03 Aug 2012 05:00
Pictures from the bus,along the road that follows the NuJiang Valley in Yunnan, China, which is the most remote of the Three Parallel Rivers that make up the homonymous UNESCO reserve.
The NuJiang is a river that springs from the Tibet plateu down to Yunnan, and later on to Myanmar (Burma where its name changes to Salween. Here it marks the border with Thailand and then flows into the Andaman Sea.
It's one of the longest undammed rivers in the world, and it's part of the Three Parallel Rivers reserve, a UNESCO Heritage site that includes also the YangTze River and the Mekong (which chinese name is Cang Lang).
It's one of the places with the richest biodiversity in the world, and it's home of 7 out of the 26 ethnical minorities that live in Yunnan.
Human development and tourism are greatly endangering the area, that is also target of a dam project even bigger than the one realized at the Three Gorges, in the Hubei province.
Here is a series of pictures taken from some of the minibuses that everyday travel up and down the valley, from the bottom town of LiuKu up to BingZhongLuo and QiuNaTong.
The places and the faces of this forgotten valley, a road trip into a traditional China that is slowly disappearing.