Having yet to bathe in a river that never makes it to the sea, I could not resist a visit to the one river that flows out of China yet fails to reach the ocean.       So I get to Xinjiang province in China’s far west, and take a bus from Yining […]

Testing the waters to ascertain how easy or difficult it is as a foreigner to make my way round China on public transport, I’d succeeded in traveling way out west to Yining where the waters drain westward out of China’s Xinjiang province, and into Kazhakstan. Now three days into the trail back eastward I had arrived in […]

Southeastern Yunnan’s Honghe prefecture borders Vietnam, and is bisected by the Red river, from which the area gets its name HONG meaning ‘red’, and HE ‘river’. Aside from the narrow Red river valley, which is generally hot and tropical, this part of Yunnan has a comfortable climate and much very pleasant scenery – a place […]

  My first venture into Sichuan province involves a series of bus journeys north from Qujing the largest town of eastern Yunnan. Seriously steep and barren mountains, traversed on sub-standard road surfaces, are followed by the spectacular descent down into the Yangtse river valley.   Cross the river into Sichuan, and the road onward runs […]

  Sleeping through Gorges The ship cruises a hundred miles upstream through the hours of darkness. When I awake around dawn the journey’s nearly over, soon my destination Fengjie comes into view. I have completed a Three Gorges cruise without seeing a single gorge.

  To view the Three Gorges of the Yangtze river the standard itinerary has embarkation at Chongqing, followed by a down-river cruise, so I decided to start from the other end, the city of Yichang in the west of Hubei province, and work my way upstream.

Lying a mile above sea-level in the far southwest of China, the Tengchong basin is blessed with plentiful autumn and winter sunshine and a comfortable temperature. Nestling amongst the peaks of sixty-eight volcanoes (three of which are identified as ‘active’), the area plays host to visitors out to enjoy such attractions as climbing up rims and […]

I have completed the first of my films to emerge from the material I collected on this year’s autumn trip to China. It features some of the attractions of “China’s Hollywood”, the scenic, historic town of Huanglongxi a river port forty miles or so south-southwest of Chengdu. As we near the end of the trail, […]