Category: China - eng
We set out from Zaduo again, it’s three days later. Only driver Renqing comes with us this time. He grew up in the Zaxiqiwa area, and he speaks Chinese though Tibetan is his mother tongue. So no need for a guide or interpreter.
He shows little mercy for his Chinese built pick-up truck....
The car fills with the whispered Tibetan prayers of the man from Zaduo. I have asked him to join, none of us knows the way.
The first high mountain pass draws oohs and aahs for its beauty. But we don’t pause, focused as we are on our aim: the Mekong’s source at Zaxiqiwa....
Three of Asia’s longest rivers, the Yangtse (6,300 km), Yellow River (5,500 km) and Mekong (4,900 km) all have their source in China’s Qinghai province, at the northern part of the Tibetan plateau.
Seems like a remarkable fact. But rivers that start furthest inland and at this...
Easy question, right? You’d expect a straightforward answer. But there isn’t.
One who wants to get to the source of a river will instinctively look for the spot that is furthest away from the sea. On a map his finger starts at the mouth and traces the river upstream. He ignores...
Authorities that don’t allow you to travel in their area, terrible weather, impassable roads – you consider all kinds of stumbling blocks and problems. What if at the end of the road no horses or motorbikes are available to continue your trip, what if one of us gets altitude...
The flag has sunk half-mast. So has the basketball board. The school has closed down.
The man minding the premises explains that the road from Maduo was too unreliable a supply line. It passes straight through a swamp, often is not passable. Then staff and students ended up without...
It is an ugly place. A now defunct school. A few low buildings. Garbage and mud. An unfinished bridge – our car had to stay at the other side. At the edge of this dilapidated settlement that sign: seven kilometers to the Yellow River source.
I have been waiting for four hours. Marco and...
Setting out from Maduo we first came to this Bull’s Head statue with the inscription underneath explaining it is a monument to the Yellow River source.
Fifty 50 meters away a stone marker even pretends you are actually there and just says: ‘Yellow River source’....
We met this boy between Dege and Manigango. He had left home a month ago with his aunt and uncle, nun and monk, and their journey to Lhasa and back would take another eleven. He would walk every step of the way, and every step of the way he would prostrate himself as devout pilgrims do....
Five joined me on a trip through the eastern Tibetan lands of Kham and Amdo. They are places of awesome empty spaces to which the people add colour with their dress, prayer flags and architecture; and life with their welcoming and direct way of interacting with strangers passing by.
We...
In always-fruit-city Kunming peach season follows mango season.
This second time, under the watchful eye of the camera, we aren’t as reverent. We mostly wonder what we will look like, even though the camera woman has told us we will feature for just three seconds in her website documentary.
We had come earlier in the day, the gardener had unlocked...
Shot my favourite picture of 2011 on January 2nd already. Took it in Yingpan, in the southeast of Yunnan province. These kids belong to the Hmong ethnic minority.
Spring in Kunming is usually sunny and warm. Every now and then a sudden cold spell interferes. The temperature drops ten, fifteen degrees to ten, twelve centigrade. Recently it went down to four. That is rare even in January.
‘Mild climate’, people say. But there is no...
From Jinping – the main town of the most ethnically diverse district in Yunnan, itself known as the most ethnically diverse province in China –, from Jinping the bus goes to Mengla first, taking the bumpy dirt road from Sanjia these days because the main road is being upgraded. It...