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Travel to Tibet just got more convenient: the government has just finished a 38km highway linking Gonggar airport and Lhasa. At the ribbon-cutting on the 17^th, government officials including Xi Jinping officially opened the 4 lane expressway that will allow visitors to Lhasa to cut about 30 minutes of travel time. When Tibet is reopened to visitors next month, AsiaTravel hopes that this will make getting off the beaten path with us just a little easier!

Sources: Xinhua and the China Daily

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…

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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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)

 

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

 

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!

 

 

 

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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.

The following post was written by a student from Concordia International School Shanghai who traveled with AsiaTravel to Abujee in September 2011.

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Trekking amidst the tranquility and nature that is Abujee, a sacred region in Shangri-la, Yunnan, was a rewarding experience that garnered many new friends and beautiful memories. On this trip, our group studied aspects of Buddhism through a visit to a monastery and a private meeting with a lama, a spiritual leader. Interaction with the local horsemen also allowed us insight into Tibetan culture and lifestyle. On a particular night, we were warmly welcomed into the home of a Tibetan friend of our guides’ for dinner, where we sampled the delightfully explosive yak butter tea and enjoyed their traditional song and dance, which we reciprocated with a hilarious rendition of the “Hokey-pokey”.”

 

After chilling in town and a “leisurely” hike on the first day, we began our trek on the barely-touched-by-foreigners path to Abujee. The physical demands of the trail called for mutual encouragement and individual strength that drew the group closer, both to each other and to the majestic terrain of Shangri-la. Through sweat, burning muscles, and the amazing leadership of Jeff “The-Guy-with-the-hair” Fuchs, Sonam “Beast” Geleg, and AsiaTravel’s David and Max, many of us surprised ourselves with our own ability to push onward and succeed.

 

Amidst games of Big Two, sing-offs, campfires, and appalling encounters with monstrous bugs, we laughed and learned and grew. Thus were born “Goat-girl”, “Sugar-boy”, “Falcwynn”, and the sophisticated and refined game of “Abububall”.

On that dreaded last day, each one of us looked wistfully at the distant mountains, waving goodbye with a bittersweet smile and a heavy heart, reluctant to leave the place that would henceforth cause us to smile fondly.

And so, I ruefully conclude that the trip was a lot like this passage—a process both fun and funny, albeit a tad trying at times, and regretfully, much, much too short.

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This young student traveled with AsiaTravel in September of 2011.  For journeys to Abujee, check out our website here or contact us at info@wildchina.com.

Earlier today, we sat down with some of the AsiaTravel team and asked them what they were thankful for this Thanksgiving.  Today we share with you some of their  thoughts on what makes them thankful in 2011.

Gloria Guo, one of AsiaTravel’s most sought after travel consultants, is thankful for her recent trip to Tibet.  She spent close to two weeks using her AsiaTravel travel grant (a grant for employees who have worked at AsiaTravel for 3 years) to explore Lhasa as well as remote mountain regions.  Her travels took her to see Mt. Everest, an experience she will never forget!

 

 

Max Stein, one of AsiaTravel’s Princeton-in-Asia fellows, is thankful for his opportunity to move to Beijing following his graduation from Colorado College. Max has assisted in leading AsiaTravel trips to locations such as Henan province to take kungfu classes at the Shaolin Temple and to Yunnan Province where he assisted with one of AsiaTravel’s newest trips, Abujee: Tibetan Trek in Yunnan.

 

 

Fred He, one of AsiaTravel’s super star guides, is thankful for his family and the support that they give him. Fred travels on AsiaTravel trips for much of the year, and he is glad that he always has someone checking in on him.

 

 

From everyone at AsiaTravel, Happy Thanksgiving.

Here is a recent blog from Chelin Miller, AsiaTravel’s own yummy mummy blogger.  Here she talks about a fantastic new book on Tibetan Arts and Artisans.  Makes everyone at AsiaTravel want to add a Tibetan rug to their Christmas wish list!

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Living Hands: Tibetan Arts and Artisans, a book by Chris Buckley is an inspiring book. It gives an insightful description of the various aspects of Tibetan Arts and Crafts, about which there is so little written.

 

 

From weavers, dyers, metalworkers and thangka painters to mask makers, sculptors and carpenters. We can appreciate Chris Buckley’s passion for Tibet not only in the beautiful images (both by the author and by Mimi Kuo), but also in the knowledgeable description of each craft. But Living Hands is much more than a book about crafts. Because by portraying the artisans’ personal stories and anecdotes, their art comes to life; we feel closer to understanding their history, traditions and emotions. What drives them to create such beautiful objects: necessity, divine inspiration? Where do they source their materials? How did their techniques evolve through time and changing circumstances? What were these objects used for? How are modernity and globalisation affecting their traditional way of life?

 

I’ve had the privilege of meeting Chris Buckley personally and attending some of his talks about Chinese antiques in Beijing. He is one of the friendliest people I have ever come across, who will open up his home and share his collections, expertise and love for art and tradition. He is also an excellent photographer, designer and researcher, with a humanitarian drive to promote the preservation of Tibetan artisan products. To this end, in 2005 he established the Tanva Weaving workshop in Lhasa, helping to enhance the quality and value of rugs produced and sold by Tibetan weavers.

 

In September 2011 his gallery in Beijing, Torana, received a design award from Elle Decoration magazine for their colorshade rug range.  Living Hands: Tibetan Arts and Artisans is currently available direct from Torana Gallery in Europlaza, Beijing. The book will soon be available through Amazon.

 

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For additional questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch at info@wildchina.com.

Ladies and Gentleman, the moment has arrived! Today we announce the 2012 AsiaTravel Explorer Finalists. One of these three will be chosen and the winner will be announced in early January 2012!

The AsiaTravel Explorer Grant is an annual 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. Last week, AsiaTravel Founder Zhang Mei and the expert panel sat down to lunch at one of Beijing’s nicest hideaways– Capital M— to discuss the finalists.

The panel– Ed Wong of The New York Times, Li Bo of Friends of Nature and Yu Hui of National Geographic Traveler China– were blown away by the caliber of applications.  The panel mulled over amazing trekking trips in Gansu province by former Bowdoin College graduates, professional photographers who saught to travel to Jiangxi Province to learn more about Wuyuan County and a world famous journalist and author who desired to venture to Poyang Lake, the last wintering area for nearly all of the world’s critically endangered Siberian Cranes and some 400,000 other water birds.  We were so impressed.

However, tough decisions needed to be made.  And this is what the judges decided:

Announcing The 2012 AsiaTravel Explorer Grant Finalists…

Finalist # 3:  Yachen Monastery & Tibetan Buddhism: Exploring the lives of Tibetan Nuns by Yasmin Cho.

Yasmin, a former graduate student in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, conducted preliminary field research over two summers focused on building relationships with non-Tibetan nuns and lay practioners. Yasmin is passionate about this subject as there has been no international coverage of the thousands of young Tibetan nuns who congregate in the Yachen monastery practicing Buddhism.  Yasmin hopes to explore the social impacts of this population in China.

Finalist # 2: Venturing to Ganzi Prefecture in Sichuan Province by Zhang Shanghua (张上华).

Ganzi Prefecture in Sichuan Province is some of the wildest parts of China. There are no roads, no cars and very few people.  As a result, Mr. Zhang wants to travel to experience this “primitive natural beauty and the most authentic religious atmosphere.” Mr. Zhang plans to use 25-30 days to explore in-depth this area to share with the outside world. Mr. Zhang lives in Chengdu Sichaun and works as a scientist at Chengdu ChemPartner Co., Ltd.

Finalist # 1: Trekking China’s Wilderness: Scouting a Route Along the Backbone of Ailao Shan & Connecting Routes by William Bleisch and Yan Lu.

With experiences such as the Program Director of China Exploration & Research Society, World Wildlife Federation China, Fauna & Flora International China Programme Office and Harvard University, this team of William and Yan is pretty dynamic.  In 2012, William and Yan propose to scout a route along the backbone of the Ailao Shan in Yunnan, through the nature reserves and up on to Dali where the route would connect with existing trekking routes.

Stay tuned to learn more about each of the explorers.  We will be doing a short feature on each of them in the coming weeks. One of these three will be chosen and the winner will be announced in early January 2012!

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For more information on the AsiaTravel Explorer Grant, please click here.