Thanks for the answers so far.
Originally Posted by
jiejie
You may also want to try a Sunday Tuesday morning bullet train from Xi'an to Beijing. The journey won't take you that much longer than the overall airport sequence.
It seems the bullet trains takes 5.5 hours (according to seat61) while the plane is almost 2 hours. Considering that I cannot read nor speak Chinese, I am not comfortable to wait until the last moment and buy a ticket at the train station. I guess I will need to stick with air travel.