Griffin and I have had pleasure and opportunity to see some of the most beaufiul places on the planet. But, sometimes, it’s not the most beautiful things that are the most interesting.

Deep in the heart of China’s mainland, sits the city of Xi’An, one of China’s Four Great Ancient Capitals. Though it’s not much to look at, it holds one of the most fascinating scenes in the world.

Xi’an, with over 3,000 years of history, took its place as China’s capital city during several different ruling dynasties for a total of more than 400 years. Its significance is far reaching as the start of the “Silk Road,” one of the most important trade routes in history, interconnecting Africa, Europe and Asia.

Since we’re not trading anything, we came to Xi’an to see something different. That is, something different that you can find anywhere else on earth.

During the days of Qinshihuang, the first emperor of unified China, one thing became abundantly clear: this guy was paranoid about death. Though the man is credited with many of China’s historal feats, including the beginning of construction of the Great Wall, he is perhaps best known for one thing, the 8,000 life-size clay soldiers that now guard his tomb.

First discovered by a group of farmers in 1974, archaeologists unearthed the now famous, Terracotta Army, still standing at attention and in perfect formation for their job as the attendants of the emeror’s soul. Every soldier is unique, with their differing facial features most likely being attributed to the unpaid laborers who constructed each one. The soldiers are also ranked and stand ready for their individual jobs as messengers, horsemen (complete with horses), officers, and even those tasked to accompany the carriage believed to house Qinshihuang’s soul.

There are four known pits where the soldiers are burried, located about 1.5km away from the emperor’s burial mound. Each of the soldiers was once painted from head to toe, but the oxygen that reaches it upon excavation instantly fades the colors and the true clay color emerges with minutes.

Standing at the enourmous warehouses, where the army members are still being systematically excavated and restored is truly mind-blowing. The details of their armor and the eyes that search out enemies are hallowing.

We toured the grounds with a guide who filled us in on the history, as well as the rank and job of each of the soldiers. What struck me, was just how life-like the army actually is. They are not only life-size, but they are actually set-up to be efficient. There are clay guards at the meeting room doors of clay officers. There are clay horses at the ready for messeges that may need to reach the clay ears of an officer at another camp. Some soldiers stand at attention and some kneel in reverence, to an emperor who was afraid of being vulnerable in life and in death. By the time we left there, we were talking about the Terracotta Warriors like they were real men, suspended in animation.

This experience was one that I will truly never forget. Looking out at this sea of soldiers made me feel small and and yet safe. I can’t recommend this destination highly enough.

If you’re making your way to China, it’s good to remember that Qinshihuang built more than a wall. His creations are still standing ready to greet you.

This article was originally published on Indie Travel Podcast

What is Animoto?

Animoto allows you to create stunning movies from your pictures and text. We tried it out for this movie as well as some we made for our moms on Mother’s Day and we really liked it.
Just upload your pictures, select some music, put in some text and it takes care of the rest. It really couldn’t be any easier. You have to pay to make a video longer than 30 seconds,to download the video and/or for higher quality video. But, if you just want to share a 30 second clip online it is free and their prices are reasonable if you want more options. We just paid for a month and then cancelled instead of having a yearly membership. We may do the same thing in a couple more months once we have some more ideas and pictures to share. Check it out here and let us know what you think.

If you ever get the chance to visit China, we would highly recommend a trip to Guilin.  The beautiful and unique landscape and the kind and genuine people have made it one of our favorite travel experiences yet.

We will be posting more updates from our trip to China soon, but in the mean time, you can see some pictures from our trip here.  And, a video of the Li River Cruise in timelapse below.  Enjoy!

Highly Recommended Tavel Guide Service

While looking for information and recomendations on Guilin, we came across a great tour guide and decided to try him out. I’ll let our Trip Advisor review tell you the rest, but the main point is, if you want a great experience, book a tour of Guilin with Jack at Yangshou Private Tours.

Trip Advisor Review:

We recently had the most terrible experience in our combined history of travel.  We have traveled to over 30 countries between the two of us and this is by far the worst experience we have ever had booking a flight.  We highly recommend never dealing with China Southern if you can avoid it!  Here is the saga we have gone through:

• Found the best price on Kayak.com for our somewhat complicated multi-destination, open jaw trip to China
• Clicked to book the trip and were told that We would have to re-input the travel dates and location as China Southern’s website did not allow information transfer with Kayak.  OK, not the most convenient, but not a big deal.
• Re-input travel dates and times and came up with a different price by about =$400!  Not cool!
• Searched around and called and asked if they could match the kayak quote.  They said no.
• Finally, after lots of searching and calling, found the same price after trying five other websites including two different China Southern sites.  They have a Chinese website for only people in China, and and international website for only people outside China.
• Put in all the information again, went through the whole booking process only to find in the end there was some kind of error with our card, but no indication what the problem was.  The screen very helpfully said “Credit Card Error” and that was all.
• Called our bank to check on holds etc. and they said there were no issues.
• Called China Southern to ask what to do and how to pay for our flight and they gave us the number for the Mandarin-only speaking internet company they use for charging.  This would be like if you called up Delta because there was an error charging your card and they gave you PayPal‘s service number.  Who does that!?
• Talked to charging company to no avail.  Tried our other cards on both websites, also to no avail.  Finally Valerie found a site that she was able to book through for about $60 more and our original card worked without any issues.

This whole process took about 8 hours of phone calls via Skype and hours of trying to book and re-book.  It was a terrible experience and we both feel it should not be so hard to pay a company for a service they are trying to sell you that you want to buy!

We have not even seen a China Southern Plane or representative in person yet and we are already not excited at all about traveling with this company.  We are hoping we will be pleasantly surprised for our trip, but our expectations are lower than the sea floor at the moment.

UPDATE:  We returned from a very enjoyable trip to China about a week ago.  We had a blast and will be posting some pictures and video sometime in the future for your enjoyment.  As for our experience with China Southern, it was better than we expected, but still left some things to be desired.  (Air conditioned planes for one.)  Despite the travel anomalies, we had a great trip and recommend visiting China if you ever get the opportunity.

Travel Plans

• Days 1-3 – Explore and take in the beautiful landscapes of Guilin, China
  

  Guilin’s famous mountains along the Li river

• Days 4-5 – Quick visit to Xi’an to see the Terracotta Army

Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an China

• Days 6-8 – Spend the Rest of our time in Beijing seeing:
  • The Forbidden City
  • Great Wall
  • Tiananmen Square

The Great Wall Of China

Here is a map of our journey. Enjoy!

View China Trip Summer 2010 in a larger map

Travel Tip

We have been using Tripit.com for all of our travel recently and really love it.  If you have not checked the site out we highly recommend it.  You can forward any emails you get from your airline, hotel, hostel, tour company etc. and the site will put it all together into a very nice itinerary with all the information you may need “on the go.”  There is also an iPhone app that can sync the information for later use without internet, which we use constantly on our travels.

Travel Hacking Strategy

Our trip is a multi-destination, open jaw trip as we are flying into one destination – Guilin, staying a couple days, flying out to another destination – Xi’an and then taking our last flight from Beijing instead of Xi’an – (that’s the open jaw part.)  We will be taking an overnight train from Xi’an to Beijing.  We are doing this for a couple reasons.  The first one is to experience train travel in China.  Another reason is it saves a little on airfare and is better for the environment, which is a win-win for us.  The last reason is to confuse the airline and make the trip as complicated to book as possible.  OK, that’s not really a reason, but it felt like that’s what happened.

For many airlines this is not a problem and a common practice.  You can usually save lots of money or hassle or both by using open jaw tickets when:

• You are planning to go overland for a portion of your jouney
• It is more convenient and/or cheaper to leave from a different airport/location/state/country than the one you flew into
• You have plenty of time and don’t mind taking buses/trains to save money between destinations
• You don’t have plenty of time, but you can take overnight transport from one destination to another to save a little money on lodging/airfaire and experience a different form of travel
• You can find cheaper flights with budget airlines in between two places you want to visit and it beats the cost of booking the whole trip with one carrier.
  • This is especially useful in countries with cheap budget airlines like Easy Jet and Ryan Air in Europe, or  Air Asia and Tiger Airways in Asia.  Booking connecting flights around the continent for about $100-$200 per connection will usually be much cheaper than booking a multi-destination trip with a major carrier.

If you want to learn more about travel hacking and even get a guaranteed free domestic flight in the States, check out this great resource by someone who will have traveled to every country in the world by 2013!

Frequent Flyer Master is a full e-book, a 20-minute audio, and a 4-page Priceline specific guide on the art of hacking airline miles. Click for a full description.

This book is packed with useful information on how to get free frequent flier miles, how to find the lowest fares, and planning for and purchasing round-the-world plane tickets.  Chris also guarantees that you will earn at least 25,000 air miles in the first 90 days or get an instant refund.  It’s the best ebook I’ve bought in terms of instant value both in knowledge and return on investment and has already saved us about $600!

Frequent Flyer Master is a full e-book, a 20-minute audio, and a 4-page Priceline specific guide  on the art of hacking airline miles. Click for a full description.

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Related Products

Here are some other products Chris Offers.  We have not tried them ourselves yet, but based on our experience with his blog and the Frequent Flyer Master product we feel they would be a great investment as well.

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Click the picture for a full description.

Please let us know what you think of these resources if you decide to get them.  We’d love to hear if your experiences with them are as good as ours.