We have also been really busy in the last week and have spent the last couple of nights on the train. Today we arrived in Beijing and now we are staying in a motel near the 2008 olympic stadium where we have free internet.
On monday we went to a place called Chongqing (sorry about spelling) and went to the zoo, most of the animals are the same as in NZ zoos, but we were able to see a sleeping panda - sprawled out with its legs in the air, and lots of monkeys. Lunch was amazing - we are really liking most of the food here, we have about 4-6 dishes to share between the two of us. Then went to a museum before catching the boat for our yangtze cruise. Cruise was heaps of fun! They kept us busy with free seminars during the day and if we were passing anything interesting we were told where and when over an intercom. They like you to be on time or early to everything we were rung in our room a few times for being late. The scenery in the three gorges was amazing and we did a shore excersion to a few places including a stream where we were able to see a 2000 year old hanging coffin. We met a lovely german couple who were on their honeymoon and we are probably going to visit them when we are in Germany.
Wednesday night we arrived at the 3 gorges dam at 10pm at night and went throught the 5 stage ship lock (the largest in the world) there were 4 other boats in the lock with us and once the gates were closed we dropped quite quickly - cool experience. Thursday morning we visited the dam itself, lots of info which was cool, so much money was spent building it and 1.1 million people were relocated and now it generates 4% of the chinese power. It would probably generate more, but people really like lights - at night everything is lit up like christmas trees, lots of bright fluro colours. After this our cruise was over and we caught the train to xi'an. Xi'an was beautiful it has a central city district which is surrounded by a wall, we spent two days here, on the first day we saw the terracotta warriors, hard to believe one person ordered the whole army to be built! Each warrior is different and there are all different types of warriors for archery, to infantry and generals, the emperor killed all the people who worked on the warriors (if they didn't die in the process) to hide their location. We also biked around the 13km city wall on rickerty old bicycles in 30 degree heat - luckily it was almost completely flat! The next day we visited temples and pagodas, before heading to the markets. You have to bargin hard which Sam wasn't very good at, but he has a system now, either let me do it or say your price and walk away and they seem to bargin with themselves. Later we caught another train and now we are in Beijing. Today we visited the Great Wall on top of a mountian range, the wall is really steep! and it seemed quite airy with the clouds floating over the wall in front of redusing the visibility to about 50m, after which our guided tour finished, no more air conditioned cars with chilled water, where the driver opens the door, or nice motels, or a english speaking guide. Now we have to fend for ourselves, speaking chinese in sign language!