The autumn leaves

It had stayed relatively warm and summery in Beijing until only this week. To get some fresh air and some sense of autumn, I had two solutions: go up in latitude or go up in altitude.

I did both!

First in mid-September, I went with my friend Josh to Jilin in the Northeast of China, just by the North Korean border. I climbed up Changbaishan again. However, we were puzzled by the impossibility to walk up the volcano. A bus took us along with other visitors into the national park, up the mountain and dropped us 500m below the crater. We only had 1 500 steps up a concrete staircase to walk before reaching the top. In this northern province, the leaves on the trees were bearing beautiful autumnal colours.

 

And again last week, I travelled with my colleague Julien (with whom I had visited Xinjiang and Qinghai this Summer) high up above 4 000m on the Tibetan plateau in Sichuan province to the Yading valley national park. Just like in the national parks of Jilin and Xinjiang, we were bused along with other tourists from the main entrance at the bottom of the valley up to the main visitor centre inside the park. From there, we shunned the crowded minibuses that ferried visitors into the upper part of the valley and found a pathway where we were allowed to walk through the autumnal landscape unhindered by the crowds. 

In both Jilin and Sichuan, I ate very tasty fresh wild mushrooms at nearly every meal: stir-fried with other vegetables and meat, stewed in a pot with country chicken, boiled in a hot pot to give a strong umami flavour to the broth. In Jilin, I saw many locals picking mushrooms from the forests we visited, filling up several bags with them at each picking session. Collecting and eating wild mushroom are indeed an essential part of autumn for me having passed many autumn holidays in my parents' forest country house in Southwest France.

Autumn leaves
Jazz Music Korea