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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 AsiaTravel’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

Amye Maqen (Amne Machin, Anye Machin) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amne_Machin>, the stout, the muscular, and for much of time, the utterly hidden from the outside world…our first glimpse of it is of a snow capped wonder that appears far closer than it is. There seem to be as many ways of spelling it as their are potential descriptives. Neither wind blown sand nor a haze can obscure its brilliant bulk. It seems to hang from the sky as we come in from the northwest towards the makeshift town at its base, Xiadawu (or in the more flavoured local Tibetan ‘Da’wurr’ – ‘Place that is difficult for horses’). In Joseph Rock’s accounts of the mountain and bandit ridden regions back in 1930 he estimated the broad peaks of Amne Machin to be 30,000 feet, a guess that was later proven to be 3,000 metres off.

Amne Machin from the northwest

The Amne Machin range itself is an eastern extension of the greater Kunlun Mountain range, one of Asia’s longest most legend laden mountain chains. Located in the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture it is here that the Yellow River (so named because of wind-blown loess that is carried in from Central Asia) rises before winding eastward. At its rounded and almost friendly white peaks it achieves just over 6,200 metres.

Mountains cannot be compared to other of their kind in my eyes. Mountains are landscapes, heaps of stone and snow unto themselves and each has their own thin-aired identity. Sacred to the Golog (Golok) nomads, Amne Machin is almost directly due east of our pristine salt lake near Mado (Mardo) that we’ve most recently left. It also lies on the route that nomads from southwest took to access their precious salt. Few nomadic caravans would pass up the chance to visit and circumambulate the sacred Amne Machin range while undertaking a perilous journey to source salt. Ever practical, the Tibetan traders saw the value of doing both trade for a revered commodity and a little cleansing of past ills.

This mountain that has long played a role in local nomad’s worship of the divine, has withstood weathering seasons and has become more iconic in the eyes of men over time. The fact that it lies as a northwest-southeast diagonal throughway for traders only increases the curiosity for Michael and I. How much is left in memory and physicality of the salt route legacy? How much of any trade route – seldom acknowledged, documented or discussed – will survive? It is in this way that these journeys and explorations are truly ‘exploratory’ with nothing being guaranteed.

The town of Xiadawu, sits in a small cupped valley and is a dusty mess of pool tables, remarkably shabby huts and a main square of errant apathetic dogs that have forgotten their roles. Xiadawu’s decrepit appearance serves as an entry to something far greater than itself, Amne Machin, which erupts to the east. Flowing west out of the mountains past the town, the swerving breadth of the Nam Chu (Nam River) wanders through, over and around valleys in a never-ending search.

Namchu (Nam River)

Our host, Tsering, is to be found out of town – it is he who will arrange our kora/ circumambulation around the great mountain. The ‘kora’ or counterclockwise circumambulation literally refers to a pilgrimage. For many eastern religions this act is believed to be a physical way to cleanse or clear away one’s past sins.

If in fact this is the case it may well take a few more than one rotation for Michael and I to wipe our collective slates clean.

Around us the landscape ripples with Spring’s pending arrival – ridges verging on going from ochre to green. Still though, the high peaks remind in a glance that up here at over 4,000 metres winter isn’t really ever truly ‘over’.

Our host Tsering tells us that, yes, the salt traders came through here as part of their annual travels – more specifically nomadic traders, who, coming from further east, would add the kora of the mountain to their travels to the salt lakes. A kind of double-pronged travel plan: salt for need and profit, kora for life-cleansing benefits.

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The following is an excerpt from an article in The Wall Street Journal by Mitch Moxley, a Canadian journalist with national and international reporting experience. He’s written on politics, travel, business and other topics from China, Mongolia, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. He is currently based in Beijing, China.

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The ride from Chengdu to Danba Valley is one to be endured, not enjoyed. The journey is by a smoke-filled bus with tiny seats that barrels deep into the mountains of western Sichuan province, shaking and rattling on a single-lane road that is often strewn with fallen rocks. A hair-raising view out the window is of the Dadu River below.

This is the route to one of China’s most enduring architectural mysteries. Ten hours and 400 kilometers into the journey, the valley opens to reveal green mountains topped with snowy peaks. On a ridge above stand a half-dozen rock towers, like ancient smokestacks.

Across the remote, earthquake-prone regions of western Sichuan and Tibet, there are hundreds of these structures. They are built of cut stone, brick and timber, date back as far as 1,700 years and stand up to 50 meters tall. No one is sure of their purpose, though theories abound: They were watchtowers, way stations, status symbols. Some say they have religious meaning.

Striving to save the towers from the forces of neglect, earthquake and a planned hydropower dam are a small number of preservationists, including Frédérique Darragon, a 61-year-old global adventurer—sailor, dancer, trekker, polo player— turned amateur archaeologist by her love for these mysterious structures.

The daughter of a wealthy Parisian inventor and machine maker who died when she was 4 years old, Ms. Darragon spent childhood summers riding horses in England and winter breaks skiing in the Alps. She worked on a kibbutz in Israel and in 1971 sailed across the Atlantic in the first race from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro. She returned to Paris, graduated from university there and then did some work as a model—”Not high fashion,” she says, “just for extra money”—played polo in Paris and Buenos Aires and became a lauded samba dancer in Rio.

During the early ’90s, Ms. Darragon spent several months a year traveling alone through China, often by foot in areas that are still rarely visited by Westerners. It once came close to killing her: In 1993, while searching for endangered snow leopards in Tibet, she suffered a stroke when a fire she built in a cave consumed too much of its oxygen supply. She lay for three days before being rescued by Tibetan shepherds.

Three years later, Ms. Darragon saw her first towers, while traveling near Danba. A year after that she saw similar towers in Tibet—800 kilometers away—and was hooked. “When I learned that neither Westerners nor Chinese had researched them and that practically nothing was known about them, I could not resist trying to crack their mystery,” Ms. Darragon says of her long affair with the ancient towers.

The Danba Valley, home to ethnic Tibetan and Qiang villages, is one of the best—and most accessible—places to explore the towers. Five kilometers from Danba city (danba means “town of rocks”) a series of sprawling villages collectively called Suopo has about 80, some in ruins but many still standing, and some of them more than 30 meters high.

Until recently, nobody knew the towers’ age with any real degree of certainty. There are references in texts from the Han Dynasty, which lasted for about 400 years starting in 206 B.C., but the peoples who historically populated the tribal corridor of Sichuan and Tibet lacked a written language, so there was no documentary evidence of the towers’ origin. Chinese archeologists had taken scant interest in the riddle.

James Wasserman for The Wall Street JournalChiles hang outside a window in Danba County.

It was a linguist who wrote one of the first papers on the subject, in 1989. Sun Hongkai, now retired from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had first seen the towers during a 1956 visit to Sichuan to investigate the Qiang language. “People in the area did not pay attention to the towers,” Mr. Sun says. “Many were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. People used the stones for building materials.”

In the 15 years since Ms. Darragon was drawn to the mystery, she has devoted much of her life to cataloging, dating and fighting to preserve hundreds of the enigmatic stone skyscrapers.

In 2001, with funding from U.S. media mogul Ted Turner, a fellow sailing enthusiast she’s known for decades, she created the nonprofit Unicorn Foundation, dedicated to education and humanitarian projects.

“I’m very proud of Frederique and the work she’s done in China,” Mr. Turner says. “Her amazing discoveries are astounding, and her commitment and dedication to the preservation of some of China’s great artifacts and structures will always be admired and respected.”

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To read the full article, click here. To inquire about journeys to see these towers in Sichuan, please e-mail info@wildchina.com.

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 AsiaTravel’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

A disk of compressed Pu-erh tea for sale at a tea market in Yunnan

It’s not often that one encounters a tourist souvenir that lowers cholesterol, promotes weight loss and protects against cancer, vascular disease, cognitive degeneration and aging – not to mention providing important nutrients like amino acids.

But tea is believed to have these virtues and recent research shows that certain types of Pu-erh tea from China’s Yunnan province have particularly potent levels of beneficial chemical compounds.

AsiaTravel visits Pu-erh production areas in Yunnan on its trip ‘The Ancient Tea & Horse Caravan Road: An Expedition with Jeff Fuchs.’ Learning about the fascinating history of the ancient trade routes along which Pu-erh tea once traveled by horseback to Tibet is a highlight of many clients’ trips.

Another highlight is trekking in Yunnan through tea agro-forests and wild tea gardens where members of exotic ethnic minorities like the Bulang, Lahu and Akha have tended organic tea gardens for generations in the general area from which tea is believed to have first emerged.

In fact, it is believed to be these small-scale, natural growing practices which impart the best Pu-erh tea with heightened health benefits. Most tea in the world these days is produced in sprawling plantations, planted in neat rows in direct sunlight and often treated with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural chemicals.

Not so with the finest Yunnan Pu-erh tea. To start with, it is not all produced from a genetically uniform crop. As we learned recently from the excellent book Tea Horse Road, Pu-erh is produced from a dozen wild cousins and hundreds of landraces of the Camellia sinensis plant – each particularly adapted to the climate of the particular hillside, or even grove, where it has traditionally been grown.

And instead of being grown in a tea monoculture, these trees (many reach an age of a few hundred years and a height of 50 or more feet) grow shaded from harsh sunlight in a natural ecosystem with hundreds of other plant, animal and insect species.

Thriving in their natural environment, agro-forest and tea garden trees produce higher levels of the beneficial compounds that first drew humans to start drinking tea, likely as a medical elixir, some three thousand or more years ago.

A study published last year in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology¹ compared Pu-erh from both terrace plantations and ecologically friendly agro-forests, measuring levels of tea catechins, flavonoid compounds that are thought to be beneficial to human health and are present to varying degrees in most non-herbal tea. The authors found that tea from the agro-forests had average catechin levels several times higher than the plantation tea.

So if you find yourself in southern Yunnan, relaxing after a day of trekking through ancient tea gardens and sipping on a cup of Pu-erh, you can feel good about the fact that a hike isn’t the only good thing you’re doing for your health that day. And don’t forget that a compressed cake packs great for the trip home.

1: See: Ahmed, et al “Pu-erh tea tasting in Yunnan, China: Correlation of drinkers’ perceptions to phytochemistry”, Journal of Ethnopharmacology 132 (2010) 176–185

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 AsiaTravel 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 AsiaTravel’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 AsiaTravel’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

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

The following post was written by Jan Heininger and Jamie Reuter, AsiaTravel 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…

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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 AsiaTravel.  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 AsiaTravel 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 AsiaTravel.
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.

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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.

Students at THINK Global School really got to experience Yunnan with a different perspective.  AsiaTravel exposed the students to Dongba culture, Tibetan language, and Tiger Leaping Gorge, among others.  Photographer / videographer Lindsay Clark put together some footage from the morning market in Shaping.  The class thrived off of the interactions with locals: “Snapping photos, speaking in Mandarin, trying new foods – everyone takes their own approach to this outdoor classroom.” (Clark, TGS)

Woman at rural market outside Dali, China

At the Zhonghe Temple in Dali, AsiaTravel Guide Zhang Jiong shared his knowledge on luck.  Check out the students aiming for good fortune.

“Zhang Jiong explains the meaning of the Fu symbol that sits in front of a Chinese temple. Students at THINK Global School spin three times – eyes closed – and try to touch the symbol to bring good luck to their families; a little lesson and humor atop the Dark Green Mountains in Dali, China.” (Clark, TGS)

Still, Brad Ovenell-Carter the Head of School felt, “The visit to the Zhonghe Temple was too short.  It would have been nice to stay at the hilltop for a while, perhaps to hold a drawing class and share a cup of tea.”

Thanks for the feedback, Brad!  AsiaTravel will definitely note this on our future journeys there.

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For more information about educational journeys to Yunnan, contact us at education@wildchina.com.

Photo by Brad Ovenell-Cartner, Videos by Lindsay Clark of Think Global School

AsiaTravel recently took students from an international school on a multi-day trek in a remote region outside of Zhongdian (popularly known as Shangri-La). It was challenging hiking at altitudes upward of 4000 meters, but the students were resilient and enjoyed the rewards, including a high alpine lake that’s sacred to the Tibetans and Yi people.

AsiaTravel expert Jeff Fuchs helped lead the journey. Fuchs shared valuable insights on the local culture and surroundings. Tibetan guide Sonam kept the group comfortable, especially when he broke into song. The horse team did well – even a two-week-old colt kept up!

AsiaTravel team of Jeff Fuchs, Max Stein, David Fundingsland and Sonam Geleg at the end of the trek

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For more information about educational journeys to Yunnan, contact us at education@wildchina.com.

A couple months ago, you heard from AsiaTravel travelers Jan Heininger and Jamie Reuter saying that they were thrilled with [their] tour company, but not seduced by China.  Their journey in October of 2010 took them through Beijing, Tibet, Yunnan Province. Guangxi Province, and finally to Hong Kong. Here is the second part of a series of articles detailing their experience.  Stop 1 – Beijing…

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We flew to Beijing via Toronto on Air Canada.  Our plane was equipped with lie-flat, business class seats.  OK food.  Great lounge with free dinner in Toronto.  The tickets were half the price of other airlines.  Definitely recommend Air Canada for anyone travelling to China or other points in the Far East.  12 hour flight with 12 hour time change meant we didn’t have to reset our watches which was sort of weird.  It took both Jan and me several days to get past the time shift.  12 hours is tough (though Jan thinks it’s easier than 8 hours).

Oddly, we arrived a full day early.  We had figured: depart on Thursday (10/14), cross international dateline and arrive Saturday.  So our hotel and ground arrangements all were set up to begin on Saturday.  I’m still not quite sure how or why we went wrong, but we actually arrived on Friday.  So there we were in the Beijing airport: no Chinese money, no one to meet us, and few people with any English to help us sort out what to do.  After an hour-long comedy of errors (cell phone with locking key-pad and no instruction booklet, low volume on cell phone, receiving text message instructions in Chinese characters, etc.), we finally convinced our tour company that we were actually in town and received their instructions.  We were asked to take a mass-transit “airport express” train into town because it would take too long for our actual guide, Andy, to come pick us up.  We didn’t really understand this at the time but our subsequent experience with traffic jams demonstrated the wisdom of this suggestion.  Eventually, we managed to get our luggage, get money, find the train, buy tickets, get off at the right stop (the last one) and meet up with our guide who then took us to our hotel.  By this time, we had finally sorted out that the timing screw-up was actually our fault, and not an error by our tour company.

Our hotel in Beijing was the Opposite House (don’t ask about the meaning behind the name; I don’t know it), an ultramodern, minimalist-design hotel in the embassy district.  Very, very nice—the kind of lovely boutique we prefer.  In fact, tourists (both Chinese and western) routinely came in to photograph the interior spaces.  Good bed, wooden sinks and bath (a little odd), good shower, great service, and a very good breakfast.  The breakfasts were fairly uniform (and excellent) across all of our hotels.  By a large, they were based on large and diverse buffets with egg stations, bacon, cheeses, breads, rolls and muffins, cereal, yoghurt, etc.  In addition, they had a whole range of stuff for oriental breakfasts.  If you’ve never seen this, it includes broth, noodles, and a wide variety of meats, vegetables, fish, seaweed, sprouts, tofu, etc that are combined in a big bowl as a sort of breakfast soup to be eaten with chopsticks.  The broth itself is simply “slurped” down.  We looked at it.  We tried it and poked around a little.  But basically we stuck with the western fare for breakfast.  We excused ourselves by saying that two good Chinese meals a day was enough and who wants seaweed for breakfast?  There were no really good breads or hard rolls anywhere in China until we got to Hong Kong.  Maybe it has to do with the types of wheat they grow or something?

Once settled in Beijing, we did all the usual things.  We went to Tiananmen Square (covered with tourists).  We toured the Forbidden City.  We had Peking Duck (greasy).  In the rain (on our third day) we visited the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace.  We drove past a couple of Olympic sites (the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest Stadium).  We took a pedi-cab tour of a hutong, a traditional Beijing neighborhood jammed in between all of the various high rise apartment buildings.  The hutongs are sort of like old, single story, traditional ghettos that are slowly being consumed by new high-rise construction.  But the Chinese who live in them love their traditional way of life, though they have no private baths or toilets.  The pre-Olympic destruction of several hutongs caused such a fury that it seems that the local “Central Committee” is trying them out as tourist attractions to see if showing them off can provide a positive financial return.

Our favorite things were the Ceramics Museum within the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall.  The museum was a quiet, deserted haven away from all the crowds with very good signage in both Chinese and English.  The Great Wall looked exactly like all the pictures you’ve seen of it.  But actually experiencing it was special.  We visited the Mutianyu section, which is a partially restored but far less touristy section of the Wall.  Jan and I took a long (2.5 hour) hike along its top.  The Wall actually just follows the crest of a mountain ridge.  The path along the top of the Wall can be extremely steep in places.  We both ended up with sore thighs and calves from climbing up and down some really steep and long stretches of steps, but loved the experience.

The food in Beijing was very so-so.  They seem to use a lot of oil so the food was very greasy and not all that flavorful.  Even when we went to a restaurant that specialized in Peking Duck, we were pretty underwhelmed.  We were not terribly adventuresome in our choices, so we probably missed a lot of what a real “foodie” would find interesting and good about Beijing food.
One of the oddities of being in China was the Chinese tourists’ fascination with us.  It started in the Tiananmen Square where this nice couple asked if they could have their picture taken with us with the Forbidden City in the background.  According to our guide, this was due to the inherent weirdness of westerners in general, and a tall, bearded westerner like Jamie in particular.  While this first incident was unique in that it included Jan, 10 or 12 times during the trip some couple or group of giggling girls or whomever wanted Jamie to pose with them for a photo – more or less to prove to their friends back home that they had seen, and even touched, a foreigner—but mostly because Jamie was so tall and looked even taller with his Australian Tilley hat.  Another tall American that we met on the trip had similar experiences.  After a while, the whole thing became a bother and bit irritating.  It was, in some small way, like having paparazzi chase after you.  It eventually made me feel like a creature in a zoo that people gawked at.  Weird.  And yet, despite such experiences and our reaction to the hordes and hordes of Chinese tourists, we found the Chinese, as individuals, to be friendly and welcoming.

We spent hours in traffic going to and from the Great Wall, and trying to get around inside the city.  Drivers are crazy there.  They push and shove in traffic using cars, trucks and buses pretty much the same way they push and shove in queues.  As one guide told us, there is no concept of personal distance in China (unlike in Japan where they create their own).  It’s not rudeness; it’s simply cultural norms. However, they always beep their horn when passing (they are taught to do this).  And when passing, they pull back into the right lane when the front seats have barely passed the front of the car being overtaken.  Several times, I was sure that we would clip the front of a car being passed but we never did.  Crossing a street on foot was also a challenge.  Initially I thought that cars were aiming at us on purpose.  Later, I realized that there just wasn’t any concept of pedestrians having the right of way.  A car making right hand turns just keeps going.  It was up to the pedestrians to get out of their way.  Given that the city was laid out in huge squares, Beijing was not a walkable city anyway.

Beijing was clearly an example of the “new China.”  Designer stores were everywhere.  Many young people clearly had lots of money and were stylishly dressed.  There was a long line outside an Apple Store near our hotel, as people waited to buy iPhones at five times the US price.  High rise condominiums and office buildings were everywhere.  Some brand new, some older and clearly showing their age.  Construction cranes were everywhere.  Our guides quipped that China’s national bird was the crane (i.e., steel crane, not feathered; get it??).  But the old neighborhood (hutong) near our hotel didn’t have a sewer or clean, public water.  Beijing was clearly a city of contrasts, with rapid change being driven by the “new” China economy.

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Stay tuned for more tales from Ms. Heininger & Mr. Reuter’s journey.  For more information about adventures in Beijing, see a sample itinerary here or contact us at info@wildchina.com.

All photos by Ms. Heninger & Mr. Reuter. To see all of their photos, visit AsiaTravel’s flickr page here.

Find a new route on the Tibetan Plateau. Trace the origin of the Yangtze and Yellow River. Assess the newfound growth years after the Sichuan earthquake. The vision perseveres in whatever the journey may be.

Several people embody these qualities and take action: Li Bo, Director at Friends of Nature, China’s first environmental NGO; Edward Wong, one of the Beijing correspondents for The New York Times; Yu Hui, National Geographic China editor.

The AsiaTravel Explorer Grant is a grant of up to USD 3,000 that is awarded to adventurers seeking to push the boundaries of responsible, off-the-beaten-path travel in China. All submissions for the 2012 AsiaTravel Explorer Grant are due by November 15, 2011.

AsiaTravel selects our explorers winners based on the following criteria:

• Focus on bringing to light a long lost route, a culturally significant issue, promoting aid in a remote community or a trip dealing with discovery or rediscovery
• Passion and excitement for exploration
• Past/current involvement with exploration in China
• Risk management plan
• Incorporation of Leave No Trace (LNT) principles
• Low carbon travel
• Participant skill levels commensurate with proposed itinerary

For more information, please e-mail us at expedition@wildchina.com or visit http://www.wildchina.com/explorer-grant to download the application.