The following post was written by Jan Heininger and Jamie Reuter, WildChina clients who traveled with us for two and half weeks in October of 2010.  Their journey took them through Beijing, Tibet, Yunnan Province. Guangxi Province, and finally to Hong Kong. This is the first of a series of articles he wrote detailing their experience.  We begin with their overall impression of China…

———-

Some people come away saying they “loved” China.  We didn’t.  Don’t get me wrong.  This was a great trip.  China was fascinating.  It had beautiful scenery.  It had lots of history and culture.  We had many very unique experiences.  Tibet was wonderful.  We saw the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.  We saw amazing scenery including the karst mountains in the Li River valley.  We saw and experienced (in our own way) the spirituality of Tibet and China.  We visited towns and areas still dominated by minority populations and tribes.  We had, alas, only a few great meals but we stayed in a number of really outstanding hotels.  We had excellent guides and drivers who gave us meaningful insights into China, its history, its culture and its peoples.  We came away with a much greater appreciation for how some of the more recent aspects of Chinese history (end of the empire, Mao, the Cultural Revolution and the change to the “new economy”) have molded how people live their lives today.  We walked through “old towns” and markets established a thousand years ago.  We got a better understanding of how life works under central control.  But we didn’t “love it.”  We were fascinated.  We will go back to visit other areas of the country.  We were thrilled with our tour company and will use them again.  But we weren’t seduced by the country’s charms.

Part of our difficulties was due to the constant and sometimes overwhelming presence of Chinese tourists.  Chinese tourists are an odd group and not terribly accommodating or pleasant from a westerner’s perspective.  According to conversations with several people, Chinese tourists are less interested in seeing, learning and understanding, and much more interested in taking home pictures of themselves and cheap souvenir gifts to “prove” they had been to the big city and seen the elephant (so to speak).  In the context of China’s economic growth and the spread of wealth down into the middle classes and rural communities, millions of these tourists are on their initial trips out of their local communities.  They smoke a lot.  They spit.  They talk, stand up or even walk around during performances.  They push and shove to get to the front of a line – a survival skill, no doubt, in a country with 1.3 billion people.  In small numbers (anything less than several thousand), they are no worse than any other population of large groups discharging from parked ranks of tour buses.  You ignore their presence and carry on.  But for some reason, we were flooded with them.  Clearly, it was worst in Beijing, and our experience there may have made us hypersensitive to the issue throughout the remainder of the trip.  But our guides uniformly reflected on how they were seeing substantially many more national tourists than expected.  In prior years, the number of Chinese tourists had substantially diminished following their big national holiday (October 1).  This year, they just kept coming.  As an early example, I expected Tiananmen Square to be this huge, open square, just like the pictures I’ve seen.  Instead, all we could see were the heads of tens of thousands of tourists jamming an open space between a few monumental marble structures.  There was a 4-6 hour wait to get into Mao’s tomb (we skipped it).  Given the number of people present, the square itself didn’t even seem all that big.  For communities all across China, hanging out a “UNESCO Site” sign means you’re guaranteed millions of dollars of revenue from tens of thousands of Chinese tourists jamming little historic streets lined with shops selling plastic crap and cheap reproductions (mostly made in Viet Nam).  You can’t fault the Chinese for wanting to visit the hotspots within their own country.  But their numbers and manner definitely reduced our enjoyment and, in some cases our appreciation, for particular sights or experiences.
Second, China is clearly struggling with the size of its population, the extraordinary rate of growth in its economy and the rapid changes that are occurring in its distribution of wealth.  Improvements in their infrastructure (highways and airports in our experiences) just can’t keep up.  So in any largish city (and a country this size has lots and lots of cities with 5-10 million people), traffic jams, litter, pollution, clean water, lack of functional sewer systems, crowded public transport, crowded airports and disruptions due to construction are real problems.  I saw more Ferraris in Beijing in 3 days than I’ve seen in Washington D.C. in 30 years.  But most of them probably never get out of 1st gear due to the endless traffic jams there.  They’re like enormous pinkie rings, serving only to demonstrate the wealth of their owners.  Our trip included many, many hours in cars and vans averaging anywhere from 10-20 kilometers per hour – both in urban areas and while driving between rural towns.  Most tourist areas are struggling to deal with the explosion of tourism by Chinese nationals and foreigners, and some sites are, frankly, failing.  For example, we had to stand around for 15-20 minutes waiting for our guide to purchase tickets to get into the Forbidden City.  There was no way to pre-purchase tickets to get into sites.  And it wasn’t just for our small group of two.  Even the large groups stood around waiting, increasing the sense of congestion and crowding around key sites.  They just haven’t learned the secrets of how to move people along.
Finally (and there’s no polite way to say this) but…  Squat toilets were not our favorite Chinese experience.  Particularly when there aren’t any doors or walls between the “stalls.”  And you’d better bring your own toilet paper because you won’t find any outside of luxury hotels and airports (and even some of the airports only had squat toilets.)
I remember when my Grandmother Miller visited us in Germany back in the 1960’s and said something like “Germany would be a great place if it just wasn’t so full of foreigners.”  That’s been an inside, Reuter family joke for years.  I am very uncomfortable with the fact that my feelings about our China trip include even a tiny hint of this incredibly ethno-centric view.  I really do believe that I’m much more cosmopolitan than that.  But it can’t be argued that in the end, we just didn’t really “love” China as a country, and these were some of the reasons why.

Our tour company was WildChina.  We could never say enough wonderful things about how well they actually performed.  They provided everything promised, including cars and beds big enough for Jamie.  Their guides were terrific: very helpful, informed and flexible.  While dealing with our early arrival is the best example of their flexibility, we regularly had conversations with our guides about the various options we had for spending a day.  They quickly picked up on our desire to skip the obvious and crowded and go for things that were more unusual and interesting.  They knew where the shops with “quality” goods were, and took us there.  They were very open about their own lives and experiences.  They taught us a lot about what it was like to live in the “new China.”  We highly recommend WildChina to anyone planning a trip there.  They will work with you to create the type of trip you want, and then deliver it.  A very good friend of ours, who has travelled extensively, went on a 12 day trip to Yunnan, departing two days after we returned, and spent time in many of the same places we visited.  She used one of the “usual” tour companies.  The contrast between the two trips was remarkable.  If you’re going to China, use WildChina.
Weather wise, we sort of lucked out.  The rainy season was supposed to have ended.  But everyone kept talking about how weather patterns had been delayed this year and that we were still in the tail end of the rainy season.  Weather.com kept predicting rain – with daily precipitation probabilities ranging from 60-80% for weeks at a time.  In reality, we had serious rain for only two days: one in Beijing (when we visited the Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven in our rain gear and under umbrellas) and one in Kunming (when a break in a steady rain let us wander around the Stone Forest without get too wet).  On the other hand, it was generally cloudy, overcast and about 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) colder than we expected.  While Jamie never put on his wool cap and gloves, he only wore his shorts and polo shirts after we got to Hong Kong.  Jan packed too many shirts with three-quarter sleeves and was stuck wearing her 2 long sleeve shirts day after day after day.  Neither of us even got close to putting on our bathing suits.

———

Stay tuned for more tales from Ms. Heininger & Mr. Reuter’s journey.  For more information about the destinations they visited, check out our destinations map here.

Traveling is easy these days. Planes, trains and ferries criss-cross the globe, Google maps and GPS can pinpoint your location in minute detail, and thousands of guidebooks, websites and blogs provide real-time information on almost every place imaginable. While this is certainly more convenient, it’s hard to imagine that same sense of exhilaration felt by great explorers doing something for the first time: Columbus setting foot on America; Hillary summitting Everest, for example. Earlier this month, however, I discovered that real off-the-beaten-path adventuresare still possible, if you know how to find them…

Tibetan home in Zhonglu Village

After a painfully early start and an hour’s delay in Beijing, I arrived at Chengdu airport around noon, where I was met by Frederique Darragon. Born in Paris, Frederique inherited a small fortune from her father, an inventor who died when she was 4 years old. Instead of buying things, Frederique chose to spend her money on exploring the world. Despite my tiredness, the 9-hour bucking-bronco journey from Chengdu to Danba, a quaint little Tibetan town in western Sichuan, passed quickly as Frederique wowed me with stories of her travels – hitchhiking across the United States on a shoestring budget, working on a kibbutz in Israel, sailing the Atlantic in the first race from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro, living amongst the golden eagle hunters in Mongolia, and being rescued by Tibetan shepherds after suffering a stroke while searching for snow leopards on the Tibetan Plateau. She has been a model in Paris, a record-breaking polo player and 8-time thoroughbred racing champion in Argentina, a lauded samba dancer in Rio…
Twelve years ago near Danba, Frederique came across a tall tower made of cut stone, bricks and timber. Thinking nothing of it at the time, she came across a similar one a year later in Tibet, 800 kilometres from the first. The locals she asked had no idea who built them, how old they were, or what they were used for, and further inquiry revealed that despite their abundance in this area (known as the Tribal Corridor), almost no scientific research has been done on them. They are one of China’s enduring architectural mysteries. Frederique was intrigued, and intent on uncovering their story.

Tower of Danba Valley

Over the next decade, Frederique sifted through journals, articles and ancient texts looking for references to the towers. She wandered the area interviewing local people, gathering data from 250 standing towers and over 750 ruins, taking photographs and collecting wood samples for carbon dating, in search of clues. Using the money that her then boyfriend, media mogul Ted Turner, had given her to buy dresses, she set up the Unicorn Foundation – dedicated to preserving the towers and improving the livelihoods of the people in the area. She also published a book, filmed a documentary that aired on the Discovery Channel and put together a photo exhibition to raise awareness of the towers both in China and the West.

The next morning, inspired by Frederique’s go-getter travel philosophy, I decided to make my own way to Zhonglu, a small village 20 minutes northeast of Danba. The landscape was breathtaking. Dozens of square towers and fortress-like Tibetan houses are visible from the hilltop viewing platform, scattered across both sides of the Danba Valley. Villagers in traditional garb were bent over in fields of crops or drove animals along the narrow pathways through the village, and yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the experience was not completely authentic. From my perch I could also make out a shiny cavalcade of SUVs parked outside the only guesthouse in Zhonglu, and an old lady in a toll booth had charged me 20 RMB to enter the village.

When I mentioned this to Frederique later, she explained that the landscape’s steep contours means that land for cultivation and building property is extremely limited.

Old buildings, including the ancient towers, are typically knocked down to make space for new ones, and the stones are reused as building materials. Her take on the toll fee is positive: if the locals recognize the value of the towers as tourist attractions, they will be more inclined to protect them. They will also be less reliant on harvesting Chinese herbal medicines and logging timber as ways to supplement their limited income, which reduces the pressure on the local environment. The next step is to convince them to think about long term sustainability and ecotourism, instead of trying to make quick money though mass market tourism. That’s where WildChina hopes to help.

Water-powered cornmill

That afternoon, we drove a little further down the road to another village called Pujiaoding. The road wound up the side of the valley, narrowed then came to dead end. We hopped out of the car and continued on foot along a narrow dirt track, which opened up to a small primary school. This was the kind of authentic, unpolished, and personal experience that would appeal to WildChina’s clients. Schoolchildren were playing basketball on the concrete playground as the school principal showed us the areas in need of repair. Seeing the multitude of little problems that could be solved with a small donation and a bit of elbow grease reminded me how much we take for granted in more developed parts of the country. Frederique’s local friend Abu then invited us into his home where we brainstormed potential projects for WildChina’s education and community service tripsover steaming cups of Tibetan butter tea, homemade cheese and tsampa, a traditional staple food made from roasted barley flour mixed with water.

This pattern of events happened for the rest of the trip. We would stop in relatively touristy spots, particularly at night, but just around the corner there were hidden gems to be discovered: a tiny village that still uses the power of falling water to grind corn into flour; little old ladies that have never seen tourists, let alone foreign ones; unspoilt fields of rainbow coloured wildflowers beyond the pastures. The five days I spent with Frederique highlighted how I will approach all my travels in future, with an open mind, engaging with local people and proactively searching for experiences and adventure.

School in Pujiaoding

———-
Author of this post Samantha Woods is a manager at WildChina.  To learn more about Danba and journeys to this area, please contact us at info@wildchina.com.

A few posts ago, we announced the opening of the commercial high-speed rail that connects passengers between Beijing and Shanghai in less than 5 hours: a remarkable feat. Before the high-speed rail opened on July 1, 2011, the fastest journey via train took 9 hours and 49 minutes. Now, due to trains which travel at an average speed close to 200 mph, the time it takes to travel to Shanghai has been cut in half.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of exploring Shanghai for the first time. Of course, I packed a long to-do list from WildChina’s China Classics Shanghai itineraries, but I had to try to condense everything I wanted to do into a single weekend adventure. I took the high-speed rail from Beijing to Shanghai on a Friday morning, then hopped on the train and rode it back to Beijing on Sunday afternoon. I knew I wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle of flying, which made the rail an attractive alternative.

My experience was fantastic. The seats are comfortable and there’s much more legroom than a plane offers. The attendants were helpful, and everything was very clean. All in all, this train makes travel to Shanghai a piece of cake.

At the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station after disembarking the high-speed train

If you’re looking to take a weekend journey to Shanghai, but not sure what to do once you arrive, here are some suggestions.

1) Yu Garden

Visit this site in the morning to avoid crowds. After a little searching for its entrance in the bustling bazaar outside the garden walls, you will find paradise on Earth in this classical Chinese garden. Commissioned in 1559 by Pan Yunduan of the Ming Dynasty (1368AD-1644AD), the gardens were meant to be a gift to his father for him to spend his old age in peace. Yu Gardens showcase the Southern Chinese garden style: carp-filled ponds, dragon statues, lucky stone mosaics, and bridges are tucked away in the luscious greenery of this famous garden.

Afterwards, stop and grab some snacks and milk tea from the vendors in the bazaar and visit the local artisans hard at work in their stalls.

2) Xintiandi

The site of the first Communist Party meeting, Xintiandi’s historical significance blends gracefully with its modern development into upscale shopping and dining. This modernized area is composed of renovated shikumen, or “stone gate” houses located in narrow alleys. The numerous cafés and the wide range of dining options make Xintiandi an ideal spot for lunch, dinner, or drinks. Most restaurants have outdoor and indoor seating which makes people-watching easy while you relax. Stop by the Museum of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party to learn more about the first Communist Party meeting.

3) Pudong: Jin Mao Tower or the World Financial Center

Head across the Huangpu River to Pudong, China’s emerging financial center. Though most tourists head to the Oriental Pearl Tower for a view of The Bund and Shanghai, Jin Mao Tower and the World Financial Center offer incredible observation decks and a dramatically thinner crowd. Jaws drop as soon as the elevator doors opened on the observation deck on the 88th floor of Jin Mao Tower (also home of the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, one of the highest hotels in the world which occupies the tower from the 53rd-87th floor).

Jin Mao Tower

4) Fuxing Park

Hidden among the charming, tree-lined streets in the French Concession district, Fuxing Park exudes a lively aura thanks to the locals who sing, play board games, dance, practice tai-chi, and relax in the park. Immediately upon entering the park, Fuxing’s I passed an older Mao-suited gentleman carrying his lucky cricket in its cage as he ambled on his way through the fragrant rose garden.

5) Urban Planning Exhibition Center

The six-story Shanghai Urban Planning exhibition Centre includes archived photos, information on proposed forms of future transportations, and a computer-generated flyover of the city projected onto a 360-degree movie screen. The most incredible part of the museum, though, is the centerpiece of the entire exhibition center: an expansive scale model of what urban Shanghai is predicted to resemble in 2020.

6) Nanjing Road

If you’re looking for shopping, Nanjing Road, one of the world’s busiest shopping streets, has it all. Renovated in 2000 by the Chinese government in an effort to pedestrianize the street, Nanjing is very easy and accessible to navigate.

7) Din Tai Fung Restaurant

Though this chain is actually of Taiwanese origin, Din Tai Fung in Shanghai promises incredible xiaolongbao, or soup dumplings, a local favorite. Din Tai Fung’s excellent service, fantastic prices, and, of course, delicious cuisine have all contributed to its immense popularity. There are numerous locations throughout the city.

8) Walk Along The Bund at night (before 11pm!)

The Bund, with its European-style Neoclassical and Art Deco buildings, portray the beginning of Shanghai’s financial prowess that began during the British concession in 1842. Commercial houses and banks line the Western edge of the Huangpu River, giving Shanghai the nickname “Paris of the East.” After the sun sets, the lights from the buildings drench the walkway on the bank of the river in a warm glow.

The lights from Pudong across the Huangpu River are dazzling and bright, and represent Shanghai’s constant development and urban renewal. Arrive before 11 pm to make sure you catch a glimpse of the city lights before they’re shut off for the night.

Pudong at night from across the Huangpu River

To prepare for the ride back to Beijing, Purchase some food from the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station before you head back; you can pay for a meal or snacks on the train, but the cuisine isn’t always very appetizing and prices are high. Relax! After a busy weekend, you can lean back your chair and sleep comfortably in the well-cushioned chairs.

———

To see more activities in Shanghai, check out the itinerary for our four-day journey to the city, here.

Patti Waldmeir, WildChina traveler and Shanghai correspondent for the Financial Times, divulges her interactive experience in China’s Guizhou province with locals and WildChina guides who helped her family embrace the history and pride of the region.

———

“Mommy, please don’t eat the brown one!” My 11-year-old daughter was pleading for the reprieve of my lunch: a hunk of stir-fried dog haunch that I was determined to stomach, whatever the consequences to her psyche or to my digestion.

Brown-coloured dogs, it seems, are tastiest – or so we were told on our recent trip to one of the least visited, but most spectacular, tourist destinations in China: Guizhou province, a land of karst and culture unique in an increasingly tourist-glutted mainland. Shanghai, Beijing, Xian and Chengdu are rapidly becoming staples of international tourism but Guizhou is an altogether different kind of China: older, friendlier, prouder, and purer. For those who enjoy tourism but hate other tourists, it is a paradise.

One glimpse of Xiao Hong’s dog diner, in the Guizhou town of Panjiang, where almost every restaurant is a canine one, is enough to dramatise the difference. Eating dog is controversial in the rest of China – in April, animal rights activists liberated nearly 600 dogs bound for the wok after ambushing a lorry just outside Beijing – but, in Guizhou, dog is still a valued delicacy. Dog meat from Guizhou’s Huajiang town was recently declared part of the town’s “intangible cultural heritage” and the provincial government promoted Guizhou dog meat at last year’s Shanghai Expo.

My host, the tour company WildChina, does not normally offer dog on its menu of visits to the karst mountain scenery and ethnic minority villages of Guizhou. But I insisted: if dog is good enough for the people of Guizhou, it is good enough for me. Then I told the children.

I had already warned my two squeamish pre-teens that this would not be our usual China trip: a tour of famous temples and sacred mountains by way of low-rent video game parlours and seedy Chinese amusement parks. This time, we were going to visit the “real China” – Tiger Mom could not have said it any better.

So I left one child cowering in the back of WildChina’s minivan – sucking on a Sprite, munching Oreos and refusing to look out of the window – and marched the other one straight past a wok of simmering puppy paws to the counter where Xiao Hong was waiting to carve up some dogmeat.

I was half hoping she would offer something other than brown dog: in the rigid hierarchy of Guizhou canine cuisine, brown comes tops but is swiftly followed by black, Dalmatian and white dog. But brown dog was what she had, so I banished thoughts of our own brown mutt back at home in Shanghai – the infelicitously named “Dumpling”, himself rescued as a puppy from a cooking pot – and tucked into a fragrant canine casserole laced with mint and garlic shoots, “smelly beans” and Guizhou chilli sauce.

Like termites, caterpillars, mopane worms, goat guts and all the other gross things I have eaten in my life, once was enough for me for dog meat: the taste just isn’t good enough to outweigh the notion of eating Lassie. But once will not be enough to visit Guizhou: I have been wandering the world for nearly 40 years but seldom have I had the sense of travelling so far back in history.

All the guidebooks drone on about the intricate embroidery and elaborate hairstyles of Guizhou’s many ethnic minorities – members of the 55 minority cultures recognised by the Chinese government (and celebrated whenever Beijing wants to trumpet its diversity). I imagined an endless array of fake cultural artefacts, produced by minority tribesmen pretending to engage in authentic traditional practices, right outside the tour bus stop.

But that was before I met Xiao Zesheng, our WildChina guide – a Guizhou native with no more tolerance for counterfeit culture than I have. He marched us off through the rice fields – balancing precariously on narrow dikes separating paddies of mud and dung and water – right into the farmyards and courtyards of villages apparently untouched by much technical innovation since the water buffalo. In the process, he showed us plenty of traditional embroidery and elaborate hairstyles but they were all worn by women chopping wood and planting rice fields.

Guizhou women sport intricate hairdo's, even while performing hard labor

Xiao and Nancy Tan, who is WildChina’s Chinese-American guide and has a broad Tennessee drawl and an unerring knack for keeping pre-teens happy, squired us from the realm of the “Old Han” and the Bouyei people, to sample a few of the sub-groups of the Miao (known in the west as Hmong), described graphically by their dress or headgear as the Long Skirt Miao, the Short Skirt Miao, the Long Horn Miao, the Big Flowery Miao and the Gejia (officially, a Miao subgroup).

The Huangguoshu waterfall

They collected us in the provincial capital of Guiyang, about a two-hour flight from Shanghai. The highlight of our half day in Guiyang – a relatively charmless city, like most of China’s minor metropolises – was watching city workers dumping mud into the Nanming river as part of Guiyang’s attempt to be named one of China’s cleanest cities. After a lightning visit to the 78m high Huangguoshu waterfall, we drove to Kaili, a convenient if unprepossessing base for three days visiting the minority villages of south-east Guizhou. No one goes to Guizhou for the hotels: ours, the Heaven-Sent Dragon, was the best in town (even if hotel housekeeping seemed to think vacuuming the rugs to be an unnecessary luxury). Our last night, at the newly built Leishan International Hotel in Leishan confirmed the impression that Guizhou people would rather dump mud into a river, than take it out of a carpet by vacuuming.

Leaving Kaili one morning – Kaili means “let’s go to the rice paddy field with the water buffalo” – Xiao took us to do just that: scarcely 100 yards off the main road, we came upon a group of women, knee-deep in a field of mud laced with dung, planting rice seedlings. “Come in and join us,” they shouted – so we did, stripping off socks and shoes to slip and slide into the muck beside them.

Patti and girls planting rice seedlings

After marvelling at the squeamishness of my Chinese-American children – adopted as infants from unknown Chinese birth parents who may also have been farmers – the seven planting matrons collapsed in laughter at our urban inability to insert a handful of rice seedlings upright, at the right intervals, under water. “Don’t waste,” scolded the matriarch of the paddy field, gently, as one child dropped a precious seedling without realising that it would yield half a pound of rice at harvest.

Patti's daughters exploring terraced fields

Soon the children were scampering off to watch a farmer ploughing with water buffalo and to stomp in cow pats with bare feet. After a pit stop at a local farmyard, where an octogenarian villager welcomed us in to wash at his water tap, we had to spend several minutes politely declining the planting ladies’ invitation to lunch. For in Guizhou, hospitality is the default: from almost every villager, a smile, a greeting, an invitation to rest or chat or drink water. One diminutive grandmother of the Old Han minority, descendants of Qing dynasty warriors sent from distant Nanjing to defend the empire’s borders in Guizhou, even thanked me for taking her picture. After nearly three years in Shanghai, with its relentless focus on the making and spending of money, I can think of nothing better than plunging knee-deep in an agrarian cesspool, with such friendly natives.

A backstreet in Zhaoxing in Guizhou

Of course, it is easy to confuse poverty with charm in Guizhou. Its people are among the poorest in China. They farm on seemingly vertical hillsides, terrace their fields nearly to the top of every available mountain, and plough by hand or with a draft animal – backbreaking work. They carry crushing loads by shoulder pole; beat laundry with a stick in oft-polluted waterways; and every grandma seems to have a sturdy toddler strapped to her back – offspring of the children she has lost to labour as migrant workers in a distant city. And they eat dog, not just because they like it – but because starvation is not something distant and medieval but a part of living memory. Many Guizhou people lost family members in the man-made famine of China’s Great Leap Forward; they still bring it up in conversation.

But more noticeable than the poverty, is the pride: in one village, a young man is making paper, from bark stripped from local trees. A blacksmith makes an axe; a middle aged man beats cotton to make a bed quilt; a potter, the sixth generation of his trade, fires bowls from clay glazed with charred rice bran and quicklime from the nearby hills. Outside every doorway is an old man or woman stripping bamboo shoots for dinner, or knitting, or sharpening a scythe with a whetstone; an Asian version of the world according to Bruegel.

But this is China, the land of economic development on steroids, where highways and railways and whole cities spring up, where yesterday there was nothing but paddy fields. Maybe next year, the sight of ladies planting rice in their embroidery will be gone from Guizhou. Maybe later it will be the water buffalo and, eventually, even the dogmeat. Either way, this is a world that cannot last for ever.

Patti and her daughters

———-

To read this article in the Financial Times online, click here. To learn more about our journeys to Guizhou, please visit our website or email us at info@wildchina.com. You can also watch this video, which introduces our guide Xiao.

Photos from Financial Times article, by Nancy Tan, a marketing associate of WildChina, and by Patti Waldmeir and her daughters.

The following is an excerpt from Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of WildChina’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai. Below is the last piece from their journey…

Early morning wind upon an Amne Machin ridge

A last time for securing our gear on the yak. Our morning of departure

An avalanche’s disintegrating power has rearranged the land in front of us. A brutal black surge of turned earth, stones and newly formed shaped forms that stretch kilometres across the valley. It has only served to enhance in many ways an already formidable scene. Five years earlier Amne Machin released a colossal chunk of itself upon the land below and we are now grinding our way over this ‘reconstructed’ surface. We, for the first time on this portion of our journey, are steadily descending and with this knowledge comes an exhausted nostalgia and a twinge of sadness – we are exiting the main protective body of the Amne Machin range which fades to our right. ‘Civilization’ is coming closer step by step, though admittedly we still have much distance to cover…Michael is feeling this glumness as well. I am doing everything in my limited mental powers to stay in each progressive moment and not to let the mind jump ahead out of the now. I keep wondering at how we came to this point, where we are about to end….

Our caravan making its way out of the main Nom'sho valley

The yaks seem impatient to get home pushing ahead, as strong and steady as ever. Peaks become rounded hills, and the snowline dissipates as we continue. We are descending through a valley that splits the highlands and even the air around us is somehow diminishing in power.

Our stout mates for the entire trip - no better transport method, anywhere

 

 

Michael sitting for the first time in a week something other than frozen ground

We are both silent, and I feel in me a longing to bolt back into the mountains’ sanctity. A last night spent in the village with locals and a huge meal….tomorrow begins for us the slow and inevitable return to the provincial capital of Xining and a number of thermoses of tea to throw back, just to stay sane.

 

 

 

 

Jeffers trying very hard to remain seated indoors...the urge to bolt was only kept down by the mug of tea in hand

 

Our caravan making its way out of the main Nom'sho valley