"xian" in Weblog

I’ve had a bit of time on my hands recently so I’ve taken the opportunity to finish up my China photos… FINALLY. The complete collection is up on Flickr titled Shaanxi and Shanxi Provinces, China 2005… I’ve gone a bit over the top, to be honest, but I can’t bear to take any more out than I already have. I guess it’ll come down to something more succinct over time.

I’ve also been writing up the trip but so far it’s pushing 2,000 words and I really don’t think anyone will be that interested in it. Instead of an epic, but ultimately tedious, account, I’ll just pop down a summary of the itinerary and leave the photos to flesh out the story.

We started in Xian with a trip to the Terracotta Warriors, the Wild Goose Pagoda and the Muslim Quarter. Then we jumped an 18 hour train up to Datong for a quick look at the Yungong Caves, the magnificent Hanging Temple and the Wood Pagoda. An overnight train later and we were in sleepy Pingyao. Pingyao was China’s financial heart before Beijing’s ascendancy and has been left largely unchanged for the last 150 years. The place is one big museum. One final over-nighter later and we were on our way back to Xian for the flight back to Shenzhen. It was a week of heavy travelling, all told, and well worth the effort.

Missed travel connections seems to be becomming a theme for my holiday. Emma and I were supposed to be flying to Shanghai last Sunday but we were told at check-in that her visa wasn’t valid. Hong Kong airport has check-in facilities in Central, which is an absolutely brilliant service, making the process almost entirely painless. Normally. It also meant that we were near the China Travel Service office, that issues visas. Emma headed over there to try and get her passport sorted, intending to catch a later flight while I continued on to the airport because my tickets weren’t changeable. After some frantic phone calls from the boarding gate we finally decided that the visa just wasn’t going to get sorted out in time so I had to walk away from the flight, get my bag offloaded and go sit in customs while they cancelled the exit stamp in my passport. They actually put a big stamp saying ‘cancelled’ over the exit visa, which is going to make immigration interesting for the rest of my passport’s natural life. Ah well.

It all worked out okay in the end though. We were able to go on the Pro-democracy march instead and spent a couple of lazy days in Hong Kong shopping. Word to the wise: apparently Granville Road is absolutely amazing for women’s clothes… I’ve been going there for years and had never been particularly impressed but Emma loved it - loads of little boutique-type places selling indie designer items. We were there for hours!

Emma flew home on the Tuesday and I hooked up with my mate George for a quick trip into China. On Wednesday we were up early and on the high speed ferry from Kowloon to Shenzhen, which was very efficient and, as far as I can tell, is the easiest way to get to the airport from Hong Kong. From there we jumped an internal flight to Xian with Hainan Airlines. I was expecting a hamster powered flying box with wings made out of egg cartons and sticky-back plastic but we got a brand spanking new Airbus that delivered us to central China exactly on time.

Xian was a bit of a surprise. I was expecting the city to be quite big but with a small town feel, since the city center is cut off from the rest of the sprawl by restored city walls, but it is SO much bigger than that. The taxi from the airport took perhaps an hour and a quarter, with most of that time spent driving through sprawling suburbs. The rest of the time passed sitting in horrendous traffic and dodging other cars, pedestrians and donkey carts as everyone competed for road space, changing lanes at will, cutting through gaps and occasionally dashing against the traffic to gain position. I’ve never seen anything quite like it!

The most surprising thing has been the pollution. Visibility is perhaps half a mile, muting all light and destroying the famous views from the Great Goose Pagoda and the city walls. It’s a city of 7 million people so I should have expected all this really. While I’m on the subject, the horrendous air quality in Hong Kong and macao also shocked me, although this is apparently the fault of their ugly, unregulated cousin Shenzhen (who lives just up the Pearl River delta). I’ve not seen a sunset in weeks - the sun just disappears into a yellow haze about 15 degrees above the horizon. We woke up this morning to a beautiful orange sky silhouetting a monster coal-burning power station somewhere South of Datong belching heavy smoke from its stacks. I guess air pollution is a problem common to many of China’s cities…

That’s it for first impressions. I’ll get cracking on what I’ve actually been doing now. Back in a bit!