TRAVEL | tibet in china

My trip to Jiuzhaigou valley took me through the Ngawa (Aba) Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northwestern Sichuan, China. I've never been so far north in China before and it was interesting to observe a culture so different from my own. 

One of the funnier incidents involved my tour leader, who happens to be from Aba herself, completely shocked by the fact that I am 25 and unwed. In her village it is still common for women to marry around the age of 18 and have children by the time she turns 20. So the fact that I'm still childless in my mid-twenties was unheard of. She told me—jokingly I hope—that I should "hurry it up, before it's too late". 

Noted, Ah Mu!

TRAVEL | huang long 黃龍

Finally back and recharged from a pretty brutal three days on the road to the Aba district in Sichuan to visit Huang Long and JiuZhaiGou National park. The bus ride was about 7 hours—we started driving at 5:30am, but including the stops organised by the local tour company, we didn't reach our destination until 2:30 in the afternoon.

I was very impressed by how efficiently everything ran at Huang Long. Due to Huang Long/JiuZhaiGou being one of the more popular tourist destinations in China I was expecting long lines with even longer waiting times. But no, when we alighted from the bus we were immediately directed to cable cars that took us halfway up the mountain within a half hour.

When up there, we followed a single path that took us all around the park and then all the way back down again to the buses. I can't imagine how long it took to build that walkway. Finally, I would recommend taking 4-4.5 hours to hike around the area, with plenty of time to stop for photos and a snack in-between.

TRAVEL | green food

It's insane how much vegetables Cheung Du-ers eat in a day. This has been great for me the past couple days because I haven't had time recently to incorporate a wider range of greens into my diet.

On my first day Becky took me to her cousin's plot of land in a village west of Cheng Du—will have to find out the actual name of the place soon, I keep forgetting—to pick fresh vegetables from his garden. We came home with, I kid you not, 15+ bags of produce! From eggplants and zucchini, to a few chinese veggies I've never even seen. Half of the vegetables went home with Becky's parents and we kept the other half. Today is my fourth afternoon here and we've only managed to polish off about half of what we picked.

If anyone's planning on visiting sichuan in the future, I would say: skip the hotpot and go straight for the green stuff.

HONG KONG | random

Completely forgot about this set of photos from a few months back. This was taken on the same day I went shooting with Li Hui around Central/Kennedy Town. 

PERSONAL | 25

I turned 25 today.
Special thanks to all my friends who made it wonderful!

TRAVEL | go green

These photos were taken on my trip to Thailand back in March. The hotel that we stayed in was so beautiful, I didn't want to leave.