I am often asked by my customers for recommendations and suggestions of place to go on their holidays and after over a decade in selling cruises I can always recommend a good itinerary to look at and often can draw on my own experiences of places that I have visited before.
My all time favourite trip has to be China for so many reasons and if I was ever going to recommend a top destination then this would be it.
The very place itself is seeped in so much history and culture and from the buildings , temples and monuments to the amazing people , China really has it all.
There is so much to see and do in China that sometimes it can be very hard to cram it all in in just one visit so even if you have been before you can always go back again and find something new to fall in love with.
I was very fortunate to see the terracotta warriors on my visit. This really is a jaw dropping experience and the shear number of warrior statues that they have unearthed at the site in Xian is unbelievable.
Over the years the remains of the warriors have been restored and brought back to their beautiful glory. They were sculptures erected to protect the Emperor of China in his afterlife and date back to the third century.
They were actually founded back in 1974 by the farmer who owned the land and along with soldiers they also uncovered chariots and warriors.
It is estimated that they have found 8,000 soldiers and you can see them in three separate sections at the site.
I was really surprised when they advised us that the warriors on closer exception would of actually been painted in bright pigments of colours such as pink , red , green , black, blue and white. When you see them in the pits they all have the clay appearance of reddish brown so it was interesting to see a recreated figure of how they would have been before time had changed and faded them.
The most amazing fact about them I thought , was that even with the large numbers we are talking about for the warriors , that each individual figure has a different face and no two are the same. They all vary in height, uniform and hairstyle and the body armors vary depending on the rank.
We had a full afternoon at the site and I manged to look at all of the pits and it really was a truly memorable experience and if you are heading over that way then I would say it cant be missed.
A chance to really experience a magical site and I would definitely return again in the future.
