When I first started looking up places to visit in China I was overwhelmed by the amount of natural beauty this country has. From rainbow colored mountains to crazy rock formations and villages taken back by nature, my list of places I wanted to visit kept growing bigger and it was hard to narrow it down to what we could actually manage to see with the time we had. Sadly, plans changed once we stepped foot on the ground. .

The air pollution in China is unlike anything I have ever seen. Honestly, I didn’t even know it’s possible for smog to get as bad as we got to experience in Xi’an, an ancient walled city with thousands of years of history that is nowadays everything but pleasant to visit. Instead of weather forecast, I started checking the pollution forecast. When I realized that the pollution was as bad if we kept going west, I scratched the rainbow mountains off the list. So we headed south to Chengdu, and since it was no better, I scratched visiting the giant panda sanctuary off my list. About a week into our trip we made it to Lijiang where we got to see blue sky for the first time since we got to China. Excited to finally be out of the smog, we set out on a 3 day long hike to one of China’s last remaining untouched places of natural beauty, the Tiger Leaping Gorge. The entire first day hiking, we were never far away from construction noises of the new highway that’s being built in the gorge. Not too long until this place loses its blue sky too. .

We traveled from East to West and then South and back East to Shanghai, we covered thousands of miles on the trains around China and the blue haze and taste of smog was never far away from us. And just as we thought we’d seen the worst, air quality index hit that purple or “very unhealthy” again for our visit to the Great Wall. HOLY COW it was bad! .

My stoke for hiking mountains and enjoying scenery unlike anywhere else in the world got taken over by anger thinking that we’ve really messed up our planet. It’s bad guys, and it’s coming for all of us unless we do something about it whether you want to believe in it or not.