My Week of Adventures, Part 5: Cycling the city walls

National Week vacation was almost a month ago, and I'm still blogging about it. Hopefully it's worth the wait.

The next day of our vacation we went to visit the city walls of Xi'an. Xi'an has some of the oldest and best preserved city walls in all of China. There are only a handful of other cities in China with existing city walls, like Pingyao 平遥 and Nanjing 南京. The first city walls in Chang'an (the ancient name of Xi'an) were built starting in 194 BCE. The existing walls, however, were built during the Ming Dynasty in 1370. They encircle about 12 square kilometers, which is just the center of the modern-day Xi'an metropolis.

This is one of the gates near the south entrance on top of the wall. The height of the walls offers a pretty good view of Xi'an from above, but in all honesty there's not too much to see. The coolest part is that you can rent bikes and turn the 3-4 hours it takes to circle the walls by foot into an hour and a half pleasure cruise!

Here's the gang about halfway through our ride.

Shelby and I are looking fierce on a bicycle built for two.