Day 16

Some time towards the end of our train journey from Shanghai, an old man collapsed and hysteria broke out in the carriage.

There were cries from relatives and just about every member of staff had congregated around the old man, not to offer their assistance but just to see what the commotion was about. After some time the man came to and the train detoured to the nearest station so that he could be taken to hospital.

Daley and I had been looking on from our seats, as everyone else was, but both of us felt like we had received accusatory glances from the other end of the carriage. I realise that that statement can't come across as anything other than sounding massively paranoid but I promise you, people were looking at us like it was our fault. I definitely didn't make the old man collapse and Daley was asleep on the seat next to me, so unless he's a Jedi, we should be in the clear.

We finally arrived in Xi'an at 4.30am, starving hungry (in the European sense), and immediately headed for the 24hr McDonald's. The reception we received inside had all the makings of a surreal take on a spaghetti western. People went deftly silent, some turned their backs, others just stared slack-jawed. All that was missing was a tumble weed. We tried our best to ignore it but the whole experience was very uncomfortable. I ate my breakfast muffin so quickly that I had to follow it by downing my orange juice to stop it burning my stomach.

We made a pretty sharp exit and then set about finding a taxi to take us to our hostel. Typically, you could see the dollar signs in the taxi drivers eyes at the sight of two westerners at 5am. We didn't have directions to the hostel Chinese and they didn't speak English so the whole thing was a nightmare. We settled on the cheapest driver, knowing that we were going to be ripped of whoever we went with bit after a few wrong turns and a phone call to the hostel, he eventually got us to our destination.

After checking in and getting a couple of hours sleep, we decided to have a look around the city. Our first destination was the Small Wild Goose Pagoda and history museum. For reasons unbeknown to me, the museum had a no photos policy and employed one person per room to ensure this was upheld. So we spent most of our time in the museum sneaking around, stealthily taking photos of the exhibits. But those Chinese folk are no slouches, they were on to us, and we quickly found ourselves being stalked by marshals in every room we went in to. It was time to leave.

Once outside, we headed over to the Small Goose Pagoda, and I think had we been travelling for a while, we wouldn't have even bothered going, let alone paying for the privilege. It's just a fancy shaped tower that you can climb to the top of. And guess what? I was too big for it. An Oompa Loompa would have struggled to climb the staircase inside.

As we were leaving the park, we got talking to a local, whose English name was Tom, and he came with us to our next stops, the Drum Tower and Bell Tower. It pains me to even write about them. They were so dull, but for those of you that hadn't guessed, one tower had some drums on it and the other had a big bell. That's all there was to see. And of course, it was a national holiday so the prices were ludicrously steep and we couldn't do them quickly as so many people had turned out to see these tourist traps. Xi'an was turning out to be a bigger con than a Shanghai tea ceremony.

We met up again with Tom, who had seen the towers that morning, and he took us to the Muslim Quarter, a brilliant street market with a huge variety of food on offer. I picked out a dish, which appeared to be a version of Bombay potatoes. Sadly, it wasn't. What I thought were potatoes were a gelatinous substance with a disgusting after taste. I asked Tom what is was we were eating but he couldn't really describe it. His best effort was "nuts with seeds in." Instinctively I spat out a mouthful and queried Tom's description thus: "What? Like testicles?" He could neither confirm nor deny that they were testicle so I did what anyone else would have done in that situation and set about finding a homeless person to offload it.

We left Tom after the market and headed back to the hostel as it was BBQ night, so spent the evening getting to know our new room mates. Thomas from Luxembourg, who looks and sounds exactly like Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Luke and Brittany, two University students from Melbourne, who were teaching English for a semester down in Guangzhou. Thankfully, they also put our minds at ease by solving the potato/testicle mystery.

It was a type of vegetable melon.