It was with relief that we checked out of the hotel, we really hadn't warmed to Taiyuan and were looking forward to heading on to Xi'an, home of the terracotta warriors and a more tourist-oriented city, hopefully it would be easier to get around and get what we wanted there! Before that, though, we had the day to visit Pingyao. We headed to the scrum of the bus station and fought our way through another throng of touts to get the public bus to Pingyao. We squeezed into the seats and after three quarters of an hour waiting for the bus to fill (there was no timetable for this route, it just goes when the bus is full) we were off and running. Unfortunately, my stomach chose this moment to have its first bout of unhappiness. I spent the majority of the hour and a half bus journey sweatily making every attempt not to go in my own boxers. Thankfully I made it and sprang off the bus to noisily end the torment in a smelly squat toilet! The City of Pingyao is an historical oddity. It sprang up as a power briefly in the mid 19th century when the trade on the silk road was really taking off and bacame a bustling centre for banking as the hub between the east and the west and the traders of north and south China. Sadly it's glory disappeared quite suddenly as shipping became the preferred route for trade and banking shifted to the big cities. What it has left is a perfectly preserved city of buildings over a century old, as the occupants couldn't afford to update the buildings they lived and worked in. Sadly just in the last few years the town has become a big tourist trap so the streets were absolutely packed (Chinese tourists mind you, there were a few white faces but not many) but the city was fascinating to lok at. We began in the first bank that had grown from a laundry business and sparked the good times in Taiyuan. It is tucked away with the entry right in the middle of a bunch of shops but once inside was surprisingly large, with rooms for the accountants, tellers and traders and living quarters for all the staff on site. We carried on and looked in on a few different styles of residence and unexpectedly found the Chinese photography festival exhibition hall but the highlight was definitely a walk round the city walls which it seemed the Chinese tourists simply missed out. We only saw a handful of people on our hour long walk round the walls and it was a welcome break from the bustle of the streets. It also gave a bit of a behind the scenes look at how the people who still reside in the city live, with a surprising level of poverty for a city so full of rich tourists every day.

We headed back on the public bus again and got the last two seats, which meant I was wedged amongst the locals on the back seat and Dave was deposited in the middle of a school group. It was a fun trip back with kids all taking photos on their phones of the hairy foreigners and Dave establishing from one of the lads that western tourists were a real rarity in Taiyuan, something which came as little surprise to us!

We picked up our bags from the hotel and headed for the bus station to find that our bus was a sleeper bus with bunkbeds instead of seats. Other than the shock of a number of unofficial passengers flooding on the bus in a dark car park round the corner from the bus station the journey was really quite comfortable and we both managed plenty of sleep on the 8 hour journey down to arrive at 5 in the morning in Xian.