A year away: July 13-15 - Urumqi and Xi'an

From Kashgar I took the easy option and instead of 3 days on a bus or 2 on a train I flew out to Urumqi, spent one night there and checked out the Xinjiang Museum with it's famous desert mummies and the next day flew again onward to the central Chinese city of Xi'an. The Seven Sages Hostel in Xian was one of the cooler hostels I've stayed at. Housed in a hundred year old courtyard house the hostel has a certain ambience all it's own. I didn't find too much to see in Xi'an itself apart from some small back streets replete with little shops and old men and their caged crickets, and the intact city wall surrounding the inner part of the city - it's very unusual for larger Chinese cities to have in intact wall. Early the second morning I was there I scaled a small section of the wall and climbed the steps to the top, walked along for a few hundred meters and climbed down a different way. It was nice to be up there alone but the haze and smog didn't make for the best views... The main drawcard in the Xi'an area are the Terracotta warriors, located about an hour outside the city. I took the bus out there in the rain and enjoyed a rain-soaked terracotta warrior-fest. Actually the setup was very professional and the warriors are quite an impressive sight. The first pit is the oldest and largest and only a small part has been excavated. You cannot get too close to the men themselves in this hall, but you do get some feel for the scale of the collection - it is huge, there a many thousands of figures. Pit 2 is deeper and smaller but since it's newer it has a bit more of a hands-on feeling with better lighting and more supplemental information. Pit 3 is the newest and is also quite large. Not much has been excavated here but there is a kind of museum around and above the pit itself with certain important warrior figures in glass cases so you can see them up close. At close range you can really see the detail work that was put into each of the thousands of warriors crafted and begin to imagine what a massive project it must have been. They have now mostly lost their lifelike painted colour but they must have been a truly awesome sight when there were newly completed and bright with colour. The on-site museum also housed some interesting exhibits including a pair of bronze chariots cast in exquisite detail. From Xi'an the next stop was to be Huashan.