After arriving to China and settling down a bit, I gave Mao Xinyu a phone call. Mao Xinyu and his wife Xu Ting are two Chinese friends from Hangzhou who I had met two years ago while travelling in China, and since then we had kept in touch through the Internet. “I am planning a two-week trip to Sichuan and Yunnan with some friends”, he said, “would you like to join us?” and naturally I did.

The plan was to start the trip from Chengdu (capital of Sichuan province), where we would rent a vehicle along with a driver (if you are surprised about the driver bit, you should re-read this post). We’d then work our way through some places in the mountain areas of Sichuan, visit a few places in Yunnan province and finally end our trip at Kunming (capital of Yunnan province) where they’d head off home.

The first bit went more or less as planned, but after getting to Yunnan we had gradually split up. As it had turned out, I did not go all the way to Kunming but am currently mid-way back towards Chengdu; Nonetheless the trip was quite fun.

These were my brave companions during this mini-trip:

From left to right: Ben Ben Niu, Xu Ting, Xing Hai Wan, Mao Xinyu.

All the Sichuan bit of the trip was in relatively high altitude (all of it higher than 3000m), with the “core” of the trip being Yading, a mountain nature reserve, ranging over 4500m. My experiences during the trip deserve several separate posts, so in this post I’ll mostly stick to posting a few pictures to try and give you the “feel” of the places I’ve been to:

Plus a panoramic sweep I did of one of these places, because only a 360-degree picture can do it justice:

And finally, to keep this post from being boring, an anecdote:
As you may have noted we had been six people (five of us plus the driver), comprised of four boys and two girls. Since much of the time we had stayed in lodges offering twin-bed rooms, the best arrangement was putting the two girls together in one room and split the four boys between two more rooms. Mao Xinyu and Xu Ting, a married couple, did not seem to mind this arrangement. After a while, at Yading park, we had slept (along with a few other travellers) in a ramshack cabin up in the mountains: On each side of the cabin was a long bed on which five travellers could lay side by side in sleeping bags. Next to me lay Mao Xinyu and Xuting, who had conveniently interlocked the zippers of their two identical sleeping bags into one big queen-sized sleeping bag. This was the first time in more than a week that they had slept in the same room and, as it seems, they had missed each other’s company very very much. They were relatively quiet; The bed, however, being basically one long and thin plank of wood, was an excellent conductor of vibrations. I did not get much sleep that night.