Xi'an (3-8 May)
I them took the overnight train with Rachel to the walled city of Xi'an, site of the famous Terracotta Army. I think I speak for both of us when I say that overnight seats in China are not worth the financial saving over sleepers – although that might vary from train to train. In our case, the seats had minimal padding aside from slightly thicker padding for your upper back and shoulders; but, since these seats had only the slightest backward tilt, this additional padding mean that we were almost completely vertical from the waist up – which is an impossible position to fall asleep in without falling forward and bashing your head on the well-placed table edge in front if you! Rachel had the corner, and managed to fall asleep leaning into the window, but I didn't have that luxury and only dosed fitfully. I tried sleeping with my head on the table, but that only lead to cramps and excessive drooling :(. So once again I arrived at my destination ready for nothing but sleep!

I have to admit that, aside from visiting the Terracotta Army site outside the city and the city's Shaanxi museum (rated one of the best in China, and completely mobbed when I was there), I didn't really see the sights of Xi'an. There's also various towers and pagodas, and the muslim quarter (good for food and shopping), as well as the city walls themselves, which you can cycle upon.

My intention wasn't to spend almost a week here but, like everyone else who didn't book ahead, it's difficult to arrange travel impromptu in the days around the beginning and end of any of the three “Golden Weeks” in China – one of which begins on May 1 – which trigger the largest mass movements of people in the world. As it was, I was quite lucky not to have to wait until May 10 or later for my onward train ticket. But, I have to admit that my time in Xi'an wasn't exactly productive, in terms of seeing the sights and absorbing the culture. Aside from visiting the Terracotta Army site outside the city (the main pit is awe-inspiring, the other two pits less so – although they do contain some beautiful statues in glass displays you can get close to) and the city's Shaanxi museum (rated one of the best in China, and completely mobbed when I was there), I didn't really see the sights of Xi'an – such as the Bell and Drum Towers, the pagoda, muslim quarter and city walls. Instead I wasted time trying to organise my onward ticket myself (futile if things are busy – better to use the hostel's booking service), as well as buy my train ticket for Beijing to Ulan Bataar – again, a futile exercise due to the vagarities of the Chinese banking system (the ticket agency required the money to be deposited into their account at the Bank of China – which apparently can only be done at the Beijing branch itself! Not very useful, given that all the advice I'd read is that these tickets need to bought well in advance...). Slightly more productive – although not very cultural - I spent a fair amount of my time in Xi'an at one of the massive and cheap internet centres, where I wrote some long-overdue correspondence to friends and made online backups of all of my photos to this point in my trip. Good insurance against stupidity or bad luck, anyway...
Shanghai
I briefly parted ways with Rachel, as I needed to get my Russian visa at their consulate in Shanghai (the Russian consulate in Beijing deals with Chinese and Russian nationals only, except in rare but unpredictable circumstances). Shanghai is, in many ways, unlike the rest of China – not sure whether the best comparison is with Japanese cities (in terms of modernity) or Las Vegas (in terms of the relative glitz and commercialisation of this city compared to everywhere else I visited in China). I think it's regarded as the style capital of China, as well as the nightlife and entertainment capital – although, due to circumstances beyond my control, I can't offer my own opinion. By the end of my first day in Shanghai, I started to suffer from food poisoning for the second time on my trip. Not sure if this was due to bad water in the samovar (hot water dispenser) on the train, which everyone uses for their noodles, or something I ate on my first day in Shanghai, but for the next couple of days I could hardly stomach any food, and again spent many uncomfortable hours in bed within staggering distance of a toilet. But, I still had to get things organised, and so with some immodium assistance I managed to get the Russia visa invite printouts, etc, organised, and even see little bits of the city.

I arrived early to grab my place in the queue outside the embassy, with only about a dozen people ahead of me, so I thought it wouldn't take long to get processed once the embassy finally opened. It wasn't as simple as that. The first few people in the queue were tour organisers, carrying shopping bags full of passports to be processed. This meant that only one window was processing “normal” single applications, and trust me they aren't in any hurry! It took more than an hour just to get into the building, and I had a few complications owing to the fact that I was travelling with two passports (dual nationality), which required me to make two trips out of the embassy to a photocopier across the road before eventually he was happy to stamp my forms and “negotiate” the price. Yes, that's correct; there is no set price for foreigners at this embassy, and given the fact that it's the only show in town, you can't exactly “go elsewhere” if you don't like the price they offer you, so there isn't exactly much negotiating to be done! (Just to illustrate how corrupt this is, I applied before an Irish guy and after his Irish girlfriend – same nationality, same everything else, but they were charged different amounts; presumably the meathead behind the counter had forgotten what he'd charged her by the time her boyfriend was at the counter.) Of course, I hadn't banked on paying around US$200 for the next-day visa that was meant to cost closer to $120, and had to make one final dash to a bank and back before my visa application was finally accepted. As sorry as I felt for myself, I felt more sorry for the dozens of people still queuing outside who were unlikely to get processed before the embassy closed for business (they only open for 3 hours, 3 days per week). I would think that less than 20 people (excluding the tour guides) would have been processed the day I was there. So I hadn't yet placed a foot on Russian soil, but already I hated their bureaucracy!

Beijing
I still wasn't over the effects of the food poisoning, but my Chinese visa didn't have long to run and I still had to either get my train ticket to Mongolia or else extend my visa, and I'd have to get to Beijing to sort out what I was doing. While the sleeper was comfortable, and the Chinese businessmen I shared my area with were friendly, if a bit mocking (of the fact that they could speak some English, and here I was in China without being able to understand Mandarin – fair point), the frequent trips to the squat toilet made the journey an ordeal. With a business card for Leo's Hostel in hand, I caught the connecting subway train to Tiananmen Gate, and (scared of messing myself) tried desperately to find a taxi to take me, but I kept getting refused – and even manhandled out of one taxi when I tried using some brazen initiative by just jumping in! Pissed off now, and still scared that the immodium might wear off any minute, I started a rather frantic walk. After some frustration, since I couldn't find my street name, I eventually found it and realised why the taxis were refusing me: it was (with the exception of a few minivans, and countless mopeds) a pedestrianised street. On checking in, I bumped into Anna from Tiger Leaping Gorge, which was a great surprise. But I wasn't really in a state for socialising, and had to quickly retire to my dorm bed – where I found I was sharing with a friendly Swiss (I think) guy who I'd met randomly in Luang Prabang. Tanya and Alex from TLG were also staying at Leo's, and Rachel was nearby. Small world, really...

The effects of the food poisoning took a long time to shake, although I started getting my appetite back, and Tanya gave me some Chinese herbal stomach/diarrhoea remedy which seemed to work quite well and didn't taste too foul! Anyway, I couldn't stay in bed while everyone else was out exploring, so (with immodium, toilet paper and plenty of fluids always at hand) I soldiered on. For the first daytrip, we got a group together and went out in search of a bit of the Great Wall to climb. Whilst we found a picturesque recreational park by an dammed lake with a view of the Wall, it wasn't really designed for access to the Wall – although that didn't stop some of the more persistent members of our group who somehow managed to climb onto it. Meanwhile, we (Anna, myself and one of the english guys) contented ourselves with a power walk around the edge of the lake, where we at least got to the base of the Wall near the water's edge. The following day was equally as unsuccessful, as we spent all of it cycling aimlessly (to be fair, we did originally have “aims” in mind, but they proved beyond our reach in terms of distance and the mechanical integrity of our hire bikes) round the city. Still good fun, though, even if we did get caught in rush hour traffic on the way back – which in Beijing extends into the bike lanes! I don't know if we were just lucky, but the terrible air pollution synonymous with Beijing didn't make an appearance while we were there, and overall Beijing was actually quite pleasant to travel around by foot, bike or train.

While I was worried about having to extend my visa due to the supposed difficulty in booking trains out of China on short notice, or else having to resort to a more complicated exit strategy using local trains to get to the border, I needn't have concerned myself; next-day tickets for trains stopping in Mongolia or straight through to Russia were quite easy to get from the Beijing CITS office. The grumpy Mongolian consular official almost threw a spanner in the works by initially refusing overnight processing of my Mongolian visa – which would have resulted in me being refused entry onto the train, and consequently overstaying my Chinese visa to make matters worse. Thankfully, the cashier seemed to wear the pants, and after some pitiful begging she forced Mr Grumpy to relent. As with the Russian embassy in Shanghai, not my best introduction to Mongolia bureaucracy!