The Angry Pangolin

The Invasive Shutterbug

The bus got in at 4am. 4am is not a great time of day to pull into a small town. “You can just sleep on the bus until morning,” the ticket lady had told me. This turns out to be a theory, not a fact. In a cruel mockery of technology, the windows on the [...]

The Dead River Dolphin

Most people seem to operate under the assumption that the Three Gorges was a better place to visit before the dam was built. Turns out they’re absolutely right. But I have a sort of sick curiosity. I wanted to see the destruction, the watery grave hiding a hundred towns and countless roads, KFCs, and dead [...]

The Kitten Village

I won’t stop moping about the midgets, so to cheer me up Yuyan finds some other little town outside of Wuhan we can go visit for a day. We rent a car and driver to pick us up at 8am one morning. One of Yuyans friends, a local photographer, had told us about a picturesque [...]

The Educated Bookworm

We step into the streets of Shiqu, and at first glance, it’s about as unremarkable as small towns come. Wide, dirty streets overrun by stray dogs the size of motorcycles. Streets lined with dingy noodle stalls and fabric stores. Monks work on their motorcycles with grease covered hands outside of autobody shops. Our holy man, [...]

Demolition in Chongqing

Chongqing, Chongqing

Dege, Sichuan

The Road to Shiqu

By 8:30 the next morning, Jack, Jospeh and I are in a bread van heading to Shiqu. Our driver picks up one other passenger on the way out of town: an old man with a dark, weather beaten face, a thick green corduroy jacket, even thicker glasses, and the warm smell of yak butter emanating [...]