course :) for which we paid 500 Yuan each! We went to the train station, as we were told to do, to buy the tickets. We queued at window 1, as we were told to do by the guy at the hostel, for 10 minutes when upon reaching the window we were sent to window 4. Great. We then waited about 15 minutes at window 4 when the window closed and we all had to find a new queue. We are no dummies, windows 4 was the foreigner window so we looked around and found that window 10 was also the foreigner window, so we queued there. Twenty minutes later we reached the front of that queue and were told that they only had tickets for travel to Tibet today (all the trains leave in the morning, so they probably didn't have any :) and tomorrow...we wanted the day after! So we left empty handed after an hour's queueing. The next day we came back and the queues were enormous! We queued for nearly a half hour at window 4 and we finally got our tickets - 2 middle bunks in a hard sleeper cabin, woohoo! We were going to Tibet :) Now to arrange for the bikes to go with us.

We found the cargo area and tried to find out what we needed to do. No one would give us a form so we could take it away and fill it out - they told us we needed to have the bikes. It was frustrating, but my handy dandy Rough Guide dictionary provides a translation for "can you get someone that speaks English?" :) So they took us went next door and chased someone up for us. We spoke to a very helpful woman whom we eventually convinced to give us a form but we promised not to fill it out - we would let the professional next door fill it out when we arrived with the bikes the following morning....at 4:30 am!!!!! She said we had to be there 4 hours before the train departed to put the bikes in for shipping and the train left at 8:48 am.

We then hooked up with our new friend Julia and went off to see the Great Goose Pagoda - we have both been reading Monkey, about Tripitaka's journey from China to India to return with Buddhist scriptures and this is where the scriptures were stored on their return. A Chinese reader/speaker is great thing to have on hand when all the information is in Chinese! :) She read some of the information panels to us and even conversed with the monks in the library :) While A went up into the pagoda Julia helped me with the translation of the shipping document that we had picked up at the train station. That was a great help, too. Then we headed over to find the bike shop that has Trek bikes, which just happens to be near the pagoda. Again, we were very thankful for Julia's presence as she did all the translation for us.

The people at the bike shop were beyond helpful!!! They did not have any spare mech hangers in stock, but they offered to remove one from one of their bikes for sale so that we could have it (that is above and beyond - it would take them 3 days to get a replacement and the bike is not usable/sale-able until it has a mech hanger). We declined their generosity, but they provided us with a few more water bottles and a cage (my bike has 2 cage mounts but we only put one on in Beijing and I was carrying water in my pack - better to put the weight on the bike). They also gave us some t-shirts, which we will wear in a forthcoming photo :) then, to be even more generous, the manager of the shop invited us out to eat! He took us to one of the famous eateries in Xi'an where we had some fabulous noodles (cold, hand cut noodles with chili oil and a little broth that you have to mix all together) and I had the most amazing pork sandwich, which is their speciality. Then we went off to a small place near the southern wall (Xi'an still has it's ancient walls) and drank Corona and talked about foreign tourism to the US. It was a wonderful evening and it would have been impossible without Julia translating for us, so we are indebted to her and we are very glad that w made some friends in Xi'an.

Ok, my little "problem" with the US as it deals with foreigners. Ugh. People have to prove that they have ties outside - whether to their own country or somewhere else - before they can get a tourist visa to enter. In China they have to have an interview with the US Embassy. It takes 3 months, so apply well before you go. Getting into a US University - be it Harvard or Podunk U - is not the challenge, even if you have been accepted you have to show that you have ties outside and that you will come to the US, get educated and then get the heck out. Being the only male son (in China there is a one child policy, so you are the only child) and have to come back and care for your parents is not enough. What sort of ties do you have when you are 18 years old? You don't have a job that you have to return to, or a business that you own....the family dog? Hardly! We even met a very educated Chinese man that owns his own business, drives a very (very very) nice vehicle and he is afraid that if he applies for a tourist visa to the US that he will be denied because he doesn't have enough ties. It is scary. We checked the UK and it doesn't seem to be as harsh. Here is a scary thought...if A wasn't a Brit and able to come to the US as a tourist via the visa waiver program then she would not be able to visit as a tourist....

Anyway...we have had a spectacular train ride across the rooftop of the world and we are spending our days acclimatizing and grinning like idiots in awe of our surroundings. Catch you later!