I’ve been lucky enough to travel through parts of China before, but over a decade ago. While some things are very much the same, some are incredibly different.
Gone are the white skies and polluted cities. They’ve been replaced by near-silent streets (thanks to electric vehicles) and flower-lined highways. The depth and juxtapose of their architecture remains, with ancient temples alongside gleaming megacities. Zhejiang is a province that gives you everything.
In October, Naomi and I spent eight days crossing China's eastern coastal province on a research trip we called ‘Finding Extreme Dreams’. The brief was simple: find the places, people and trails from which we could build our next Extreme Dreams expedition. Here's what we found.
The bamboo sea at Anji, Huzhou
Culture you can walk through
Think 1,000-year-old poets' trails, Buddhas carved into cliffs and temples painted deep ochre. We hiked a section of the Tianmu Ancient Trail on the Road of Tang Poetry, stood beneath the Great Stone Buddha at Xinchang's Dafo Temple, carved more than 1,500 years ago, and wandered the courtyards of Guoqing Temple in the Tiantai Mountains, the birthplace of Tiantai Buddhism. In Songyang's mountain villages, chillies dry on the rooftops and tea is still poured on the balcony with a view straight down the valley - the same view that's been happening for thousands of years.
Dafo Temple, Xinchang
Guoqing Temple, Tiantai
Guoqing’s Sui-dynasty pagoda above the rice harvest
Village life in Songyang, Lishui
Into the underground
We then dived way down under the surface. At the Huangyan quarry caves, generations of stonecutters have carved out vast caverns where small boats glide across emerald water and holes in the roof open to the sky. In Suichang we went deep into Earth's Core World, an old mine full of caverns, an underground river and light installations, and ended 300 metres below the surface with a swim in a glowing blue underground pool.
The Huangyan quarry caves, Taizhou
Looking up from inside the quarry caves
Earth’s Core World, Suichang
A glimpse of the future
Above ground, Zhejiang feels like it's running a few years ahead. Hangzhou's towers glow at sunrise, high-speed trains linked almost every leg of our journey, and the streets are strangely quiet because so much of the traffic is electric. Electric cars, taxis, scooters and tiny two-seat runabouts are everywhere, and their green number plates make it easy to spot just how many there are. In Anji we visited Yucun, the village that gave China its green development motto, “clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as gold and silver”, then walked into the bamboo sea it helps protect.
Sunrise in Hangzhou
Electric all the way, even through the mountain tunnels
Hangzhou’s tiny electric runabouts
What's next
Finding Extreme Dreams was always about research, and Zhejiang delivered. You get culture, caves, trails and some of the friendliest locals we've ever met. Now we want to bring a group back for an Extreme Dreams expedition in 2027 or 2028, which I'll be leading. It's an excuse to go back to somewhere beautiful, wild and off the beaten track for adventure travel. The one thing Zhejiang can't give us is big mountains, so we're scouting peaks in another province to give the expedition its summit.
Mountains to unwrap and discover
A huge thank you to Isabella and the team at the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation for hosting us. Want to be first to hear when this one opens? Get in touch and we'll put your name on the list.
