FENGHUANG
In south-central China, Hunan province -- home of fiery food, birthplace of Mao Zedong -- offers something many tourists find irresistible: the thrill of discovery, in an age when everything seems already to have been discovered. Hunan's old city of Fenghuang isn't even mentioned in some popular China guidebooks. But it is reason to make the trip to China -- and even more so if paired with a visit to the national Wulingyuan Scenic Area, 150 miles away.
Wulingyuan is China's Yosemite Valley, with soaring mountain peaks and 3,000 sandstone spires rising spectacularly from the valley floor. Trails along the creek at the bottom of the gorge take hikers past waterfalls and lush vegetation and offer bottom-up views of rock formations and steep cliffs; trails carved on the cliffsides thread their way around the spires, offering heart-stopping vistas of the drop to the valley floor. Moving about on top via free shuttle buses, you can choose from several hiking routes or break for lunch at rustic peasant farmhouses. As at Pingyao, hundreds of Chinese tourists -- and guides with their flags and ubiquitous bullhorns -- detract from the nature experience, but it's a marvel nonetheless.



One of the many taxis that hang out in the Wulingyuan parking lots will make the trip to the city of Fenghuang. It's a beautiful four-hour ride through terraced rice fields. Initially, Fenghuang may seem like another characterless, somewhat grimy Chinese city. But for a couple of miles along the Tuo River, which cuts through the heart of the city, Fenghuang moves back to previous centuries. A jumble of flagstone-paved streets go past stone houses and temples dating back to the 17th century. Wooden houses perched on stilts lean precariously over the river. At one end of a covered bridge is a food market, which opens in the evening to sell dozens of grilled-to-order meats, fish and vegetables. Boatmen offer rides up the river in small, ancient-looking wooden craft. Red lanterns hang everywhere. At night, vendors sell candles, each anchored to a base that will float in the river.
The old section is a functioning city populated mainly by the Miao ethnic minority. Most of the centuries-old houses are occupied; some have converted their ground floors to restaurants. Women wash clothes at the riverbanks; almost no one speaks English. But just a few English words, from a bellhop at the Government Hotel, were enough to get us into a taxi to visit Hongxing, a village half an hour away, where half the 1,000 residents still live in original houses with tile roofs and dried-mud walls, surrounded by rice fields. It's as picturesque as China gets.