Seventy-Seven Days

Jieshan Daban, western Tibet province, China, 20 Apr 2010. After hiking for 80 days across the 1,400 kilometres from Shanghai, solo traveller Yang Liusong (Zhao Hantang) has finally arrived at the start of the challenge he’s been preparing for two years - being the first person to cross the uninhabited zone of Qiang Tang from east to west, alone on a bike without any back-up. It’s taken him 20 days just to get to this point from Lhasa, where he had consulted the only specialist on the region, Old Captain (Luosang Qunpei), a Tibetan who surveyed it in the 1960s and thought Yang Liusong was mad to undertake such a journey on his own. There he had also met a neighbour of Old Captain, the wheelchair-bound photographer Lan Tian (Jiang Yiyan) who ran a small inn on her own. (CMC Pictures Holdings)