Arnaud Bertrand
Reunification in China! High up in the Xinjiang mountains, we met up with my very good friend @DanielDumbrill who is on his own RV roadtrip with his (very big) family! His RV roadtrip is even more impressive than ours: he started in Chongqing (where he lives), drove all the way to Beijing, then all the way here to Xinjiang and he will go back to Chongqing - all in all 13,000 kilometers, literally touring the whole of China! We're reuniting in the most idyllic place imaginable: high up in the Tang Bu La (唐布拉) mountains, in a Khazak nomad camp. We'll spend the night there, both RVs parked next to each others, and we'll probably spend the next couple of days traveling together 😊
Arnaud Bertrand
I feel like we've reached a little piece of heaven - this place is so beautiful it's genuinely unreal! Look at these videos we just took on the road 👇 We're arriving at the Tangbula grassland in Xinjiang ( 唐布拉), a place also known as Bai Li Hua Lang (百里画廊, "Hundred-Li Scenic Gallery"). This place is about 50km long and consists of 113 scenic side valleys off a main valley. Specifically we're now in the Bu Long Gou (布隆沟) valley. Most of these 113 side valleys remain completely private, controlled by local nomads. They're either completely off-limit to tourists or have their access tightly controlled. We managed to get in Bu Long Gou because we made a reservation with a local nomad family to have dinner with them 😊 As you can see on the videos, people still very much live the traditional pastural nomad lifestyle here - at least during the summer (during other seasons they go back down to their apartments in town). This is again a great illustration of how China - contrary to popular belief (and Western media propaganda) - is actually best in class at letting ethnic minorities preserve their traditional cultures and ways of life.
