Back in 2009, Michele and I flew from Guangzhou, China, to Guilin, China, and then traveled by car to Yangshou. Guangzhou and the surrounding cities, like Hong Kong, make up the largest metropolitan area in the world with about 70 million people. It is modern and cosmopolitan. The airport was surreal: huge, gorgeous, clean, busy; all under one huge, vaulted space. The flight was about an hour: takeoff, a long level-off period, long enough to pass out some sort of nut thing, and then landing. The Guilin airport was back to another, older China. Sort of like what I imagine the Bakersfield airport to be like.

Our hotel had arranged to pick us up at the airport, and we had an hour drive on the new toll road to Yangshou. The scenes – without the power poles – on the drive were classic Chinese watercolors (on steroids).

The very smoggy, extraordinary landscape felt ancient. For millions of years, it has seen change come and go, the great majority of that time before we even existed as a species. Four hundred million years ago, this area was a huge inland sea. For fifty million years or so, shelled sea creatures lived and died in this sea, sinking to the bottom, forming an almost 10,000-foot-deep hard layer of limestone. About 250 to 200 million years ago, as the whole mess was moving north across the equator, the Yangtze Plate bumped into the North China Plate, raising this area, drying out the lake, and turning the new landscape into dry land.

Later, much later, from about 40 million years ago to today, the Indian Plate, at the end of its wander from somewhere near South Africa, plowed into the Eurasian Plate, creating the Himalayas. The ripple effect from this event, almost 2,000 miles away, pushed this region up even further, to be shaped by weathering and erosion driven by heavy monsoon rains.

For most of the recorded history of China – of the world, really – this area was only known from legends and paintings. It was always too remote, across too many rivers, through too much not-friendly territory for many people to make the journey. But now Yangshou is only two hours away, by plane and toll road, from a megacity of 70 million souls. It was adjusting rapidly.