Everything was going so well the next morning. Our planned taxi journey to the station area of Xian to pick up our coach to the Terracotta Army went without a hitch - well there was a minor blip when our taxi driver decided he would stop for breakfast en-route but apart from that all good. And then we saw the queues for the coaches to the Terracotta Warriors! As they say in Norfolk where Lottie Let Loose hails from 'Ooooh moi gard!' There were literally hundreds of people in the queue (the fact that the Chinese were actually queuing warranted a photo!) and it wasn't moving as far as we could make out. Dennis hadn't ever seen it this bad before, but this is where having a fab local tour guide comes into its own. A few phone calls later and he had got us a ride, through a friend of a friend and we relinquished our place in the queue, that had only move about 2 metres in the time we'd been waiting, and followed our personal driver to his vehicle a few streets away and we were off....sort of...the traffic was really bad, so along with everyone else trying to get to the Terracotta Army, we were crawling along at snail's pace for quite a way out of the city. Eventually things seemed to ease up a bit and we got on our way.
A very slow 17 miles later and we finally arrived at the Terracotta Army site. A long walk to the ticket barrier and another long walk to the pits and - deep breath - woah there we were standing in front of the most amazing archaeological discovery! The main pit is housed in a big arched roof hangar with a viewing platform all around the edge. At the front are the horses and infantry soldiers that have been expertly restored - not quite to their former glory as the originals were painted, but as good as. Further down the pit are still some of the smashed warriors waiting to be restored or half way through their jigsaw work. At the back you can see lots of half made up warriors, work stations and a lab.
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