Xi'an

11 Jun 2017 - Mateo Atwi

I traveled to Xi'an with eight other students last weekend. I took a plane, but three of the students took the overnight trains there and back (a total of 31 hours). Xi'an was the ancient capital of China, so the inside of the city is still within an ancient wall. We stayed in an airbnb in that section of the city. We arrived Friday and went for a bike ride around the entire city wall right after we checked in. We explored a little then waited for our other group.

Around 6:30 PM Carrie, George, and I started our journey for another weekend hike. It was absolute crazy, but it was the defining experience of my weekend. Unfortunately, we tried to book trains to late, so the tickets were all sold out. We walked across the city to the other side of the wall to catch a bus. It took us more than 45 minutes to cross, so we missed the last bus. By then we were already exhausted after a day of biking and walking, but we still decided to go. Fortunately we found someone that was driving people to the mount Hua Shan. We each paid 70 RMB. The driver was professional. He knew where all the speed cameras were, and he passed up so many cars. I did my best to sleep even as he passed up cars around turns. Luckily he was competent and did not crash. We got to the base of the mountain around 10:30 PM to start our hike.

The reason we hiked so late was because we wanted to see the sunrise. Unfortunately, there was no sunrise because it was so cloudy. The view at the top was amazing though. It surprised me because there were maybe few hundred Chinese waiting at the top for the sunrise, and we were never alone going up. There was always some Chinese people around us. It was such a hard hike, that I was really surprised to see so many people doing it. Below are some fake Oreos that I bought for the hike. They did not taste like Oreos...

We expected to be on a hiking trail where we would need a light, but fortunately or unfortunately the trail was lit all the way to the top. It was lit all the way to the top because the Chinese had actually carved steps up the entire way. It took us about five hours of hiking straight up steps to get to the top. We were so exhausted we were almost sleeping while standing. By the time we tried to sleep it was about 4:00 AM on Saturday. It was hard to sleep because we sweated so much, and it was very cold and windy at the top.  A lot of the hike was nearly as steep as shown below.

A few hours later we took a cable car down. After a series of buses, one of which dropped us off in the middle of a highway to find our way to the next bus, we went to see the Terracotta warriors and the Muslim Quarter.