Monthly Recap: April 2017

Here's what I got up to this month!


Places I went 

Beijing, China

Huangshan, Anhui, China

Lhasa, Shigatse, Everest Base Camp, Tibet, China

Urumqi and Turpan, Xinjiang, China

Best on the Blog

Guilin & Yangshuo - this was the last the last blog post in my series from my travels during Spring Festival.

Best on Instagram

Huangshan

Books I Read

Xinjiang: China's Central Asia by Jeremy Tredinnick - This is a guide book to Xinjiang Province, which has a pretty good introduction and general travel information about the area and good advice on specific cities and attractions. I read everything before the trip and we took it along while we were traveling, which was really helpful!

China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford - This is a really well-written book, first of all. It's a travelogue by a British journalist who had been living in Beijing for six years and took a final trip across China - from Shanghai to Kazakhstan - via hitchhiking and public transportation. Mixed in with stories from his travels are thoughts about China's development and issues in China. It's such a great read, even if you don't know much about China - maybe especially if you don't know much about China.

China on the Wild Side: Explorations in the China-Tibet Borderlands (Volume 1: Yunnan and Sichuan) by Joseph F. Rock - This book is a compilation of articles from National Geographic, which were published in the 1920s about Rock's explorations in China. He was a botanist/explorer and has some incredible stories and pictures (even some in color!). I'm now reading the second volume, so I will report on that in my next monthly recap.

Forgotten Kingdom by Peter Goullart - This book is the author's memoirs of his time living in Lijiang, Yunnan Province for nine years (from 1940 to 1949). He has a lot of interesting stories, tells about his work developing cooperatives among the Nakhi, the local ethnic minority group, and sort of an ethnographic survey of the other nationalities in the area.

Inspiration

Kyle Obermann - Kyle Obermann is an American photographer and conservationist based in Beijing, but does a lot of work in Sichuan and the Tibet borderlands (an area which I am really interested in). He has a really great instagram account if you just want to see nice pictures of mountains and pandas, but his website is also worth a look if you're interested in conservation.

Joseph Rock - the author of the book I mentioned above, is a super interesting guy. He came to China to document plant life, but has some really interesting cultural encounters. He was mentioned in Forgotten Kingdom, and was also mentioned in person by a botanist I was talking to recently. His work seems to pop up everywhere (at least in my world). I can't wait to read more.

Beyond Borders - A Film Celebrating Global Diversity - This was a kickstarter campaign that has finished and was successfully funded. It's going to be a documentary that comes out next February. Two guys (both YouTubers) are going to circumnavigate the world over the period of a few months in a plane, which one of them will fly. It's going to be a crazy adventure for them and the film is going to focus on a united sense of humanity and not letting cultural differences create boundaries (or borders). It sounds a bit kumbaya-y, but I'm really excited to see it. It's also made me think about planning some of my own big trips, which I hope to take in the next few years.

Challenges

I was sick for the whole second half of the month, which overlapped with my time in Tibet. I also had altitude sickness for the first 5 days I was in Tibet, which compounded the cold I had. It put a haze of headaches and runny nose over my trip, which was really difficult to not let ruin my trip.

I'm also struggling with my classes here. I find them so dull and unengaging. I dread going to class and it's a struggle to focus in class. I only have five or six weeks left of class this year, but it feels like an eternity. In the mean time I'm filling my weekends and holidays and planning lots of trips.

Highlights

TIBET - I have been wanting to go to Tibet for years. I had been trying to plan this trip since last summer. Obviously, being in China already makes going to Tibet a lot easier, though it's still logistically complicated and expensive. I have also been doing a lot of reading and research about the area, so it was incredible to see everything with my own eyes.

Also Huangshan was an unexpected highlight of the month. I went with a couple of friends and we had the most pleasant weekend. We had amazing weather and the crowds weren't too bad. It was such a pleasant surprise.