Warburton.me

Xi’an, Chengdu and beyond

// October 14th, 2009 // by Andy

Well… still in China (for one more day). At the moment, we’re in Chengdu having taken an overnight sleeper train from Xi’an, tomorrow we fly to Shenzhen and will then be crossing the border to Hong Kong.

Shenzhen is just outside Hong Kong and by flying their instead of direct to Hong Kong is going to save us a few hundred quid – just because it’s on the other side of the border – daft really when you consider both are Chinese owned regions!

Xi’an was grey and rainy pretty much the whole time we were there but we made it out to see the Terracotta Warriors which was pretty awesome. The room you can see behind us in the photos below is about the size of a football stadium and supposedly contains around 8000 warriors, although only about 1000 have been excavated so far.

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If theres one thing I’ve learnt about the Chinese while I’ve been here is that they like to do things BIG. Big walls, big monuments, big buildings and big cities. Strange for a country where the average height is so small

We only popped into Chengdu for a couple of days, but while we’re here we’ve been out to a Panda Breeding Sanctuary just outside of the city which was pretty amazing. They had normal black and white Panda’s but also Red Pandas which my fellow geeks should recognise, since it’s also known as the Firefox!

Anyway… next stop, Hong Kong!

Tags: chengdu, china, firefox, panda, terracotta warriors, Xi'an