Xincheng

Our first trip on a Chinese train today, as we head out from the capital and into the countryside, 1100km to the southwest and the city of Xi'an. It was an early start as we had to get out to the train station well in advance, and that of course required another trip on the subway. Counter-intuitively, most of the high-speed train stations in China are actually on the outskirts of the cities rather than in the centre - mainly because they're newer.

So we headed out to Beijing West station, expecting to have difficulty finding our way through the station, but as usual it was actually pretty easy. Most of the signs are in Chinese and English, so it's not that hard to get lost. Made our train with plenty of time to spare and were happy to discover that the train was very new, modern and sparkling clean.

Since these trains are on an entirely separate network, they don't need to trundle through the whole city before hitting their stride, so pretty much as soon as we left the station we were blasting along at 350km/h. Not bad!

I passed the time catching up my journal, starting on some video editing, and playing some games. I also had a halting conversation with the lady sitting next to me who suddenly realised she had left her ID card at Beijing station. Losing it is a pretty serious issue, since the government seems to track people's movements fairly closely - your train tickets are tied with your ID card etc, and you need to show ID to board the train. Not sure how she was going to catch her connecting train! We managed to chat for a while using Google Translate - it has a facility where she could draw Chinese characters and have them translated into English, while I could type and have the reverse translation.

Arrived in Xi'an right on schedule at 1pm, Caught the subway down to our hostel which again was fairly easy to find, and were pleased to discover the room was actually a proper size. A welcome change after our room in Beijing, which had basically been the size of a double bed plus a combined toilet/shower cubicle.

Freshened up and then headed out, first stopping at the city walls. These date back to the 14th century, though I think what we can actually see is pretty modern - 1980s or so. They're impressive though: 12 metres high, 15-18 metres across, and a full 14 kilometres in length, stretching in a rectangle around the old core of Xi'an. We decided to pay the $9 for access and climbed up for a look, then noticed the bike rental place. So we rented bikes for another $5 and spent about 2.5 hours riding the entire length of the wall. Super quiet in some places and busy in others, it was a nice ride and good to just stop occasionally and peer off to see what was happening in the city. There's four impressive gate houses at each of the cardinal compass points too which made for good stopping points.

Finished with the walls, we hopped on a bus down into the centre of the city where it was time for dinner. Xi'an is home to a large Muslim population and their area of the city has some excellent street foods. We wandered for a while and sampled various bits and pieces: fried quail eggs on sticks, fried dumplings, and a special local dish called biang biang noodles, with delicious beef and pickled vegetables on top. Also grabbed a tasty mango ice cream roll for dessert!Read more