Day 5 - Saturday 7 April - Exploring Xi'an

After happy landings, our new guide took us into Xi'an and started explaining about the Tang Dynasty, for the whole hour of the ride. Xi'an is larger than we'd expected and much prettier than the parts of Beijing we had seen. The central city is walled - preserved as the finest example in China - and at the heart were the Bell and Drum towers. No real need to explain what each houses and, if you can't guess, we'll leave Googling as an exercise to the reader!

We had an earful of drum and bell documentary from our guide. We now know the size of each dimension of each building to the nearest millimetre, how many people have ever looked at them and the average rainfall falling on each person listening to her speech etc.

The leisurely walk around the ancient walls thus quickly became a fun rickshaw ride so we could shake off our guide and her interminable litany of Chinese Trivial Pursuit answers, at least for a while.

Dinner was at the Tang Dynasty show – a kind of Chinese Moulin Rouge - but with somewhat fewer tits and rather more pagodas. Very good indeed. Needless to say, we counted the number of people in the audience, how long the show lasted to the nearest second and what temperature the wine was served at, so we would be ready to check her answers in the morning.