In the late Spring of 2009, Michele and I went to China. Neither Michele nor I have a clue about how to speak or read Chinese – or know much about China, for that matter, except for the Great Wall and the terra cotta soldiers of course – so, much of the time, we were traveling blind except for the internet. But the internet really is a game-changer. With the internet, we felt pretty safe flying into Hong Kong with no reservations except for a hotel reservation for the first night and tickets to fly out of Shanghai three weeks later. The three things we had on our agenda were the Shanghai Auto Show, the canyons in the Zhangjiajie area, and the karst formations around Guilin and the Li River.

The Shanghai Auto Show is probably self-explanatory. China is both the world’s largest automobile market and the world’s largest automobile producer and, well, a car show, any car show, is always interesting (if one is interested). Zhangjiajie was unknown to us but had been recommended in a travel book and was the first Unesco World Heritage site in China. The karst formations may not be famous by name, but we all know them because they have been so conspicuous in Chinese art.

A balloon ride has been at the top of Michele’s long list of things she would like to do. Specifically a Buddy Bombard Balloon ride through France’s wine country – which wine region, I’m not sure – so, when she found out that we could take a balloon ride in the Yangshuo area, that became our goal. Yangshuo is a tourist town surrounded by a farming area in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Because it has a large minority population like Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and the far west of China, in theory, the local government has more control than a normal Provincial-level administrative area. After watching the central state move into Hong Kong, I’m not sure autonomous is really an operative word in these cases. Either way, Yangshuo is a tourist town and the place in which we saw the most Western tourists, culminating with the balloon ride which seemed to be all western tourists. It was spectacular and even though it was almost ten years ago, I thought I would post some pictures.

But first, some geological background because the area is dominated by its geology; improbable mountains – hills? hummocks? – formed by a deteriorating limestone seabed. The limestone is formed because the sea is shallow and warm, and full of animals like oysters, clams, mussels, corals, and shrimp that use the calcium carbonate found in seawater to create their shells and bones. As these animals die, their shells and bones settle on the ocean floor where they, over millions of years, are compacted and turned into limestone. This limestone was raised above the sea level when the subcontinent of India floating on a small plate from an area near the southern part of the future Africa slammed into an area that was becoming Asia about 55 million to 35 million years ago. This is a tropical area and it has been raining on the limestone ever since, dissolving it into this fantastic landscape.

As an aside, when Michele first told me – deep in the Grand Canyon, as I recall – how limestone was made, it seemed so unlikely. “This huge area of limestone, thousands of feet thick, is made by the shells of tiny sea animals that precipitate to the seafloor when they die, really?” It turns out, “Yes, really, and limestone covers 12% of the earth’s land surface so it’s not even rare.” It is easier to understand by keeping three things in mind, the earth is very old – about four and a half billion years – for about three billion years, it was covered with more water than now – evidence of water first shows up in the geological record about three point eight billion years ago – and life showed up about three and a half billion years ago (in the shallow seas). That is a very long time for those little dead animals to litter the seafloor. End aside.

I want to add a disclaimer here, China was – and by all accounts, still is – astonishing smoggy. It reminded me of the LA Basin in the late 50s, early 60s, only worse in that the smog – and, is that even a word we use anymore? – is everywhere in the entire country. (My nose started running and my eyes burned from the time we landed in Hong Kong until we flew out of Shanghai, my theory is that my body had gone into a “get rid of this shit” mode.) With all the smog, trying to photograph a distant landscape from a balloon results in a washed-out image. Standing in the balloon basket with only the landscape in our vision, it is overwhelming, but in a nine by sixteen image on a small screen, it is very underwhelming. So, for your pleasure – I hope – and my ego, for sure, except for the one image below and the two images above, I have heavily worked over these in Adobe Lightroom, and I have been especially generous with my use of the Dehaze slider.