I Want To Ride My Bicycle...

It had felt bloody ruddy good to sleep in a nice warm and comfortable room after the Beijing hotel so we woke refreshed and ready to nip upstairs for a bit of brekkie, included in the price for our stay. It was a great spread too and we sat and wondered why we didn’t pay a couple of quid extra to stay in somewhere nice in Beijing too. Maybe we have been getting a little soft as our travels have gone on.

There was only one real thing on the agenda for the day – cycle the Xi’An city walls. It is supposedly the thing to do in Xi’An, when you are not visiting the Terracotta Warriors, of course. And also it is best to do it on a tandem bike. Well, we were well up for it, until we actually saw the tandems.

To get to the bikes we needed to trek the few km to the South Gate where we would be able to hire said bikes. It is a pretty impressive sight when you come face to face with the big grey walls that surround the inner city. We paid for our ticket to get up onto the walls and mooched around trying to find the bike station. As I said before, we quickly turned down the opportunity to do a tandem ride – mainly because of the bikes, but also because we knew how uncoordinated we would be on it.

On second thoughts........no!

We paid the girl for the bikes and clambered on. We would have 100 minutes to do a full circuit of the wall. No problem we thought, we used to always be out on our bikes when we were young, just like Karl Pilkington was. And we were off!

Much better! 

It was a very bumpy ride along the wall and we stopped numerous times to check out the scenery and generally muck about, as you do when you are cycling along an ancient city wall in China. There were a few others on top too, but nothing like how many there would be in summer, so it was nice that we almost had the place to ourselves, even though it was jolly chilly up there!

Hello! I'm riding a bike!

We made it round in plenty of time and even had a few minutes to spare as we handed the bikes back. Thankfully there had been no accidents so we wouldn’t need to be calling up the insurance arm of Barclays anytime soon. It certainly got the old blood pumping, which is something that hasn’t happened for quite some time so it was definitely a positive experience. After the bikes we tried to find the Great Mosque but got lost in the maze of narrow streets again. We did find our way out (obviously) and ended up in Lianhu Gardens. There was a small lake and a group of people gathered round a karaoke machine with some “Bez” dancing around like a fool, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. The outdoor karaoke seems to be quite a big thing over here as we saw it in plenty of other places on our travels through China.

Back at the hotel we took the weight off our feet and James had a little snooze through an episode of Catterick. I tried to do a bit of Christmas shopping online, but didn’t really get anywhere. We did manage to find one of the restaurants that we had been researching, but it was one heck of a walk! All the way down to the south-east part of the city, about a half hours walk. It was decent enough grub, but I doubt we would go back again. Especially as on the way back we saw a place right next to our hotel that looked like it would be just the job for the next night, after we had been to see the infamous Terracotta Warriors.