In November 2012, I’m visiting the Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces in Guangxi province. After a night spent in a guesthouse on one of the hills, I start a 5-hour long trek across the rice terraces to another village. I’m trekking with 3 Chinese guys who have also stayed in guesthouses on the hill. November is low […]
Category Archives: Travel stories
One day at the end of September 2013, Q, a friend who’s living in Shangri-la, has invited me to come with her to her hometown Weixi, which is located on the hills of a fertile valley in Western Yunnan and is a 5-hour-drive across steep mountain roads from Shangri-la. Weixi is a city surrounded by mountains which is […]
I’ve climbed 18 of Tiger Leaping Gorge’s 28 bends when a guy in his 40s with a horse crosses my path. While he walks by, he looks at me and says with a friendly smile: “You’re beautiful.” I’m out of breath and he comes to a halt, asking: “Do you want to ride the horse […]
I’m climbing Northern Yunnan’s Tiger Leaping Gorge. I’ve met a German and a French on the bus, and we walk up the mountain together. At one point, we come by a lonely stall high up in the mountains selling fruits and veggies. I point at some leaves and ask the woman selling these things: “What […]
Y and I are in Changchun. Changchun (literally meaning long spring) was once the capital of Manchuria, which was the name of Northeast China under Japanese occupation from 1931 to 1945. Today, it’s the capital of Jilin province and China’s biggest auto manufacturer. After lunch we set out to take a cab that will take […]
One day while travelling through my husband’s home province Jilin in July 2013, we come by a city called Tonghua. My husband’s friend is living there and my husband has promised to pay her and her mother, who is seriously ill, a visit. My phone got stolen a few days before on our train ride […]
Ever since we met, Y and I have spent every single day together. It’s hard not to when you sit right next to each other in the office. This doesn’t mean that there weren’t times when we were apart, but it was always only for so long. There was one time when Y had to […]
