云南游记

— About this volume —

What this book is

The coast is beautiful in summer and merciless in winter: no central heating, damp cold that gets into the bones, a season that tests resolve rather than merely passing. In December 2025, having spent nine months without once leaving the town, he shouldered his pack and went south.

Fifty days, fourteen towns. Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, Mangshi, Ruili, Tengchong, Xishuangbanna, Pu'er, Yuxi, Jianshui, Hekou, Mengzi, Mile — several of them twice. He went by bus and by cheap flight, slept in hostels, ate whatever was cheap and local, and kept no itinerary at all.

This is not a checklist book. He wanders without purpose, sits in courtyards, walks along rivers at dusk, watches border sunsets, and reports everything with the same flat honesty — including the things that disappointed him, the towns that did not work, the weariness of long bus rides, and the way the southern winter has no sun in it and what that absence does to a mood.

What he finds is not a new home but a reference point: proof that another tempo exists. “Yunnan taught me at least this,” he writes, “there is another way to live. Life need not be wound so tight.” The pleasure of the book is its pace — a winter spent being thoroughly unhurried.

He returns to the sea to find minus ten degrees, a north-west wind, and heavy snow falling in slanted lines. The book ends at the window, watching it, with a reflection on how climate makes temperament — north and south, and the kinds of people each one produces.

— Highlights —

What's inside

• Fourteen towns in fifty days, travelled without an itinerary and mostly alone.
• Border country: Mangshi, Ruili, Hekou — the edges of the country and what they feel like.
• Honest about disappointment: the towns that didn't work, the weather that didn't lift.
• Sunset compared across a continent: 17:01 in Yintan, two hours apart.
• The winter escape as a strategy, not a holiday — and what it costs to keep repeating it.