Up on the Tibetan Plateau, the sun beats down with an unrelenting intensity that gives the Tibetans their rosy cheeks and rugged features, even at a young age.

This Tibetan boy is spending the night on the grasslands with his grandfather, who is living in a tent there for two weeks tending to the community yaks. The boy usually lives with his mother in a village ten kilometers away. He understands no Mandarin Chinese, which he won't start studying until he begins school at six years old.

A boy watches Bouyei (布依族) men and women carrying watermelons up from the river to be loaded onto trucks and sold in Guiyang.

A mother holds her son up on a wall in Xuelin (雪林鄉). Our rides through these forested mountains on the Burma border have been plagued by ominous clouds and on-and-off rain, an unwelcome departure from the predictability of the once-daily monsoons we've had since a few days after entering the province.

A Han Chinese toddler runs through the streets of Xuelin (雪林鄉), a Wa (佤族) township atop a mountain 12 kilometers from the Burmese border in western Yunnan. The boy is the son of one of a handful of Han families. The two we met were from Hunan and running small convenience stores in the town.

A little boy stares at the three goofy looking foreigners walking around town in spandex shorts and bike jerseys.

A little boy spends the day with his grandmother as she bundles up stalks in a dry rice paddy in Jingshan, Zhejiang.

Big smiles from a grandfather and grandson team selling vegetables in the morning market in the Zhangguan old town.

We met a lot of very welcoming people as we walked around the Zhangguan old town in the morning before setting out.

A young Uighur boy helps out at the animal market in Hotan, Xinjiang.