At Youning Si monastery outside Xining, small temples are perched precariously on the face of a mountain. They seem almost to cling to the rock, as if afraid they could at any moment slip and slide down to the road below. As you ascend from one temple to the next, you leave behind the fresh [...]
This is the fifth and final post of a weeklong series recapping my August trip to the western Chinese provinces of Gansu and Qinghai. See the first, second, third and fourth posts in the series.
When I think back on the two weeks we spent in Gansu and Qinghai, the food and the funny-frustrating stories are [...]
This is the fourth post of a weeklong series recapping my August trip to the western Chinese provinces of Gansu and Qinghai. See the first, second and third posts in the series.
Maybe all these posts about western China have got you thinking about a trip to the region. But how much will it cost?
Well, the [...]
This is the second post of a weeklong series recapping my August trip to the western Chinese provinces of Gansu and Qinghai. See the first post in the series here.
Our taxi clung to the gravel road as it ascended from switchback to switchback with uncomfortable speed. It felt as if we were climbing into the [...]
This is the first post of a weeklong series recapping my August trip to the western Chinese provinces of Gansu and Qinghai.
Only a month after getting back to Changsha, I have finally finished updating the site to include everything from my August trip to western China. In celebration, a week (!) of posts recapping the [...]
All over western China, you can find stalls selling 肉夹饼, pronounced roujiabing. At it’s most basic, a roujiabing is a seasoned chopped meat filling, stuffed inside a round pocket of bread. But not all roujiabing are created equal — and I’m not talking about quality. As we traveled around Gansu and Qinghai, every bite into [...]
When this appears, I’ll be about halfway through a 24-hour train ride from Changsha to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province. Originally, my plan was to continue from Gansu into Xinjiang and eventually to Kashgar. But after the riots, we scrapped our plan to visit Xinjiang. Instead, we’ll visit a few sites along the Silk [...]
