Our non-English speaking drivers were all so brilliant at finding us and getting us from the train stations to our hotel in every city. The driver who met us in Xi’an was my favourite, he used his audio translate app frequently – as we drove under the imposing archway into the city centre he turned and showed his phone to us, it simply said ‘the wall’.

And indeed the wall is key to the city: one of the few in China remaining, the city walls are 12m high and form a rectangle with a perimeter of 14km (which we both ran – me in the pouring rain!).

We had picked a great place to stay, the Xi’an See Tang hostel which was on a lively, mostly pedestrian street inside and close to the wall, with lots of calligraphy shops and artist studios.

It wasn’t far to walk to the famous Bell and Drum Towers, which give you a good view of the city.

We really enjoyed the atmosphere and food in the Muslim Quarter in the evening, where hundreds of stalls and restaurants sell everything from lamb kebabs to squid and Durian pizza.

For our second night we headed outside the walls to the Big Goose Pagoda, sadly the nighty fountain show wasn’t running that evening as there was a musical performance, but we had a good time eating dinner in a place called Green Molly which seemed to serve Cuban food!

The main reason to come to Xi’an however is the city’s proximity to arguably the most important and certainly most intriuging archaeological finds ever, the Army of Terracotta Warriors.

First discovered in 1974, the site is divided into three pits of different sizes, containing row after row of soldiers, horses and chariots that were part of a massive tomb for the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang who died in 210 BC. That makes them over 2000 years old.

There are over 8,000 life-size sculptures, no two faces are the same. It really is a jaw-dropping experience to see this, and the girls really engaged well with it.

It did take over two hours on two buses to get there, but it was an unmissable part of the trip.