Man Man Zou

We left Xishuangbanna on an epic two night sleeper bus ride (via Kunming) in search of the most beautiful rice paddies in China. When we finally arrived in the main rice paddy town, Yuanyang, instead of paddies, this is what we saw:
I first heard of Yuanyang on TrekEarth, and was excited because it’s relatively [...]

Xishuangbanna- what a cool name. Even though I can read Pinyin, it took me a while to figure out this name- I used to just call it ‘banana’. The Chinese name is just made to sound similar to the Thai name for this southern region of Yunnan province, which borders on Laos and [...]

I left off my last post in ‘Shangrila’- which I prefer to call by its original name, Zhongdian. Even the buses that go to Zhongdian don’t say ‘Zhongdian’, they say ‘Shangrila’. The town was kind of a nothing town with nothing special except an old town, and a nice monastery.
We enjoyed [...]

I said before that I wanted to better understand Tibetan culture. Now that I’m almost out of Tibetan land, I’ve gathered enough thoughts and observations about them that I’d like to write it down.
I think my initial expectations- and perhaps what North Americans impressions of what Tibetans are like- come from all the ‘Free [...]