It's coming, it's coming....

Hello again!  I have just returned from 8 excellent days traveling in northwestern Yunnan with a friend from Swat.  It was pretty sweet: huge mountains, precious villages, beautiful fields, enormous lakes, perilous gorges (12,000 feet deep!), great new friends (as well as bizarre small-world encounters), and delicious foods: fried goat cheese, yak meat, Tibetan butter tea (the thickest, most filling beverage possible), a host of vegetables and mushrooms that I'd never seen before, and much, much more.  

My plan is to write up detailed entries of all this over the next couple days and post them here with pictures.  Warning though:  I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed with the overall quality of the photos.  Considering the HUGE number of spectacular places we went/things we saw, there weren't as many great ones as I was, well, expecting when I started to download things. Fundamentally, it was cloudy and rainy for about 80% of the time, so there's going to be a fair amount of blurriness here.  You can deal, I suppose. 

So, first stop: Dali!  I'm going to crash right now though, because it's been a low-sleep week.