I understand you stayed at backpacker hostels? There were a couple of very charming little hotels. They put out Ping-Pong tables for us in the courtyard, and we were there for over a month. That was Huang Yao. Then the other place after that … in the film, when you see those shots of the big river snaking through those hills and the compound where we live? That was in another town, called Yizhou. It was a bigger town that had a lovely hotel right on that river. It was called the Holiday Inn. They call a lot of hotels the Holiday Inn, even though they have nothing to do with the Holiday Inn [chain].

Where did your father live when he was there? He lived in Kunming, in Yunnan, in southwestern China. Yunnan is, without any question in my mind, the most beautiful part of China that I have been to. It's the Rockies and the Grand Canyon, all rolled into one. It encompasses everything from Burma's rain forest all the way to the top of the Himalayan peaks. It is just the landscape of your Shangri-la dreams: incredible mountains, deep river valleys, gorges, beautifully terraced fields cutting up the hillsides, beautiful ancient towns like Lijiang, and people of incredible ethnic diversity. I would wander around in northwest Yunnan for six months. From Beijing or Shanghai, you would probably fly to Kunming, which is a wonderful city. From Kunming, you could jump to any of the smaller towns like Lijiang or Zhongdian. Also, I would say that my brother, Jim, is one of the only people in the world running commercial river trips on the rivers of northwest Yunnan. My brother was really the first person to really start running regular commercial rafting trips on some of these incredibly adventurous rivers that cut through these gorges in Yunnan. People book his trips through a big travel company called Mountain Travel Sobek. My brother, Jim, runs the Yunnan Great Rivers trip, on the great bend of the Yangtze and upper Mekong. They do it every February and April, and it is the trip of a lifetime. Truly. I have done the Grand Canyon, and never in my life have I seen river gorges like these. It is the river trip of all time.