This hotel is quite comfy. We have lots of room and some pretty big and fluffy beds. Consequently it seems a little difficult getting up at a sensible time of the day. Today was no different.

Sadly we had broken our room's loo the previous night and it wasn't flushing properly. The more we used it, the worse it worked. Eventually it just decided that it would block itself. We had to resign ourselves to trying to tell the hotel staff of the problem, something that would have been easy in English but is a challenge in mime. After a couple of minutes of not being understood we found the Chinese words for bathroom in our guidebook. Finally we were understood and we went out for the day.

We walked for twenty or thirty minutes up to the railway station to find the number 306 bus that would take us to the Terracotta Warriors. Just by the station was the hotel where we were supposed to collect our next train tickets from. We tried to see if they were there and were told to come back the following day. After leaving the hotel, we then bought some bananas and some bread rolls to nibble on and boarded the waiting 306 bus.

The site where the figures were unearthed is about 40km from Xi'an, just past the town of Lintong. It took about 45 minutes to get there and we wondered where we would have to get off the bus, keen not to repeat our Great Wall bus trip and miss our intended stop. Fortunately though the end of the 306 route turned out to be the place where we needed to get off.

We walked past many stalls selling souvenirs, ignoring their beckoning an offers for the time being. The walk to the site entrance was quite a long one but perhaps it's a good thing that they've kept the bustle of the road and the souvenir sellers at a distance. We purchased our tickets and turned down a few offers of guided tours, opting instead to look around at our own pace.

Once inside the gate we followed some other people and found our way into pit 1. The building over pit 1 is apparently about 600m long and it is simply amazing. There in front of us were rows and rows of porcelain figures, each one as individual as the people looking at them. It would have been great to jump in there and have a close look but unfortunately we could only look from the slightly elevated walkway that runs round the entire pit.

Pit 2 is smaller and is much less excavated than pit 1. You're also not supposed to take photos but that didn't stop me being sneaky. Most of the porcelain figures have yet to be unearthed but bits and pieces were showing here and there and we were chillingly reminded for a while of the killing fields in Cambodia with little bits of bone visible.

Pit 3 has been almost entirely excavated and is far smaller than pit 2. It is supposed to contain figures of generals of the terracotta army although it's not easy to see any difference without some other figures for comparison purposes.

I think that for maximum impact the best way to see the whole Terracotta Army would be to see pit 2 first, then pit 3 and finally pit 1. Not that seeing them in numerical order is a bad thing, it's just you then get a build up in terms of size and magnificence.

After wandering around the small museum as well, we headed back to the bus stop. Some taxi drivers tried to offer us rides back to Xi'an but we had return tickets and thwarted them all.

After we got back we checked our email and gave some consideration as to where we'd like to eat that night. We walked quite a long way before trying a duck restaurant that also looked like it served other dishes too. We were led upstairs and then into another room and finally tucked away in a corner. We were shown a menu but found that we could not decipher it. Unsurprising really since it was in Chinese. We asked and were told that they didn't have an English menu of any sort so we decided that we ought to leave. The waitress asked us to wait a second a came back with a list of dishes in English that they must have had tucked away somewhere. We picked, ordered and waited. Our dish eventually arrived and we also chose some pickled vegetables from a trolley that was doing the rounds.

I mentioned a while back that we had purchased a phonecard with which to call my grandmother. Well, today was the day that we were due to to the phoning and I was determined to call on time. So in preparation I got the card out and tried using it. I could get an outside line from the hotel but the five digit number for the phone card company just resulted in some sort of message that I presumed meant "no" in some way. I checked the back of the phone card and discovered the problem: it was only supposed to work in Beijing!

A frantic few minutes followed as we tried to find out how much it would cost to use the hotel phone system to call England and then finding out that they'd want a 200 RMB deposit to let us do that. Things got more frantic because we only had 61 RMB left and the ATMs weren't giving us any more money. I resolved to ask Nationwide why as our credit cards had ample balance on them. But, in the meantime I showed the man who came with me to our room to collect the money that we had only 61 RMB and a selection of foreign currencies. He phoned down to reception and we negotiated a 50 RMB deposit, leaving us with just 11 RMB to our names.

Twenty minutes later we still couldn't dial out so I had to chase it up with reception. The enabled the phone and we tried calling. The instructions in the room however weren't that clear and it took a few attempts to get the number right. At last though we got to wish my grandmother a happy birthday and our day was complete.

The following morning we headed straight to the big Bank of China down the road and queued to see someone to try and get a cash advance on our credit cards. While we were waiting a badly dressed London man tried suggesting some things but I don't think that he understood our problem. The bank assistant tried both of our cards without success so we resorted to plan B. We had with us three bundles of foreign currency that we could exchange and ended up with about 500 RMB afterwards.

We checked up on the times that we could call the Nationwide next and found out that we wouldn't be able to call until 4pm at the earliest. Since that was some time away we headed back to the railway station to pick up our tickets. We were told to come back at 3pm and so next we had a bit of lunch from a nearby restaurant.

Cold noodles, a dumpling and a weird pie thing later we wandered over to the city wall and climbed up a very dodgy looking ladder to the top. Once there we found a much nicer set of steps on the other side but that didn't matter now. We walked along to the north gate of the city and had a brief look around there before heading back and down.

At 3pm the hotel that we were due to pick our tickets up from asked us to come back the following day at 5pm. We made sure that they knew that our train was at 7pm the following day and then let it go. We headed back to our hotel to call the Nationwide.

We bought a cheap phonecard with which to call England and after a few annoying menus got through to a real person. He informed us that Nationwide had a policy that a maximum of 50% of our credit limit could be taken as cash and that we'd both hit that limit. He was unable to tell us how long that policy had been in place but I suspect that it hasn't been long or we would have hit that problem a while ago. Really nice of them to tell us. We wrote to them before we left and told them exactly which countries we'd be in and roughly when so that they wouldn't worry. I explained that we were in China and were seriously inconvenienced by the problem. Fortunately there was a payment going through on my card that day so we hoped that our 500 RMB would last until we could draw some cash in Shanghai. We also decided to try and pay for our hotel by card rather than cash to help ourselves out. The real problem with this 50% thing though is that it means that we're going to have to stay in expensive western hotels in order to be able to pay by credit card. Likewise with restaurants; in order to pay by credit card, we're limited to the biggest and most expensive restaurants. Thank you Nationwide! I will not be using them again and I will recommend against people using them too.

We managed to break our loo again and decided to go out for some supper while the nice hotel people fixed it again. While out we also send a couple of strongly worded emails off to Nationwide (which were not even acknowledged by the following day, that's how pants they are). We opted for a restaurant we had seen close to our hotel and almost didn't go in because it looked expensive. I really glad that we did though. We think it was some sort of Mongolian hotpot restaurant but whatever it was it was fun and the food was tasty.

The language barrier interfered with ordering a little bit but after only a few minutes we had a large metal bowl on the gas burner in the middle of our table. The bowl was partitioned into two sections, one with a red chilli soup in and the other was some sort of cream coloured stock. We were presented with a plate of raw, sliced beef and one of pork. We also had some mushrooms. After these had arrived we looked blankly for a while and then one of the waiting staff stepped in and showed us what to do. From that point on one of them cooked all of our food for us and we became a spectacle for any waiting staff not busy at that minute. It was fun though.

When the bill came I was pleasantly surprised as the whole lot, and there was a lot, cost less than 80 RMB! On top of that our loo was fixed when we got back. A good end to an otherwise frustrating day.

It's always the way. You're just getting used to a bed or a room and you have to leave! Oh well, at least checkout time in Asia seems to be midday rather than 10am like in many places. We had a nice lie in and then packed up slowly and somehow managed to be out of the room well before we needed to be. Our plans to pay by credit card didn't work but since we had given the hotel a 700 RMB deposit and our bill was only 621 RMB we actually walked away with more money.

We convinced the hotel to look after our bags for a few hours and wandered off to see if Nationwide had responded. They hadn't. Worse still we found out that we had a lot less money left than we thought. It's probably a good thing that India is one of the cheapest countries on our trip.

We went to the Bell Tower for a quick look as it's supposed to worth seeing. Claire rang a big bell three times for "good lucky" and we watched some musicians make bell music for a while. We then headed off for some lunch.

We went back to the restaurant without the English menus from the night before last and tried to order a couple of tasty dishes. They quickly appeared along with some roast duck and pancakes. Somehow we had managed to order one of those as well. If we ever eat Chinese food with anybody, don't let us order or you'll end up with too much duck to eat!

Full, contented and still with lots of RMB left considering the size of lunch, we went back to our hotel to pick up our bags. We tried to get a taxi from outside the hotel but none of the drivers seemed interested in such a small fare. One would take us to the railway station for five times the going rate but we weren't in a huge hurry and so we told him no way. At about the exact same time one of the hotel porters turned up in a taxi he had fetched for us. He told us that it should cost only 6 RMB to get to the station, which we already knew but I think he was actually telling us that he'd made sure that the driver was going to use the meter. What a nice guy!

Without any additional financial incentive though, the driver didn't get as close to the station as he could have done. That was ok though as we still had to pick up our tickets. We did this quickly and found that we would not be alone again. One of us had a top bunk and one had a bottom bunk. Nevermind, we've coped before, we can do it again.