Author: karl

I have stood on a lot of lake shores in my life, but the first time I looked down on Heavenly Lake Xinjiang from the switchback road above Urumqi, I…

I almost didn’t set my alarm. After two days bouncing along the desert highways of northern Xinjiang, China, the last thing I wanted was a 6 a.m. wake-up call. But…

I still remember the moment Hongyadong first hit me. I had shuffled out of the Chongqing metro at around 8 p.m., squinting through the river mist, when the whole hillside…

I’ll be honest: I almost skipped the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum on my first trip to Nanjing. Purple Mountain sounded like a hike, the guidebooks called it “a must-see,” and I’d…

I almost missed Xitang. It was my second trip to China, and I had Wuzhen and Zhujiajiao already pinned on a map like trophies. Then a cab driver in Jiaxing,…

The first time I heard about Qiandao Lake, I assumed it was another one of those poetic Chinese place names that sounds better than the reality. It is not. This…

The first time I saw Erhai Lake, I was still half-asleep on a sleeper bus from Kunming, and the 6 a.m. light was doing something unfair to the water. It…

The first time I saw Mount Siguniang, I was slumped against a bus window, four hours out of Chengdu and half-convinced the driver had taken a wrong turn into a…

I arrived at Lugu Lake at 2 a.m. after a four-hour bus from Lijiang, stumbled out into air so cold and thin it slapped the sleep off my face, and…

The first time I stood under the Xi’an Bell Tower at dusk, I made a classic rookie mistake: I thought it was just a pretty building to photograph and move…