Katie: 

We departed Shanghai by train to travel two and a half hours to Nanjing, where we stayed just the one night. The hotel was nice enough and the area pleasant but not that much to see in the city centre but yet more neon lights! We did take a trip to 'Purple Mountain' to visit Dr Sun's mosoleum. It was an absoultely beautiful place it was lovely to see some greenery and see some fantastic architecture. We visited a Pagado on the mountain which we climbed the seven levels to the top and saw some breath taking views of the local area.

After 'Purple Mountain' we left Nanjing and began our 13 hour train journey to Xi'an... The train was better than expected with bunkbeds which were 3 beds high stacked next to each other, quite hard but definately ok for the night! It turned out to be quite a lot of fun & gave us a chance to get to know people better, eat Chinese pot noodles and learn some very strange NZ card games! Arrived in Xi'an at 5.30am..

Arber:

GRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

I was sooo happy to see some green after the never ending grey and neon of the city. This place was beautiful and well worth the hundreds of steps we had to climb to get to the top where the moselium was and then back down again onto a little choo choo train to the pagoda. This was very rewarding and after a dizzying spiral staircase the mountain range was breathtaking with the city scape sitting on the horizon, it turns out being 6ft has its disadvantages as the spiral stair case was never designed for me i almost whacked my head a few times on the way down! On the minibus there we all learnt how to count in chinese and to do the hand signs to represent numbers as well and then it was off to the train station.

The NZ game was possibly the most complicated came in the world and lasted a good 2 hours solid i dont think i could play again if i tried! and you really haven't had pot noodles till you have had pot noodles in china on a packed train - i managed to square away three pots (there is photographic evidence)

When we arrived in Xi'an at 5 30am i was in for a lot of punishment!!!!