day 211: 武威 (wuwei) = 0km

I am still here, and now that my notebook is up and running again, I’ve prepared some DVDs with pictures I want to send home for storage. But… this whole postal thing is apparently not as simple as I had figured it would be. Not over here in the wild wild west it ain’t!

Forget it, there are other things on my mind.

…

I’ve been wanting to show you these pictures from Sichuan ever since, but up until now I’ve had no way to grab them from the server:

February 2007 - that’s when my friend Dario and me somehow joined a Chinese tour group for a trip to 九寨沟 (jiuzhaigou), in the north of Sichuan:

Now good old Dario doesn’t enjoy making exaggerative statements as much as I do, but I remember him looking at all that crystal-clear mountain water, saying that this was …among the most beautiful places he had ever seen:

…please forgive my photography:

It hardly does this marvelous place any justice at all.

…

I don’t recall exactly where we went after 九寨沟, but there were several places we visited with the tour group, all of them located in what is now called the disaster area:

This particular town I remember was an old 羌族 (Qiang-minority) settlement:

So many interesting old buildings, all of them made of stone:

Tourists were even invited to look around in the traditional 羌族-residencies:

And I somehow remember thinking: those 羌族-people are so good-looking!

Yes, they are:

…

Another place we went to was 都江堰 (dujiangyan), the world’s oldest irrigation system of some sort:

This is said to be one of the places that have suffered the most severe blows during the quake.

…

- look, this is not exactly what I had in mind when I said I wanted to show you pictures from Sichuan -

I realized it’s not about nature or buildings or the cultural relics - it’s not even that much about all the grown-up people.

Instead, it’s really about the little ones:

the little girls:

the little boys:

the chopsticks that sometimes seem too large:

the parents who always pretend to be in a hurry:

the confidence that culture is and always will be just boring:

and the distinct and profound feeling one gets when one is little and riding on a parent’s back:

…the feeling of absolute security.

And protection from harm.

Soundtrack: Lynn Strait - “Sad Air”

—total: 2613,3km