Hebei served as the deserved butt of many a joke throughout the trip, but when we finally arrived in the mountainous northern part of the province three days before the end of our trip, we were pleasantly surprised. There we found blue skies, green hills and picturesque villages as unique and interesting as those in any of the remote areas we passed in the western part of the country.

Evan on the Tibetan Plateau on our way to Labrang (夏河), Gansu Province.

Nomadic sheep and yak herders on the plains of the Tibetan Plateau in Sichuan.

In contrast to the women, we have yet to see the men in Yunnan wearing traditional or colorful outfits. Perhaps that's only for the tourist zones.

Two Miao (苗族) women walk through the Ameng Wednesday market. Check out those leg wrappings!

Watermelon farmers on the eastern coast of Hainan load their harvest onto a truck to be shipped to markets in the mainland. The family's fields are comprised of 40 mu (畝, 6.6 acres). They were planted with seedless watermelon back in October, which the family is now selling at 1.6 yuan per half kilogram (斤), a decent price, we were told.

We caught a glimpse of this beach at Dahua Corner (大花角) from on top of a hill on our ride and had to check it out and have a swim. It ended up being the perfect camping spot, too. Thanks to the Gorillapod for making shots of all three of us possible!

I'm not vigilant enough to be able to tell if this teen is Kazakh or Kyrgyz -- both seem to be prominent in the Lake Karakul region of Xinjiang in China's far northwest on the road to Pakistan. Regardless of their ethnic makeup, the locals at Lake Karakul are all extremely aggressive in trying to get money out of tourists, demanding money to look at the lake, camp in the area, stay in a yurt, and pretty much anything else you could possibly do. This particular young man was about to try to push a camel ride on us. The vibrant blue of Lake Karakul is in the background.

Yangshuo, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region