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Booking flights in China is like booking them anywhere else. Go online, use Travelocity, book your flight. Very efficient.
Long-distant trains, not so much.
While China is updating its network of trains and bringing online some high-tech, high-speed trains, the ticket booking system has a ways to go.
First, unlike airlines, they don’t issue e-tickets. They will only issue paper tickets that they insist be delivered by courier to the hotel where you will be staying in the city from which your train will be departing. This means you have to book your hotel rooms before you can book your train tickets, which is the reverse of the standard order.
Second, train tickets in China only go on sale ten days before the day of use. The work-around is that you can go through a ticket broker. You “buy” your tickets from him several weeks or even months ahead and then the day that your tickets go on sale, he makes the actual purchase on your behalf. The risk is that the broker has your money weeks in advance, with no guarantee that he’ll get your tickets.
Sure enough, that’s what happened. The day after our overnight train tickets from Xi’an to Beijing went on sale, we got an email from the broker saying tickets were not available for the class of seats that we wanted on the day that we requested. In the same email, he mentioned that on the day of our choice the deluxe berths were still available for US$60 more per person. We were already on the road traveling through China at this point with limited email access and the rest of our itinerary –including hotel rooms- was already set. What were we going to do? We bought the more expensive tickets. It threw our budget off kilter to the tune of an extra US$240.
But man, what an upgrade it was.
Rather than staying in a four-person cabin with access to a communal squatty potty, we got two two-person rooms with private baths. They looked like cabins on a cruise ship. They were new, clean, and modern. It completely ruined train travel for my family. I will never get them to travel in economy class again.
Not sure it was worth and extra US$240, but we arrived in Beijing in style and well rested.
The second of the big three highlights in Xi’an, was riding bikes on top of the old city wall. Xia’an –which at one time was the capital of imperial China- was a walled city like so many ancient Chinese cities. Today, Xi’an has the distinction of having the largest intact city wall (thanks –in part- to some modern re-construction efforts). The top of the wall is about three stories above the rest of the city and is about thirty feet wide –or wide enough for several horse-drawn chariots running side by side. It is possible to start at one spot and bicycle the entire fourteen kilometers. We stopped to take a lot pictures and finished the circuit in just under two hours.
The third must-see attraction in Xi’an is the Muslim Market. Before moving to China, I never realized how prevalent Islam is, particularly among some of the ethnic minorities and especially in the more westerly provinces. The Muslim Market is in downtown Xi’an just west of the city center and it is the place to go for cheap souvenirs. Given that this is Xi’an, there is an abundance of reproduction Terra Cotta figurines of all sizes and price ranges. They were everywhere. I am convinced that for every full-sized warrior that was crafted 2,200 years ago, a thousand miniature replicas have been made since their discovery in 1974.
As much as I wanted to buy a full-sized replica to put next to my lamp post just outside by breezeway door in Chicago, I settled for a modest-sized one of about eighteen inches. Annika used her Mandarin to help me negotiate a very good price. I like to think the man gave us a particularly good price because my daughter’s Mandarin was so impressive.
Later that week, as we attempted to fly out from Beijing, I was stopped by security. The guard took me around a corner where he had me put my packs on the counter while he called over his supervisor. They expressed particular interest in my miniature terra cotta figurine. They had me take the lid off of the box and peal back the tissue paper. The two of them talked and poked and lifted it out of the box to get a better look.
Oh my goodness, I thought, they actually suspect that I might be trying to smuggle antiquities out of the country. I felt like saying, “Hey I can clear this all up in jiffy. This is not one of China’s ancient Terra Cotta warriors dug up from the ground. This is one of five million miniature replicas that are mass produced every year. The old ones from the emperor’s tomb, yeah, they are famously full-size. That’s full-size as in the size of a real person. You should know this. Those dusty, full-size warriors are China’s biggest tourist attraction second only to the Great Wall. Pretty sure my eighteen inch guy is fake.”
Finally, they indicated that I could box up my warrior and be on my way. Honestly, I think it was a slow day and they were just messing with me. “Did you see the look on that guy’s face? He actually thought that we thought he had a real Terra Cotta soldier in his possession. What a yokel.”
Xi’an -of course- is most well known for its full-size, subterranean terra cotta warriors. Famously, no two of the soldiers are alike, each one of their eight thousands faces was individually sculpted. One of the cooler aspects of the Terra Cotta Warrior experience is that visitors view most of the soldiers right where they were put 2,200 years ago and right where they were found forty years ago. Unlike other great antiquities, such as King Tut, the Terra Cotta Warriors have not been removed and relegated to distant museums. Instead, the museum –essentially a giant airplane hangar- was built right over the burial site. Some of the warriors have been purposely left half excavated so that the visitor can see the terra cotta artifacts in various states of excavation.
The result is that visitors get two amazing experience. They get to revel in the wonder of these 2200-year-old life-size figurines and the colossal force of will that must have been required to bring about the creation of such an extensive engineering feat. But the visitor also gets to experience a little bit of the excitement of discovery -discovery that is ongoing. Granted it’s archeology that is so slow that it appears to be at a standstill to the untrained eye.
Several years ago a German art student dressed himself up like a terra cotta warrior. Somehow he snuck passed security and managed to stand in formation with real terra cotta warriors for several minutes before he was discovered and promptly removed.
Genius.
I was seriously tempted, but realized that I had left my terra cotta warrior outfit at the cleaners.
Despite the fact that we had just seventeen days in the mainland, our intention was to get an overview of the vastness that is China. So after a week in Yunnan Province in Southwest China, we boarded a plane for the city of Xi’an in central China.
Julie had booked us into the Seven Sages Inn in the old part of Xi’an. The Seven Sages backpacker’s inn is on the site of an old military housing compound and has maintained the same traditional Chinese communal layout. The inn has a series of five consecutive courtyards with circular moon gates leading from one to the other. Each courtyard had six or seven rooms around its periphery . Like any self-respecting building of any age and importance in China, the complex was built of grey brick.
Of all the guest houses we have stayed in over the last two years, the Seven Sages probably had the largest number of amenities. In addition to the tree-shaded, outdoor café, it also had an indoor restaurant with overstuffed sofas providing seating for the booths. The restaurant had a large screen t.v. on which the staff kept a regular rotation of blockbuster movies for weary travelers to watch. Adjacent to the restaurant was an all-glass sunroom with a large, well-worn pool table dominating the center of the room. In one of the courtyards they had an all-weather ping pong table made of stone. The inn had a coin-operated laundry on site. And of course, they had bank of computers for internet access.
I am convinced that some people travel to the world’s most amazing locations, find a really hip and comfortable backpacker inn, and then proceed to camp out for days or weeks at a time. At the Seven Sages, there was one pair of women –sisters, by the looks of it- who seemed to be either lounging on the sofas or nursing Tsingtao’s on the veranda every time we passed through or grabbed a meal. I couldn’t help but wonder if they knew there was an entire ancient city to be explored on the other side of the walls of the Seven Sages. In their defense, some of these travelers are in the midst of multi-month treks so it is not uncommon to veg out for several days or a week to recharge one’s batteries. A person can only tour so many temples.
True confession: we spent a full day loafing around the Seven Sages Inn ourselves. The previous day, three of us had shared a piece of delectable-looking bread we bought from a street vendor in the market. That night and into the next day we were paying the price. Annika, the only one who hadn’t eaten any of the bread, was fine. The kicker was that while the bread was wonderful looking, it really wasn’t all that good. We too spent several hours on sofas in the Seven Sages restaurant watching the animated movie Happy Feet.
But it all worked out. We were approaching the mid-way point of our seventeen-day trip and were ready for a down day. Besides, the Seven Sages’ banana pancakes were really yummy.
Booking flights in China is like booking them anywhere else. Go online, use Travelocity, book your flight. Very efficient.
