Our trip to China was such a blur that I can’t remember in my head what the differences are between the cities that we visited. What I remember clearly, however, was our deliberate effort to NOT plan. Besides lodging and a few known sites, we didn’t pre-arrange anything. This gave us the flexibility to wander villages and towns, to turn corners that looked prettier or stranger than the rest, to walk into a coffee shop and pretend to be a local.
This wall appeared to us one afternoon while we were wandering the streets of Lijiang. It hit us like a brick, the sheer beauty of it, and we couldn’t believe that we had it all to ourselves.