When we last left off, our intrepid adventurers found themselves in Lijiang, Yunnan, where to their dismay, a 800 year old Unesco world heritage site was replaced by a monstrosity of modern-day tourism. Only in China would you have a squatty-potty equipped with LCD screens to entertain you as you go about your business.

Determined to boldly go where no KFC had gone before, our travelers headed for Tiger Leaping Gorge. A terrain so perilous said to be infested with (leaping) tigers. Twice as deep as the grand canyon, with icy waters originating from the Tibetan plateau, ranked the #4th on the world’s best white water rivers.

Booyah!

Our heroes arrive at a Tibetan guesthouse. The walls are lined with intricate carvings of ill-fated travelers:

LEAPING FOR THE BEST BED!!!! (and the mysterious Richard makes his appearance!)

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It’s Yunnan (photoblog) redux time!!!!

Perhaps one of the nicest things about being a photographer is that once a trip is over, it’s really only just begun. Then comes the massive download (nearly 20GB worth in my case) of images, the processing and tweeking, and generally reliving the experience over and over again.

So part one of my trip. We begin with the train.

Now for a few hundred kuai more, I could have spared myself a 45 hour train ride from Beijing (in the north) aaaaaall the way to Kunming, Yunnan (in the south). But there’s really something rather magical about trains and watching the scenery go by your window. Concrete jungles soon melted into picturesque countryside from the comfort of my berth

I should probably not mention that our trip began with us actually MISSING our original train. By a measly 5 minutes. Seriously. We were schedules for the fast train which would have been around 36 hours, so we lost about an additional half a day in transit. But maybe that was a good thing. Because we wound up getting a soft sleeper… which was really, really cushy.

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