A small ethnic minority village tucked away in mountainous southwest China is as fine a place to get lost as any, Bruce Munro discovered.
I am not the first to have found this place.
Nor the first to have wilfully become lost here.
The rural road narrows to a barely passable lane as our two Jeeps approach Yuhu village, Yunnan province, China.
But this is not the China of our screens, bustling, noisy and sticky with heat.
No, this is green, misty and quiet. Very quiet. It feels like we are intruding.
What is this other China in which we have found ourselves?
Yuhu is a village of the Naxi people whose 278,000 members, concentrated in the southwestern corner of China, are virtually invisible in this continent-sized country where 92% of the 1.35 billion citizens are Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese.
But we have flown here directly from Shanghai and the Naxi, and this tiny hillside village, are to be our tangible proof of the cultural, linguistic and religious diversity to be found among China's 56 officially recognised ethnic minorities.
Disgorging from our vehicles into a small cobblestoned square at the top of this hillside village, we look for clues.
There is no-one to be seen.
Then singing is heard coming from a doorway. A doorway, it is revealed, which does not lead into a house but opens on to a walled courtyard.
Here women in blue aprons with broad white semicircular mats tied to their backs are chanting as they move rhythmically around the open space.
Toddlers and children play or watch.
The older girls join in to learn their people's traditional songs and dances.
Stepping back outside we do not walk further into the village but exit on foot into the surrounding countryside.
We are at an altitude of 2500m and climbing, as we follow a rough track up through open scrubby farmland dotted with pine trees and the occasional burial mound marked by a rock headstone.
All around us are tree-clad mountains whose peaks are wrapped in cloud.
It is to this beautiful backwater that the Naxi antecedents, pushed by other tribes, retreated almost 2000 years ago.
Remoteness has its advantages.
The Naxi kingdom was not annexed by the Chinese empire until 1724.
A haunting form of orchestral music adopted from the Tang dynasty imperial court 1300 years ago, and now lost in the rest of China, is still played here.
The Naxi religion is also distinctive, a unique blend of Tibetan Buddhism and folk religion.
The temple shaman-priest is believed to use sticks painted with colourful ancient hieroglyphs to control and direct pixie-like spirits.
The largest mountain, about 10km from the village, is the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (Yulong Mountain) whose 13 peaks spread along its 35km length give the appearance of a slumbering dragon shrouded in cloud.
Local legend recalls that this mountain and nearby Haba Snow Mountain were twins who fought off a fearsome fiend, and continue to provide protection.
Yulong is also sacred to the Naxi because it was the traditional place for star-crossed lovers to commit suicide rather than submit to arranged marriages.
The rest of the group is following a dirt track back down the gentle slope.
I am dawdling, taking dozens of photographs in the hope a few will capture the essence of this ancient, moody, ''other'' place.
The track empties on to a narrow road, but the others are nowhere to be seen.
I hurry towards the village, but pause when I hear a distinctive chugging sound. Behind me, around the bend, comes a small truck powered by what looks like a tractor engine.
Now uncommon in China's big cities, these remnants of pre-capitalist communism, glorified mechanical rotary hoes of diverse size attached to a vast array of conveyances, can still be seen in rural areas transporting everything from livestock and manufactured goods to couples on their way to market.
In this case, the truck is loaded with leafy stock feed. Yunnan's temperate climate makes it ideal to grow a wide variety of crops. Everything from tobacco to enormous peaches grow in abundance.
As I enter the village proper, a woman comes towards me leading a horse bearing a boy.
Behind them is another person walking a horse also carrying someone.
And then another ... the hoofed procession is about 20 horses long.
Tourism is an increasingly important component of the villagers' livelihoods.
The growing disposable dollar, or in China's case the renminbi, of the burgeoning middle class is being spent not just in the acquisition of ''stuff'' but also in the pursuit of recreational experiences.
China's domestic tourists now number more than 2.6 billion per year, double the 2006 figure.
And to Yunnan they flock, among other reasons, to ride the renowned and sturdy Lijiang horses as they plod through the quaint cobblestoned streets of Naxi villages like Yuhu.
I now have no idea which way to go.
I stick my nose down a couple of side streets but cannot see or hear any European visitors.
No matter.
It is not a large village.
I will keep wandering and taking photos and see what happens.
The houses in Yuhu are typical of the simple yet elegant Naxi architecture - three or four double-storeyed stone and wood buildings topped with tiled roofs and built around a central courtyard. Often one of the buildings is the family storehouse for winter supplies of firewood, corn and other essentials.
We were supposed to be rounding out our trip to Yuhu with a visit to the former house of Dr Joseph Rock.
The famed and eccentric 20th-century botanist-cum-anthropologist-explorer lived in this village for more than 20 years.
Born in Austria, and largely self-educated, he became Hawaii's first official botanist before decamping to southwest China in 1922.
In addition to studying the flora of the region - the spectacular Rock's Peony is China's unofficial national flower - he produced a 1094-page dictionary, numerous scholarly papers and two histories of the Naxi.
Wherever he travelled, he took with him a complete set of silverware and an Abercrombie and Fitch canvas bathtub.
Dr Rock returned to Hawaii in 1949, shortly after the communist takeover in China.
Up to that point there is a good chance many people who had known him would have thought he was irrecoverably lost.
Wandering this captivating countryside and these enchanting streets, I think I know what he would have replied.
''No, not lost, just still more to see.''
Ah, there's our tour guide, wearing an air of patient exasperation.
