The only way to do the 1000km round
trip in a day is on the bullet train, our first! It is so smooth, quiet, clean,
and bilingual that there is almost no sense of stress or speeding at about
300 km/h. The scenery was polluted skies and thousands of construction cranes,
building apartments next to coal burners or nuclear plants! Once in Xi'An, the
best strategy is to find young people to help ---- they just might have enough
English to help arrange transportation. So I flagged down some passing skaters
and did some bargaining and off we went in the jail-like back seat of a BYD
taxi.
Somehow I had envisioned the
warriors would be accessed through fields and huts ---- wrong. There is a
mile-long hike through souvenir stands, photo-ops with replica bronzes, ticket
booths, and hundreds of guys selling the same cigar-box full of mini-
warriors. The actual UNESCO site is housed in
4 buildings: a museum and the 3 real "pits" where the excavations are
still going on. The other blog today will show what's inside, the holy grail of
this day.
Returning to Xi'An we wandered
through a large Chinese-Muslim district that has been here for 700 years.More
mob scenes, but with a literally different flavour. More help from both a young
local couple, and even 2 blonde Norwegian girls got us to the sparkling new
subway. Which took us back to the more-sparkling new train station.
We got home by 10pm but at 295 km/h!! You had to be there.
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