I'm feeling a bit lazy and time is against me so I borrowed the following from Roy's blog (I got his permission!). Caught the train to Xi'an anyway, only 12 hours. We had 3 or 4 bottles of beer drank in the dinning carriage and the chef decided that we had had enough, ha, little did he know, so we had a few more. Discussion after argument after discussion, beer after beer, went to bed, got up a few hours later to get off the train which had already arrived. Took a quick stroll around Xi'an and started into the tour companies again to see if they would get us travel permits to Tibet at an acceptable price. Not much luck with most of them, but eventually for a hostel that, after a lot of persistance and persuasion, said they could get us the permit in 1 day for $100, so we jumped at the chance. However, they were very surprised when we said that we didnt want to fly into Lhasa, we wanted to get the new train, highest train in the world, with a 5200m pass. So they said they would do the permit but we had to arrange our own transport, which, in China, is not always the easiest thing to do. Bext day we were told to call back at 5.30pm for our permits. We headed off on the local bus for 1.5hours to go see the Terracotta Warriors, which were very impressive. Constructed about 2200 years ago, over 6000 life size terracotta pottery warriors, horses and charriots have been excavated since 1976. Back to the hostel and amazingly collected our permits, yahoo, it was like gold dust. Off to the train station the next morning and got the train tickets with surprisingly little hastle. When we went back to the hostel all the staff were amazed and gathered to look at the train tickets that the foreigners had managed to secure, alone. I think we may be one of the 1st foreigners to get into tibet in this manner, considering that the train tickets to Tibet from Xi'an only went on sale 4 or 5 day previously. Regardless, we are going to Tibet, the roof of the world...