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For many travelers, one of the difficult aspects of setting aside the time and money for a trip to China is that it’s hard to know what you’re getting yourself in for until you’re stepping off the plane — unlike buying a car there is no ‘test drive’ option.

We frequently receive enquiries about our Tea Horse Road journey, an exploration of ancient trade routes in Yunnan from the jungles of Xishuangbanna to the breathtaking Tibetan highlands of Shangri-la.

For 13 centuries, the Tea and Horse Caravan Road was a network of rugged paths linking China with Tibet, Southeast Asia and India through Yunnan. Its name comes from the exchange of Chinese tea for Tibetan horses that formed the backbone of this commercial network connected by fearless caravans. These caravans facilitated the exchange of customs and culture between dozens of different ethnic groups scattered across some of Asia’s wildest terrain.

A virtual trip back in time peppered with some of Yunnan – and China’s – most spectacular scenery, our journey is led by Jeff Fuchs, the first Westerner to travel the entirety of the Tea Horse Road.

It is not easy to fully convey how special places such as Mangang Village or Shaxi are over the phone or in an email. Many places along the old route are simply too unique for words.

That’s why we were excited to happen upon the book Tea Horse Road, an amazing introduction to one of the world’s most beautiful and diverse regions. A joint effort between photographer Michael Freeman and ethnobotanist Selena Ahmed, this incredibly thorough book is the result of years of travel, photography and research.

This attractive 340-page book published by River Books is big enough and has enough photos (more than 270!) to call a “coffee table book”, but that wouldn’t do it justice.

Freeman, who makes great photography seem easy, spent two years on the route getting to know the places and people of the old route through his lens.

Ahmed’s writing – which comes from four years of doctoral research – allows the reader to understand the route as a whole while appreciating the unique role each individual town or ethnic group played within this fascinating trade network.

This September we will travel the Tea Horse Road once again with the incomparable Jeff Fuchs. If you are considering joining us on this unforgettable journey, we highly recommend that you give it a test drive with Freeman and Ahmed’s excellent book.

The following post was written by Gerry Levandoski, a AsiaTravel client who traveled with us on a small group journey with Yosemite in September 2010.  This is the first of a series of articles he wrote detailing his experience.  We begin in Jiuzhaigou…

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Daybreak added disappointment to the dread Esther and I already felt. Cold and rain had returned, and the day’s itinerary had us hiking and overnight camping. Hiking has become a favorite activity. If I have the proper clothes, I don’t even mind walking in the rain. But I will always choose a hotel bed and pillows over a sleeping bag on an air pad.

Park visitors need special permission and local guides to enter the Zharu Valley, our destination. The park zone contains a monastery, a couple temples and stupas or shrine, plus Zha Yi Zha Ga (“King of All Mountains”), a 14716’ peak sacred to local Benbo Buddhists. The Benbo or Bön is an ancient pantheistic sect with shamanistic and animistic traditions. Bön predates Buddhism in Tibet, but today’s followers combine Bön and Buddhist beliefs and practices.

The valley is a biodiversity treasure house, too. According to the park website, the valley contains 40% of all plant species existing in the whole of China. By the time we boarded the van that would take us to the valley’s mouth, the air was trending warmer and the rain had slowed to a drizzle. The van left us at Re Xi Village and proceeded to the campsite with the equipment and supplies.

Re Xi reflects the changes wrought by the area’s conversion into a park. The houses feature recent and modern two-story, stone and tile construction. One old style three story home remains as a museum piece for the tourists. Of wood construction, both the interior and exterior exhibit colorfully painted religious symbols and images.

Tigers on the exterior discourage evil spirits. Inside, the kitchen and living room are one. This main living space features Tibetan-style lacquered wood shelves and panels. The family altar, with a lotus positioned Buddha, a cropped peacock feather array and an incense burner, occupies a prominent shelf. Multiple teakettles sit atop the central wood-burning stove, ever ready to accommodate guests. Yak butter tea, anyone?…Adjoining bedrooms, workrooms and storage occupy the main floor’s remaining interior space. The top story serves as a hayloft.

Today, the villagers continue to wear traditional clothing and earn a living in the tourist industry rather than relying on hunting and subsistence farming. The few remaining farm animals find shelter in detached buildings rather than the traditional ground floor stables.

We did not follow the van up the road. Instead we proceeded over an easy rolling trail on the river valley’s right wall, first, through a temperate forest, and then past abandoned fields, orchards and crumbling concrete and wood farm cottage remains. When we began hiking the group’s mood was subdued, but the weather continued to dry and to warm, which lifted our spirits. Soon, our conversation and laughter proscribed any chances of encountering the local fauna. Even the birds kept their distance. John and Jay, two park rangers, served as our guides/interpreters.

On my own, I watch the trail for wildflowers, fruiting bushes and unusually-shaped leaves, but I’m no botanist. John and Jay’s powers of observation and knowledge of the local flora astonished me. They stopped us repeatedly to point out a plant or shrub, give us the English name and to tell us its value in herbology or cooking. Many wildflowers were in bloom including some orchid varieties. Ramon, an avid nature photographer stood beside himself with delight:

After a three or four mile hike, we reached the campsite, a piney flat beside the river and a teal-watered reservoir. To our delight, the tents were already up. The site provided clean pit toilets WITH tissue, and a ranger cabin where we could relax at tables and chairs.

Phillip, our Tibetan guide, was already in the kitchen making dinner preparations.

John explained that the Chinese have yet catch on to camping as recreation, but the national parks service hoped to promote the activity. Park management had originally intended Zharu Valley to become a campground as well as a horseback riding area.

However, the local inhabitants objected vehemently because of the valley’s religious importance, so future usage now stood unclear. Our hosts had erected our tents next to an enclosure that once housed giant pandas. For better or worse, the bamboo inside the enclosure died, so the pandas were released.

We had stopped for lunch along the trail and dinner was still a couple hours away, so when John and Jay offered us another hike, the majority accepted. This trail took us deeper into the forest toward Zha Yi Zha Ga summit. We passed a Benbo stupa and a nearby field strewn with prayer flags. In case you don’t know, Buddhist prayer flags commonly come in five color combinations, blue, white, red, green and yellow. While sometimes displayed as long banners, most flags I’ve seen are roughly 8”x12” rectangles with a prayer, and often a symbol, printed upon them. The flags are sold sewn to a cord so they can be strung up where they will flap in the wind.

Buddhists believe in something like a universal consciousness rather than a god. The wind waving the flag means the prayer is being continuously recited. The best analogy might be votive candles lit beforea Catholic church side altar honoring Saint Somebody or the Virgin Mary. Just as the candle burns until used up, so the prayer flags remain until they disintegrate.

I find the concept beautiful, but the practice far less lyrical. One sees masses of thin, faded and tatted cloth drooping toward the ground or, having already landed, lying in the mud. Yet, maneuvering through this chaotic flag array triggered a long-lost childhood memory of summer days when my mom had the sheets and clothes from our eleven-member household hung out to dry in the backyard. This vision lacked poetry, but I recalled the simple joy of walking between the waving sheets wearing nothing but cutoffs. In the moment I felt again the sheets’ cool, damp touch on my hot bare skin.

The rain restarted as we moved further along the trail. We passed the roofless walls and doorless portal of a claustrophobia-inducing stacked stone shelter. John explained that the builders/inhabitants had had an opium poppy plantation out here. A tiger carried off one of their children. They abandoned the homestead only after the same tiger carried off their second child. Everyone grew quiet and began paying closer attention to the meadow grasses and wildflowers around us…

Esther voiced the obvious questions. “How long ago did this happen?” (In the 90s.) “Are there still tigers here?”

(Maybe—butprobably not)

“I want to see a tiger.”

A drizzly mist enfolded us on the return walk and the trail was muddier and colder for it. We trudged into the ranger cabin to find the dinner tables set and Western beers and California wines set out for sharing. During a recent trip to California and Yosemite, John purchased these treats anticipating our visit and this meal. Phillip, our chef du jour, created the best meal we ate in China. Fresh vegetables rescued from the primordial cooking oil ooze, and meats spared a deep fryer plunge. Generally, our Juizhaigou hosts treated us like the VIPs.

While we were chatting over cookies and tea, Don pulled a bottle of clear liquor and several thimble-sized shot glasses from his pack. His actions raised a collective “Ahhh” from his group, which caused the rest of us to pay more attention.

I happened to be sitting on Don’s right. He set a thimble before each of us and filled them with liquor. I raised the drink to my nose and detected a faint soy sauce fragrance.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Mao Tai.”

Don raised his glass, and indicated that I should do likewise. “Ganbei!” he shouted and downed the drink. Why not? I thought and followed suit. Mao Tai comes from fermented soygum, not soy beans. Its alcohol content varies between 35% and 53%. At the state dinner during Nixon’s 1972 China visit, Prime Minister Zhou En-Lai touched a match to his glass demonstrating to the President that Mao Tai can indeed catch fire. A young Dan Rather called it “liquid razor blades.”

Despite all that, I found the taste experience surprisingly smooth (At least that was true for the brand Don shared with us). Even notorious tea totaling Esther enjoyed a second glass. Mao Tai first gained a worldwide reputation after winning a gold medal at the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair, but I’d never heard of it. If you drink hard liquor, the next time you go to a Chinese restaurant with a bar, try Mao Tai and form your own opinion.

With a great meal in our bellies and good spirits to warm us, we were set for a long evening of stories and jokes. Our hosts, however, found it impolite to clear the tables while their guests remained seated there. It was only about 9:00, but they had to clean up before going to sleep. Zhao Bei politely told us we had a long day of travel tomorrow, and we should go to bed.. We had a good laugh over this, but obeyed.

It wasn’t my best night’s sleep. The sleeping bags were cozy enough, but in the middle of the night, my air pad popped and I laid across the uneven contours beneath the tent the rest of the night.

Did I mention that I don’t like camping?

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This year, this trip departs September 14, 2011.  For inquiries, please click here: Hiking Yosemite Sister Parks in China or e-mail us at info@wildchina.com.

Image: Gerry Levandoski & Ramon Perez. See all photos on Facebook here.

The following piece is an excerpt from an article written by Alison Beard for the May 2011 edition of Harvard Business Review.

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FORCED TO SHUT DOWN: What a Chinese travel entrepreneur learned from the SARS crisis and its aftermath

The first defining moment of Zhang Mei’s career came in late 1999, when she quit her lucrative consulting job to launch a small travel company in her native China. In December, the Harvard MBA was wearing business suits to New York boardroom meetings; by July, she was in jeans, on the floor of her tiny Beijing office, untangling telephone wires.

The second—and more important—turning point came nearly four years later, when the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak hit Asia, battering a travel industry still recovering from the 9/11 terrorist attacks and all but killing Zhang’s fledgling business. Nothing in her training had taught her how to handle the crisis. But she managed to keep the company going, and today AsiaTravel is a leader in its field.

Looking back, Zhang sees that her first big move turned her into an entrepreneur. But it was the SARS experience that taught her how to be a CEO.

“I had high hopes for the business,” she recalls, “and early on I wondered: Am I a good manager? Am I a smart leader?”

After 2003, however, she was battle tested:  “These extraordinary events happen once in a decade, and I’m lucky I got mine early.”

A New Direction

Zhang grew up in Dali in China’s Yunnan province, studying English at the insistence of her father, an electrician who’d never attended high school  She went to Yunnan University and then worked as a translator, until a Thai banker she had met at a business event encouraged her to apply to Harvard’s MBA program – and promised to pay her tuition if she would join his company after graduation.  Once enrolled, she set her sights on a corporate career – “doing the job while other people took care of the details” – and was thrilled to land at McKinsey, a position that required extensive travel and allowed her to repay the banker rather than work for him.

But consulting left her unfulfilled.  She wanted more freedom and even more travel.  She also wanted to do something good for China.  McKinsey gave her a pro bono assignment:  strategizing on economic development and conservation in Yunnan province on behalf of the Nature Conservancy, a U.S.-based NGO.  Zhang liked nonprofit work but didn’t want to make a career of it.  Instead, she came up with a business idea: Launch a travel company to offer sustainable, socially responsible tours of Chinese destinations and communities.

She did a test run, guiding two Nature Conservancy executives and two Washington Post journalists into Tibet – impressing one of them so much that he soon married her.  And then Zhang made her move, relocating to Shanghai and taking a job at travel website Ctrip to learn the industry while honing her business plan.  A few months later, armed with her own savings and small investments from friends and family, she joined her new husband in Beijing and launched AsiaTravel.

“I had no idea what I was doing, and I never perceived myself as a salesperson, but I became really good at selling my idea – to investors, staff, clients,” she says.  “I didn’t even mind all the mundane details of entrepreneurship at the beginning – moving the table and buying the trash can. I just had a conviction.”

With a small, young, enthusiastic staff, a growing list of mainly American clients, and tours focused on everything from city hopping to bird-watching, the company turned a profit in its first year.  Then came the travel standstill following 9/11.  “She was definitely thinking the business might be finished:  good idea, bad timing,” recalls Zhang’s husband, John Pomfret.  But the slowdown ultimately served as an impetus to improve her strategy.  “Our business had been focused on U.S. travelers, and that was the first time we started thinking about selling in other markets as well,” says Guido Meyerhans, a McKinsey colleague who had invested in AsiaTravel.  By early 2002, bookings were back on track.  Still, the experience didn’t fully prepare Zhang for the next, more painful crisis.

Second Shock

The first reports of a deadly SARS outbreak in China’s Guangdong province, about 1,400 miles south of Beijing, emerged in February 2003. In March, the World Health Organization issued a global alert, and foreign countries started to release travel warnings for China. But in part because Chinese officials were claiming to have the situation under control, Zhang and her employees carried on as usual.  “It was peak season, clients were still coming, and the news was all about how limited the SARS cases were,” she recalls.  “So we didn’t make any contingency plans.”

By April, however, cancellations were pouring in, and, late that month, Beijing was declared a danger zone. Zhang thought she could finish up the tours in progress and then redirect her staff to planning and training until bookings resumed. “Then one day,” she recalls, “the contractors renovating our office said, ‘We can’t come in.’” They didn’t want to risk infection by riding the bus. “That’s when it dawned on me: This is serious.”

Belatedly, Zhang and her COO, Jim Stent, started to consider the threat to their own employees, to cancel all trips already under way, and to develop models of what a pandemic might do to their balance sheet. Staff salaries were low by Western standards but could still have eaten up the company’s reserves within six months in the absence of new revenue. Zhang wanted to buy herself at least a year, so she opted for drastic measures: AsiaTravel would cease operations immediately. Both she and the COO would suspend their incomes indefinitely. The dozen or so other employees were asked to forgo 75% of their income until the fall, essentially taking vacation at 25% pay. Once the company reopened, if it did, everyone would be fully reimbursed. They all agreed.

Jia Liming, Zhang’s first hire at AsiaTravel, remembers ending the long- planned bird-watching trip she’d been guiding a week early and then attending an employee farewell party—held at a Beijing park since the SARS threat was considered to be less severe outside. “We thought it was over,” she says.

For her part, Zhang remained calm. But “it was hard to stomach,” she says. “The city was in lockdown, and it seemed like the whole world was coming to an end. Still, I’d been through 9/11, so I was confident we could come back.”

Indeed, by midsummer, following more than 8,000 cases of infection and nearly 800 deaths, SARS seemed to have been contained, and bookings began to pick up again. Zhang and Stent decided to reopen much earlier than they’d expected, on August 1, and called back all the staff.

But it wasn’t as easy as that. Zhang’s top performer in terms of sales and customer service—a young woman she’d hired in 2001 and come to view as a protégé—refused. “She said she wanted more time to hike around another moun- tain,” Zhang says. “I said no. I’d promised a client a proposal by August 5. Two weeks later, she didn’t show. Eventually she came back, all smiles, and I had to tell her I’d given her position away.”

The woman soon launched a regional competitor to AsiaTravel, and over the next few months several other employees left because they missed traveling independently. “It was disappointing because she’d paid these people well and given them opportunities,” Pomfret says.

The next few months at AsiaTravel were nose to the grindstone—reaching out to new clients in the corporate and education sectors; selling, planning, and executing trips; recruiting and training new employees; and replenishing the reserves to pay employees’ back salaries and fund growth. “We had to hustle,” Zhang says. But it paid off. “2004 was one of the best years we’ve had, in terms of profits and new projects.”

Seasoned Traveler

Today, “a little bit older, a little bit wiser”—and having stepped down as CEO in late 2004 to follow Pomfret to the United States, where he had a new job—Zhang points to a few ways in which the SARS crisis helped her become a better leader.

First, it taught her the importance of scenario planning and proactive communication with staff and customers in crisis situations. “I was responsive to client questions during SARS,” she says, “but I didn’t take action until May, by which point I was a little bit cornered.” Since then, AsiaTravel has established crisis response guidelines. “Number one is to make a judgment call as early as possible,” says Zhang, who remains chairwoman and part owner and oversees market- ing from her suburban Maryland office.

When riots broke out in Tibet during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, for example, the company issued a press release and sent instructions to staff and guides the next day.  Meyerhans notes that employees are also in closer contact with provincial government officials to ensure access to the most accurate information. “Once you start preempting clients’ questions, they feel you’re in control,” Zhang explains.

The employee fallout from SARS was also educational. When people Zhang had trusted left her, she realized she needed to think harder about whom she was recruiting and why. In the first years of AsiaTravel, she explains, “I was looking for the passionate, free-spirited traveler I should have been looking for the customer service, travel industry professional—someone who really gets satisfaction out of serving other people.” She was also giving promotions and pay raises too quickly, on an ad hoc basis, without establishing benchmarks for advancement, including long-term commitment to the company.

After SARS, Zhang built a different kind of team, including more-seasoned managers who could handle day-to-day operations when she left in 2004. “One of her biggest achievements,” Meyerhans says, “was making that transition so smoothly, based on the trust she had in the employees she’d hired.”

More broadly, he thinks the two early hits of 9/11 and SARS forced Zhang to be a more creative, confident executive, diversifying and expanding the company each time. “We had high-net-worth individuals and small groups, but that’s a difficult business to control and grow, so we started to build up the corporate and the educational business,” in addition to targeting different geographic regions, he explains. And Zhang has insisted in the years since that AsiaTravel stick to that forward-thinking strategy.  During the recent financial crisis, for example, even as competitors retrenched, “I doubled down,” she says. “I plowed more than 50% of our profits into marketing and IT. I knew that China’s rise, and its tourism and our business, would outlast the recession.”

One last benefit of enduring the SARS period, with no income, was that it reinforced Zhang’s passion for her venture. “You go through self-doubt moments,” she recalls. “When the profits aren’t great, you say, ‘Wow, how did I labor another year with no payback?’ But I’m in this be- cause I enjoy it. As long as I have a comfort level that reaches the minimum threshold, I can seek satisfaction.

The following is an excerpt from Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of AsiaTravel’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

The Nyi Chu river provided a valley ‘trail’ by which salt caravans, single yak, and nomads accessed the salt sources of Qinghai

Honkor – Mado

Some would call these wastelands, vast spaces of emptiness that can host only the most rugged life forms…from my heavy eyes; I see that this is as a place of great and silent power that cannot be bent by human hands. These bleak and stunning landscapes measure risk and beauty differently and the ‘reward’ for mistakes or failure here is harsh and often fatal.

Vast and empty – valleys at 4,000 metres near Mado

We are heading west to Mado and the famed salt lake awaits us (we think). Mado County rests at 4,300 metres and it is known for being one of the coldest counties of all of the Tibetan regions. It is called Marduk to the Tibetans meaning, “high place” and it is that, though the ‘town’ itself was more of a nomadic seasonal dwelling place wedged into a long lake shaped valley.

The following is an excerpt from Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of AsiaTravel’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

Amye Maqen (Amne Machin, Anye Machin) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amne_Machin>, the stout, the muscular, and for much of time, the utterly hidden from the outside world…our first glimpse of it is of a snow capped wonder that appears far closer than it is. There seem to be as many ways of spelling it as their are potential descriptives. Neither wind blown sand nor a haze can obscure its brilliant bulk. It seems to hang from the sky as we come in from the northwest towards the makeshift town at its base, Xiadawu (or in the more flavoured local Tibetan ‘Da’wurr’ – ‘Place that is difficult for horses’). In Joseph Rock’s accounts of the mountain and bandit ridden regions back in 1930 he estimated the broad peaks of Amne Machin to be 30,000 feet, a guess that was later proven to be 3,000 metres off.

Amne Machin from the northwest

The Amne Machin range itself is an eastern extension of the greater Kunlun Mountain range, one of Asia’s longest most legend laden mountain chains. Located in the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture it is here that the Yellow River (so named because of wind-blown loess that is carried in from Central Asia) rises before winding eastward. At its rounded and almost friendly white peaks it achieves just over 6,200 metres.

Mountains cannot be compared to other of their kind in my eyes. Mountains are landscapes, heaps of stone and snow unto themselves and each has their own thin-aired identity. Sacred to the Golog (Golok) nomads, Amne Machin is almost directly due east of our pristine salt lake near Mado (Mardo) that we’ve most recently left. It also lies on the route that nomads from southwest took to access their precious salt. Few nomadic caravans would pass up the chance to visit and circumambulate the sacred Amne Machin range while undertaking a perilous journey to source salt. Ever practical, the Tibetan traders saw the value of doing both trade for a revered commodity and a little cleansing of past ills.

This mountain that has long played a role in local nomad’s worship of the divine, has withstood weathering seasons and has become more iconic in the eyes of men over time. The fact that it lies as a northwest-southeast diagonal throughway for traders only increases the curiosity for Michael and I. How much is left in memory and physicality of the salt route legacy? How much of any trade route – seldom acknowledged, documented or discussed – will survive? It is in this way that these journeys and explorations are truly ‘exploratory’ with nothing being guaranteed.

The town of Xiadawu, sits in a small cupped valley and is a dusty mess of pool tables, remarkably shabby huts and a main square of errant apathetic dogs that have forgotten their roles. Xiadawu’s decrepit appearance serves as an entry to something far greater than itself, Amne Machin, which erupts to the east. Flowing west out of the mountains past the town, the swerving breadth of the Nam Chu (Nam River) wanders through, over and around valleys in a never-ending search.

Namchu (Nam River)

Our host, Tsering, is to be found out of town – it is he who will arrange our kora/ circumambulation around the great mountain. The ‘kora’ or counterclockwise circumambulation literally refers to a pilgrimage. For many eastern religions this act is believed to be a physical way to cleanse or clear away one’s past sins.

If in fact this is the case it may well take a few more than one rotation for Michael and I to wipe our collective slates clean.

Around us the landscape ripples with Spring’s pending arrival – ridges verging on going from ochre to green. Still though, the high peaks remind in a glance that up here at over 4,000 metres winter isn’t really ever truly ‘over’.

Our host Tsering tells us that, yes, the salt traders came through here as part of their annual travels – more specifically nomadic traders, who, coming from further east, would add the kora of the mountain to their travels to the salt lakes. A kind of double-pronged travel plan: salt for need and profit, kora for life-cleansing benefits.

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The following is an excerpt from an article in The Wall Street Journal by Mitch Moxley, a Canadian journalist with national and international reporting experience. He’s written on politics, travel, business and other topics from China, Mongolia, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. He is currently based in Beijing, China.

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The ride from Chengdu to Danba Valley is one to be endured, not enjoyed. The journey is by a smoke-filled bus with tiny seats that barrels deep into the mountains of western Sichuan province, shaking and rattling on a single-lane road that is often strewn with fallen rocks. A hair-raising view out the window is of the Dadu River below.

This is the route to one of China’s most enduring architectural mysteries. Ten hours and 400 kilometers into the journey, the valley opens to reveal green mountains topped with snowy peaks. On a ridge above stand a half-dozen rock towers, like ancient smokestacks.

Across the remote, earthquake-prone regions of western Sichuan and Tibet, there are hundreds of these structures. They are built of cut stone, brick and timber, date back as far as 1,700 years and stand up to 50 meters tall. No one is sure of their purpose, though theories abound: They were watchtowers, way stations, status symbols. Some say they have religious meaning.

Striving to save the towers from the forces of neglect, earthquake and a planned hydropower dam are a small number of preservationists, including Frédérique Darragon, a 61-year-old global adventurer—sailor, dancer, trekker, polo player— turned amateur archaeologist by her love for these mysterious structures.

The daughter of a wealthy Parisian inventor and machine maker who died when she was 4 years old, Ms. Darragon spent childhood summers riding horses in England and winter breaks skiing in the Alps. She worked on a kibbutz in Israel and in 1971 sailed across the Atlantic in the first race from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro. She returned to Paris, graduated from university there and then did some work as a model—”Not high fashion,” she says, “just for extra money”—played polo in Paris and Buenos Aires and became a lauded samba dancer in Rio.

During the early ’90s, Ms. Darragon spent several months a year traveling alone through China, often by foot in areas that are still rarely visited by Westerners. It once came close to killing her: In 1993, while searching for endangered snow leopards in Tibet, she suffered a stroke when a fire she built in a cave consumed too much of its oxygen supply. She lay for three days before being rescued by Tibetan shepherds.

Three years later, Ms. Darragon saw her first towers, while traveling near Danba. A year after that she saw similar towers in Tibet—800 kilometers away—and was hooked. “When I learned that neither Westerners nor Chinese had researched them and that practically nothing was known about them, I could not resist trying to crack their mystery,” Ms. Darragon says of her long affair with the ancient towers.

The Danba Valley, home to ethnic Tibetan and Qiang villages, is one of the best—and most accessible—places to explore the towers. Five kilometers from Danba city (danba means “town of rocks”) a series of sprawling villages collectively called Suopo has about 80, some in ruins but many still standing, and some of them more than 30 meters high.

Until recently, nobody knew the towers’ age with any real degree of certainty. There are references in texts from the Han Dynasty, which lasted for about 400 years starting in 206 B.C., but the peoples who historically populated the tribal corridor of Sichuan and Tibet lacked a written language, so there was no documentary evidence of the towers’ origin. Chinese archeologists had taken scant interest in the riddle.

James Wasserman for The Wall Street JournalChiles hang outside a window in Danba County.

It was a linguist who wrote one of the first papers on the subject, in 1989. Sun Hongkai, now retired from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had first seen the towers during a 1956 visit to Sichuan to investigate the Qiang language. “People in the area did not pay attention to the towers,” Mr. Sun says. “Many were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. People used the stones for building materials.”

In the 15 years since Ms. Darragon was drawn to the mystery, she has devoted much of her life to cataloging, dating and fighting to preserve hundreds of the enigmatic stone skyscrapers.

In 2001, with funding from U.S. media mogul Ted Turner, a fellow sailing enthusiast she’s known for decades, she created the nonprofit Unicorn Foundation, dedicated to education and humanitarian projects.

“I’m very proud of Frederique and the work she’s done in China,” Mr. Turner says. “Her amazing discoveries are astounding, and her commitment and dedication to the preservation of some of China’s great artifacts and structures will always be admired and respected.”

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To read the full article, click here. To inquire about journeys to see these towers in Sichuan, please e-mail info@wildchina.com.

The following is an excerpt from Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of AsiaTravel’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

A disk of compressed Pu-erh tea for sale at a tea market in Yunnan

It’s not often that one encounters a tourist souvenir that lowers cholesterol, promotes weight loss and protects against cancer, vascular disease, cognitive degeneration and aging – not to mention providing important nutrients like amino acids.

But tea is believed to have these virtues and recent research shows that certain types of Pu-erh tea from China’s Yunnan province have particularly potent levels of beneficial chemical compounds.

AsiaTravel visits Pu-erh production areas in Yunnan on its trip ‘The Ancient Tea & Horse Caravan Road: An Expedition with Jeff Fuchs.’ Learning about the fascinating history of the ancient trade routes along which Pu-erh tea once traveled by horseback to Tibet is a highlight of many clients’ trips.

Another highlight is trekking in Yunnan through tea agro-forests and wild tea gardens where members of exotic ethnic minorities like the Bulang, Lahu and Akha have tended organic tea gardens for generations in the general area from which tea is believed to have first emerged.

In fact, it is believed to be these small-scale, natural growing practices which impart the best Pu-erh tea with heightened health benefits. Most tea in the world these days is produced in sprawling plantations, planted in neat rows in direct sunlight and often treated with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural chemicals.

Not so with the finest Yunnan Pu-erh tea. To start with, it is not all produced from a genetically uniform crop. As we learned recently from the excellent book Tea Horse Road, Pu-erh is produced from a dozen wild cousins and hundreds of landraces of the Camellia sinensis plant – each particularly adapted to the climate of the particular hillside, or even grove, where it has traditionally been grown.

And instead of being grown in a tea monoculture, these trees (many reach an age of a few hundred years and a height of 50 or more feet) grow shaded from harsh sunlight in a natural ecosystem with hundreds of other plant, animal and insect species.

Thriving in their natural environment, agro-forest and tea garden trees produce higher levels of the beneficial compounds that first drew humans to start drinking tea, likely as a medical elixir, some three thousand or more years ago.

A study published last year in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology¹ compared Pu-erh from both terrace plantations and ecologically friendly agro-forests, measuring levels of tea catechins, flavonoid compounds that are thought to be beneficial to human health and are present to varying degrees in most non-herbal tea. The authors found that tea from the agro-forests had average catechin levels several times higher than the plantation tea.

So if you find yourself in southern Yunnan, relaxing after a day of trekking through ancient tea gardens and sipping on a cup of Pu-erh, you can feel good about the fact that a hike isn’t the only good thing you’re doing for your health that day. And don’t forget that a compressed cake packs great for the trip home.

1: See: Ahmed, et al “Pu-erh tea tasting in Yunnan, China: Correlation of drinkers’ perceptions to phytochemistry”, Journal of Ethnopharmacology 132 (2010) 176–185

The following is an introduction to Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of AsiaTravel’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an announcement about their journey…

The Route of White Gold

When: May, 2011

Who: Jeff Fuchs, Michael Kleinwort

Where: Southern Qinghai (Amdo)

One of the ancient world’s great and unheralded trade routes was the eastern Himalayas’ Tsalam, or Salt Road. Known to many Tibetans as “The route of white gold”, much of its desiccated remains rest at close to 4 km in the sky upon the eastern Himalayan Plateau.

Traversing some of the planet’s most remote and daunting terrain, the Tsalam passed through the snowy homeland of the fierce Golok nomads, notorious wolf packs and beneath the sacred Amye Maqen mountain range of southern Qinghai province (Amdo). Largely forgotten it remains culturally, historically and geographically one of the least documented portions on earth. The memories of a few traders carry on its almost fabled tale.

The route itself has never before been acknowledged (nor travelled) by westerners, and much like the Tea Horse Road, the last remaining traders who traveled its length are passing away and with them too, the memories of what for many was the only access path into the daunting nomadic lands.

Leading the expedition and transcribing the tale of Tsalam will be myself, with English entrepreneur and endurance athlete Michael Kleinwort joining me. Along with local nomadic guides and the odd mule, our “0 carbon footprint team” will attempt to travel the most isolated and unknown portion of the route – a remote nomadic portion from Honkor to the Maqu area.

The expedition in May of 2011 will be done entirely by foot and will access many of the last nomadic traders to document their precious recollections of travel along the Tsalam. The expedition is another of the ancient Himalayan trade routes I hope to re-expose to some light. Articles in select publications will appear upon completion of the journey.

Jeff Fuchs

Lubden & Michael Kleinwort

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Sometimes when on the road, the past and present can collide in the most unexpected of places. We were reminded of this recently when on the road in the lush upper reaches of the Salween River in Yunnan, where the river is known as the Nu River.

It was a Sunday morning and we’d been enjoying the Tibetan-style Buddhist architecture in hills near the remote town of Bingzhongluo. The fresh, invigorating air filled our lungs as we headed down into the valley, where we came upon a rebuilt Catholic church that had originally been constructed more than a century ago.

It was half past ten and mass was going to start at eleven. A small crowd of worshippers from the Lisu ethnic group was waiting to enter the building. We walked around to one side of the church where we came upon a small graveyard with only one headstone.

Upon closer inspection, we made out the name of the deceased: “Annet Genestier”. The name rang a bell instantly, as just one night earlier we had  re-read some of famed botanist/explorer Joseph Rock’s impressions of traveling through the Nu Valley, which were published in an article in National Geographic from August, 1926 entitled “Through The Great River Trenches of Asia”.

In the article, Rock described the animosity between local Tibetan lamas and a French church and mission, led by a stubborn priest surnamed Genestier.

Relating what back then was recent history of the mission, Rock wrote:

“Twice it has been burned by the Tibetan lamas of Champutong, and twice intrepid Father Genestier, who still lives in the Salwin Valley… had to flee for his life and find shelter among the Lissu further south.”

In 1937, Pêre Genestier died and was buried in this remote spot far from his native France. Standing deep in the mist-filled Nu Valley, we scanned our surroundings. It was hard not to feel that Genestier had stood in the same place nearly a century ago and seen almost the exact same scene that laid before us.

Whenever we travel, we do our best to read, or re-read, books or other materials about the places we plan on visiting. This not only gets us even more excited about our upcoming destinations, but small, almost negligible information such as the last name of a priest can suddenly make a connection that spans decades or even centuries.

These kinds of connections are at the heart of the importance of travel to our understanding of who we are and where we’ve come from.

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For more information about this remote and still unknown region, also check out the film Deep in the Clouds by Liu Jie, winner of the Sydney Chinese Film Festival for Best Director. Also, travel to this destination on our AsiaTravel journey From the Salween to the Mekong: Hiking the 19th Century French Explorers’ Route.