Hey guys,
Has anyone been to the above cities in China? Will be spending 3 days in Chengdu and 3 days in Xi An.
I'm Chinese, so getting around won't be an issue however, I'm taking a few of my oz mates and wanting to know how easy it is to find an English-speaking guide especially at Terracotta Warriors site…
Also, finding it very confusing to book all these tour tickets online…:|
Cheers!
Wow that's awesome to know!!!!!! Do you know if the official guides speak English? Yeh I've also heard that the unofficial ones will bug you like crazy. I assume the official ones are easy to spot, do they have a stand or something?
Yeah I've got DianPing on my phone, use it every time I travel to China haha!
We found this really nice Airbnb near the Bell Tower.
We made a mistake travelling to Xi An during labour day which we only found out after we booked the tickets… Crowd will be crazy but I'm ready for it haha!
Any other places you liked in Xi An? We going to Muslim St for food heard it goes off there. Also on the way to see the warriors we going to stop by this place called HuaQingGong?
Hua Qing Gong is 1 of the 2 meh places. We went there first before the terra cotta warriors given it's only ~10km from each other.
Back to terra cotta warriors, the official guides speak English and located not too far from the entrance IIRC.
Yong Xing Fang is a great touristy area, some food are good, mostly crap and don't take cash payments. Seems like most of the food covered by the CCTV show seems to be safe.
If you're lazy to fetch food or needed a midnight snack, Meituan delivery is great.
hey thanks ! we are planning to check out Hua Qing Gong before Terracotta. Was going to stay there one night for the insta famous hot spring hotel but it's all booked out :|…
Good to know you can get official guide that speaks English!
I thought YongXingFang is famous for their food! I gotta make sure I load up my wechat pay then, so sad you can't link OZ card to Wechat..
When you're in Chengdu, go to one of the panda sanctuary and help out for a few hours. You get to hand feed the cubs, and feed the adults (you use a long stick). Best thing I did in China
Haha yep we are doing that! Not planning to find a guide in chengdu as we are not doing any historical sites..
We've made the mistake of getting off the plane unprepared and just go to that travel agent thing right at the airport exit and booked a Chinese speaking tour there. There are no English speaking tours available if you're booking from there. Hopefully you're travelling light or else those LPG tank equipped taxi will struggle with your luggage. Got spoilt by the taxis in Shanghai and Beijing where luggage wasn't really a problem…
Went to 2 other places as part of that tour but it was just meh.
Terracotta warriors - rent the self paced tour ear piece thingie. IIRC 40 RMB each. Spend more time in pit 1, forget about the other 2 - it's nowhere near as impressive. Now I gotta do this again because I've waste too much time looking at the other pits.
You can rent a guide, there's the official ones and plenty of unofficial ones that bugs you when you get into pit 2/3. You won't be missing out on much if you rent one of those self guided ear piece. We had more fun walking around ourselves with the ear piece than following our guide anyway.
Those biang biang noodles are legendary. If you can read Chinese then use Dian Ping, fantastic piece of work to ID all the good restaurants where the locals eat. Don't know where you're staying but Hilton Xi'an is pretty close to the action. Impeccable service A+++ will book there again.