50 Shades of Salt.

Another day of our China trip – another couple of awesome places!…

The first one turned out to be absolutely stunning – Feicui (Emerald) Lake. Another salty one – but this time the most colorful lake ever! Well, more like a whole constellation of small salty pools. Just look at these:

Salty ground: a dried-up lake ->

Curiously, satellite images don’t show these colors. Why is that? ->

The best way to take in all this beauty is by drone! From above, the view’s way brighter, more colorful, more striking:

Pure magic; just unreal! ->

The colors of these lakes depend on the chemical composition of the water and the algae living in it. But I do wonder… Did they become this colorful naturally – or did China’s tourism industry give them a little help?!…

Time to explore on foot and soak it all in! As usual: zero crowds at the entrance – no lines at all. That’s the beauty of traveling around China at precisely this time of year – right after the Golden Week holiday rush.

Next, we pick the cutest, most Instagrammable train, and off we go!…

Then it was time for a stroll around the colorful lakes…

The bodies of water come in all sizes – from vast lakes to… puddles, like this one:

And the water colors vary plenty:

Yep, that’s salt:

Whoa! A full-on photoshoot. Considering it was about 0°C (at 3200 meters above sea-level), just watching this was making me feel cold ->

Poor girl! A true content warrior. Instagram TikTok demands sacrifices…

Meanwhile, our girls were having fun in other ways:

The vibrancy of the colors was somewhat muted by the gray sky. Oh well, what can you do?…

The vast, frozen salt flats looked apocalyptic ->

Up close:

The colors were amazing – but some bright blue skies would’ve been the cherry on top…

The small holes in the ground were covered with ice – there’d been a frost overnight:

For those who prefer an easier photo session, there’s a white piano here too. That’s the second I’ve seen in the middle of nowhere on this trip :) ->

In all – an amazing place!

And that was that. Time to be heading on toward our next Chinese terrific-tourism, which I’ll tell you about in the next post…

The rest of the photos from our China-2024 trip are here.