It is Sunday morning in Chishui old town and the market is in full swing. Despite the slight rain, the narrow main street is packed. In front of us walks an elderly Chinese woman, sporting a traditional wide-brimmed straw hat and a packed, back-slung basket.

She could have decamped from any of the region's growing number of Red Army museums. Behind her runs her grandson, clutching a deformed Transformer toy, with an arm missing and its battery pack gaping.

In the "Big Boy's Book of Travel Cliches", depicting China as the old jostling with the new is right up there with observations about the vagaries of the British climate or the Russian love for vodka.

Nevertheless, it occasionally slaps you in the face as an unavoidable truth - especially while ambling down a thousand-year-old concourse where temples rub shoulders with flat-screen TV shops and handmade bamboo knick-knacks compete for space with MP4s.

In Chishui, a city in northwestern Guizhou province, this juxtaposition of past and present is deeper and more profound than in many other regions. The city is at the heart of the area's "Danxia" (literally "red rocks") zone. This comparatively simple term does not really do justice to a geological anomaly that has seen the area gifted with landscapes largely unchanged from the Cretaceous period, more than 65 million years ago.

The distinctive colored rocks that characterize these landscapes give the region a second string to its "red tourism" initiative and also provide some of the most memorable scenery you are likely to see.

Singling out one "must see" location among the many on offer - the Great Chishui Waterfall, the Zhongdong Waterfall, the Four Pillar Mountains or China's very own "Jurassic Park", to name just a few, is invidious. While it is tempting to recommend the massive rambler's paradise that is the Jurassic Park - particularly as local officials maintain that is home to its very own Bigfoot - it is the beauty of the Great Chishui Waterfall that takes the top slot.

Not only does the site offer what I would argue is one of the most breathtaking water features I have ever seen - and I have holidayed by Zimbabwe's legendary Victoria Falls - it is also home to fabulous species of primeval plant life.

This includes a species of fern said to be among the most ancient on the planet. This is not, however, just a paradise for dry botanical types - you do not need to know your alsophila spimdosa from your Asplenium ceterach to appreciate the beauty and rarity of many of the species that flourish here.

(China Daily 09/22/2009 page24)