Sichuan

Sichuan gets under your skin in the best possible way – it’s beautiful, layered, and utterly magnetic. A land of misty bamboo forests, pandas, clacking mahjong tiles, and a famously laid-back attitude known as xián qíng, it’s a place where teahouses are a way of life and lingering is an art form. The food? Fiery, fragrant and layered – from tingly málà heat and sweat-inducing hot pot, to hand-cut noodles, sweet-savoury regional dishes, and snacks you’ll dream about long after you’ve gone home.

This is a province of contrasts: elegant Shu cultural traditions and Sichuan opera, Daoist temples and tea plantations, booming cities and stone-cobbled old towns. On our Sichuan journeys, we dive deep into markets, alleyways, hole-in-the-wall eateries, and the everyday rituals that make Sichuan so compelling.

Our journey isn’t a highlights reel of Sichuan; it’s a carefully shaped route through it.

We start in Ya’an, panda country, where mist blurs the edges of the hills and life feels gently removed from anywhere else. Mingding Mountain rises above it all, a landscape of tea gardens, walking paths, and old pilgrimage routes that most travellers never piece together in one go.

We move through old riverside towns that don’t really show up on standard itineraries – places where the river still sets the pace, and the food, markets, and daily rhythms are entirely local. These are not stops you tick off; they’re places you’re taken into.

Leshan brings a different scale again with the Giant Buddha holding its ground above it all, while in Yibin, the landscape opens into the bamboo sea – rolling, green and shifting with light and weather. Food here features bamboo in every guise imaginable, plus the unique fungi that grow under the canopy. These are flavours are deeply regional and hard to replicate elsewhere.

And then Chongqing and Chengdu: one dense, vertical, and electric; the other more genteel, relaxed, and a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. Both are exciting, sprawling places, so we don’t try to see everything. In Chongqing, we move through stairways and neon, the right hot pot rooms, and back-alley noodle shops that make sense of the chaos; in Chengdu, things slow down into tea houses, renowned eateries, and the chance for unhurried walks.

This is a curated journey, where we choose what matters. The food, places, and moments you don’t easily string together on your own.