9/18/08
3:14 PM
Page 94
W
We had climbed 3,300 feet up the steep flanks of the mountain when we reached a forest of prayer flags at the top of a pass. There, at 12,000 feet, a Tibetan pilgrim family invited me into a trailside shelter for a cup of butter tea, and I joined a game of pool with some local porters. Clouds roiled around the lean-to, and a light rain fell on its tar-paper roof. At the time, it didn’t seem strange to have stumbled upon a huge mahogany pool table set high on a mountain. But in that forest, with the ground covered by decomposing cedars, like in the Pacific Northwest, and pines and firs growing alongside huge Dixie-style oaks with long beards of Spanish moss, anything seemed possible.•Photographer Matthieu Paley and I were trekking to the base of one of the peaks that Tibetans hold most sacred, 22,113-foot Mount Kawagebo, which nestles close to the borders of Myanmar and Tibet at the northern tip of China’s Yunnan Province. Kawagebo is Yunnan’s highest mountain, part of the spectacular Hengduan range that rises not far east of the end of the Himalaya. In 2001 the Chinese government renamed—or, more precisely, rebranded—the nearby city Zhongdian as Shangri-la, a move that had struck me as a ham-fisted attempt at marketing when we passed through just a few days before. But as I had seen over the course of my trip here, tourism, not subtlety, was foremost on the government’s checklist. The porters in the shelter knew better than I the contours of the table’s weathered surface and, soundly beaten, I handed over my pool cue, picked up my pack, and headed downhill. But before I could settle into a steady hiking rhythm, I was stopped short by a view as fantasy-filled, as breathtaking, as I had ever seen: 2,000 feet below lay a lush green valley, tiny, like a bright emerald set in a ring of towering mountains and waterfalls that fell like lace down granite walls. Across the valley, densely forested slopes, unimaginably steep, gave way to snow-laden peaks and glaciers. High above, sheer, windswept escarpments and jagged pinnacles faded in and out of the EAST OF EDEN: The view from Yubeng village on the flanks of Mount Kawagebo. Near right, from top: Chinese tourists at Tiger Leaping Gorge; Tibetan butter tea—the Himalayan drink of choice. Opposite: The wooden architecture in Lijiang’s old town was declared worthy of UNESCO protection in 1997.
clouds. I stared in wonder. They may have only changed the name, I thought, but this sure does look like Shangri-la.
O
UR JOURNEY INTO THE
Yunnan Province, a 152,100square-mile region long considered China’s wild southwestern frontier, began in the town of Lijiang, the ancestral home of the Naxi people. In 1997 a massive earthquake destroyed most of the city’s modern concrete buildings. Reconstruction efforts focused on restoring the traditional Naxi wood architecture, which prompted UNESCO to designate Lijiang’s old town a World Heritage site. Now it is full of red Chinese lanterns, camellia flowers, and weeping willows that drape over winding canals. Paley had been here five years earlier, just after the city had finished rebuilding, and he was curious to see how things had changed. In that half-decade, tens of millions of Chinese had emerged from poverty and moved into a middle class hungry for the benefits that new wealth can provide. Travel, we saw, is high on that list. Under a bright sun, busloads of Chinese tourists emptied into Lijiang’s plazas and narrow streets, each group wearing same-colored hats and led by a perky tour leader brandishing a matching pennant and a mini megaphone. In the past five years, many of the wooden buildings here have been transformed from Naxi homes into shops
PHOTOGRAPHS, BOTTOM LEFT: LUKE DUGGLEBY/ONASIA; OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: DAVID NOTON/GETTY IMAGES
FEAT.nov.Yunnan.qxp
PHOTOGRAPHS, BOTTOM LEFT: LUKE DUGGLEBY/ONASIA; OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: DAVID NOTON/GETTY IMAGES
FEAT.nov.Yunnan.qxp
9/18/08
3:14 PM
Page 95
As China’s westward expansion hits full stride, it’s likely that Yunnan’s 26 major ethnic groups, including the Naxi, will suffer the brunt of the growing pains. and restaurants. In a central plaza, tourists lined up by the dozen to photograph Naxi women, resting between folk dances and wearing wide blue dresses, white aprons, and quilted capes tied off at the shoulder. A nearby group of Naxi men sat astride horses, looking fearsome in white yak robes and red-panda-fur hats. As China’s westward expansion hits full stride, it’s likely that Yunnan’s 26 major ethnic groups, including the Naxi, will suffer the brunt of the growing pains. Lured by Lijiang’s meteoric growth in domestic tourism since 2000, the Han, China’s dominant ethnic group, threaten to relegate the Naxi to tourist props, much like Native Americans were during America’s westward expansion in the 20th century. Once the majority here, the Naxi people now make up only about 210,000 of Lijiang county’s 1.14 million people. With crowds converging on Lijiang’s old town, Paley and I made our way along paths paralleling the Yangtze River, which runs through the middle of the village, to the peaceful Black Dragon Pool Park, the modern spiritual center of Dongba, the Naxi religion.
Sweeping Chinese pavilions and arching bridges set off a stunning view of 18,360-foot Jade Dragon Mountain, a snow pinnacle 20 miles away. In a timeworn building full of old photos and folk jewelry, I spotted a wooden stairway as steep as a ladder that led to a temple musty with thick incense smoke. The Dongba religion preaches harmony between man and nature, and remains, perhaps even more so than Tibetan Buddhism, the closest link to Tibet’s ancient and mystical Bön religion. I lit an incense stick the width of my wrist and asked for safe travels on my upcoming journey, then a smiling monk pulled me aside, gave me a string of beads and, strangely, a gentle knock on the top of my head with his knuckles. (I later learned this unassuming monk was the religion’s high priest and a master shaman.) Our plan was to drive north from here to explore the newly named Shangri-la, where a domestic tourism boom is changing Yunnan’s physical and cultural landscapes irrevocably. The rebranding of Zhongdian and its surroundings in 2001 was, for the most part, an attempt to attract tourists by referencing the Tibetan paradise invented by James Hilton in his 1933 novel, Lost Horizon. In effect, the marketing ploy turned fiction into fact. Hilton, it is believed, based his descriptions of Shangri-la on a series of National Geographic articles by Austrian-American explorer and botanist Joseph F. Rock, who set out in 1926 to catalogue the Hengduan mountains’ 3,500 endemic plant species. Rock was so intrigued by the area that he ended up living near Lijiang for 25 years. Our route to Zhongdian would follow a road that passes the 6,000-foot-deep Tiger Leaping Gorge and parallels three mighty rivers—the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Salween— which begin on the Tibetan plateau farther north then flow south through deep gorges that at times lie as close as 50 miles apart. From there, another day’s drive would take us to Deqen, a small town near the Tibetan border and the starting point for trips to Mount Kawagebo. I had read that pilgrims travel in large numbers from as far as western Tibet, a thousand miles away, to circumambulate the peak during the fall, observing a rugged two-week kora, or pilgrimage. By going in the spring, we’d avoid the heaviest traffic—if the tourists didn’t get there first.
F
OR THE SIX-HOUR DRIVE THROUGH THE RUGGED HENGDUAN MOUNTAINS
to Zhongdian, we rode with Uttara Sarkar Crees, a diminutive, energetic woman in her 40s with an ever present smile and years of experience in ecotourism in Nepal. She moved from Kathmandu to Zhongdian a decade ago, set up a travel company called Gyalthang Eco Travel, and now consults for organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, and the Nature Conservancy. Her current focus is on developing low-impact lodging for small groups as an alternative to the kind of mass tourism that is overwhelming Lijiang. As we drove on the newly paved two-lane highway past small farms and villages, she talked optimistically about China’s plans for the area. “Government agencies are beginning to understand that we need to protect habitat and create nature reserves,” she said. “But they also know that they
NOVEMBER 2006
ADVENTURE
95
FEAT.nov.Yunnan.qxp
9/18/08
3:14 PM
Page 96
FLAG DAY: A tangle of prayer flags marks a sacred site on the outskirts of Zhongdian (above). Top right: On the trail to Yubeng village in the Hengduan mountains.
must provide economic opportunity to tribal people and minorities who have been left out of China’s economic gains. My job is to remind them that if we don’t work toward mitigating the effects of tourism on our natural places, we will have so few of them left.” Clearly, Sarkar Crees said, China is in a race between preserving its vulnerable minority cultures and some of the richest biodiversity on the planet, on the one hand, and, on the other, satisfying a rapidly expanding middle class that is already larger than the U.S. population. She pointed to the breakneck expansion of the country’s infrastructure, from the recently widened road we were driving on, to the new 710-mile Qinghai-Tibet Railway. In its first month of operation, the 4.2-billion-dollar railway carted 70,000 people to Tibet, flooding area hotels and restaurants. In the coming years, the government plans to turn the railway’s terminus in Lhasa into a junction, extending the line to Xigaze on the Nepal-China border and, possibly, to Lijiang.
ADVENTURE GUIDE:
Whatever boost in tourism is on the horizon, the people here are ready, as we saw when we stopped three hours from Lijiang at Tiger Leaping Gorge, a canyon that narrows to as little as 80 feet, pressing the waters of the Yangtze River into a vicious cataract. Walking down cement steps from a road above, we faced a flotilla of Chinese entrepreneurs offering to photograph us beside Tibetan children dressed in traditional garb and then to produce the image on battery-operated printers. I was reminded of stories about how, 70 years ago, the expansion of the Santa Fe Railroad brought out Native Americans in ceremonial dress when trains passed through Albuquerque, New Mexico. Paley, who had hiked through here just three years earlier, could not believe the change. “There was a road that stopped a few miles in and from there you had to hike,” he said. “There were no steps and none of the hucksters.” At the bottom of the stairs, 500 feet below the road, the river roared with wild ferocity. The government has rigged a scaffold that clings to the granite cliff face, allowing visitors to walk above 300 yards of the narrowest section. While I leaned over its railing, with the rapids some 20 feet below, I struck (Continued on page 107)
Exploring Yunnan, China’s Wild West
+ China’s Yunnan Province is home to more than half of the country’s plant and animal
96
ADVENTURE
NOVEMBER 2006
closely follows the author’s route and is highlighted by a stay in Yubeng village ($2,350; www.world expeditions.com). DIY: To repeat the author’s route, fly to Lijiang and take a bus from the station at the south end of old town. En route to Zhongdian (six hours), stop at Tiger Leaping Gorge and hit High Path, one of Yunnan’s best day
hikes. Uttara Sarkar Crees’s Gyalthang Eco Travel leads customized treks on Mount Kawagebo’s sacred pilgrimage routes (uttara_ sarkar @hotmail.com). GETTING THERE: China Southern Airlines (www.cs-air.com/en) flies to the provincial hub of Kunming from Beijing and Hong Kong and connects to Lijiang.
—Kate Cosgrove
Tibet
Detail area
DEQEN ZHONGDIAN
Mount Kawagebo (22,113 ft.)
LIJIANG
Tiger Leaping Gorge
Yangtze River
China KUNMING
Yunnan
Vietnam Myanmar (Burma)
150 miles
Laos
Country boundary Province boundary
MAP BY LINDSEY BALBIERZ
Muslim village. In September 2007, Geographic Expeditions will launch Yunnan’s Tribal Tapestry, a 16-day trip that follows in the footsteps of explorer Joseph F. Rock ($4,395; www .geoex.com). Travelers stay in Naxi, Mosuo, Yi, and Pumi villages and trek to Yunnan’s highest lake, Lugu Hu. World Expeditions’ 15-day Yunnan Meili Trek
China
Me k o n g Ri v er S a l we e n R i ve r
GUIDED TRIPS: Starting next year Bike Asia will lead cyclists through northern Yunnan to the foot of the Tibetan plateau, where the Yangtze, Mekong, and Salween River Valleys converge. The 15-day trip ($1,570; www.bikeasia.net) combines long days of riding on mixed surfaces with visits to historic sites such as Haba, a predominantly
n dua s ng t a i n H e o un M
species and 26 of its 55 cultural minority groups. In 2007 two new guided trips will take visitors—by bike and by foot—to its northwestern frontier. If you choose to go it alone, pack the Berlitz Chinese Mandarin Phrase Book ($10; www.berlitz.com), a must-read.
FEAT.nov.Yunnan.qxp
9/18/08
3:14 PM
Page 107
BUILDING SHANGRI-LA (Continued from page 96) up a conversation with a young man from Guangzhou, a town near Hong Kong. “Last summer I traveled to Switzerland to see the beauty of the Alps. I had no idea we had anything to compare,” he said in British-accented English. “But now I see we do. I am so proud, so excited; I keep wanting to shout it out.” BEFORE ARRIVING IN ZHONGDIAN, some 150 sinuous miles past Tiger Leaping Gorge, we stopped at a stupa festooned with prayer flags and shouted “O so so lha ge lo!”— the prayer for a safe journey that Tibetans recite when they summit a pass. We then descended to 10,500 feet and entered a broad, sunlit plain surrounded by rolling hills and distant Tibetan villages. Yaks grazed in fields flamboyant with wild azaleas blooming in reds and blues. The air was luminous, almost effervescent. We had only just arrived in eastern Tibet, and already it felt entirely different from where we had been. Zhongdian, too, felt like another world after Lijiang. Though there has been recent construction here—as well as a good deal of Han immigration due to the potential for business—the building efforts in Zhongdian’s old town have been on a smaller, more authentic scale than in Lijiang. Here the pace of work is being guided by concerned residents, including Sarkar Crees, and the local government. “We are learning what not to do here by looking at Lijiang,” she said. “We want it to be a place where people live and work, not just a place for tourists.” Zhongdian’s crown jewel is the 17th-century Ganden Sumsanling Monastery, a Tibetan Buddhist gompa climbing up the side of a hill above a valley of meadows two miles outside of town. When Sarkar Crees first visited Zhongdian, in 1987, it had been completely destroyed, like most of the monasteries in Tibet, after the Cultural Revolution began fomenting attacks against monasteries in the 1960s. But today its gold rooftop—real gold—glitters from afar. The monastery is freshly painted, the elaborate murals of gods, though new, appear ageless, and there are still some priceless paintings, mandalas, wood sculptures, and doors that the monks had buried to save from destruction. Sumsanling reopened in 1995 and today has over 600 monks. “The government understands that monasteries are important for tourism, both here and in Tibet, so they now support them,” Sarkar Crees told me. “However, the old system of financial giving by landowners and other wealthy people has ceased, so most monks now need to work, often in the fields with their families, to support themselves. They also run their own businesses.” They are still monks, she says, but now most monks come only once or twice a week and for special rituals or holy days. It was tranquil walking through the monastery
FEAT.nov.Yunnan.qxp
9/18/08
3:14 PM
Page 108
BUILDING SHANGRI-LA on the evening we arrived, and other than groups of lamas dressed in the burgundy robes and yellow hats of the Gelupka order, I was alone. But when I returned to the site at nine the next morning, it felt more like high season at Lourdes. The parking lot was stuffed with tour buses, and great groups of Han Chinese ambled about, shooting pictures. But by 11 a.m. it was mine again, and I came across a cluster of lamas in the plaza facing the main monastery, debating in their unique style: sharply clapping their hands as they shouted philosophical questions and answers to each other. THE BORDER TOWN OF DEQEN, THE endpoint of another daylong drive, sits in a trough of the mountains. A few miles beyond it, along a ridgeline, a fledgling tourist center offered cafés, a few guest houses, and a frontrow seat for a spectacular view of Mount Kawagebo rising high above the Mekong River. Spectacular, that is, on a clear day. Yunnan means “south of the clouds,” but my experience suggests a more appropriate translation would be simply “cloudy.” As night—and drizzle—fell, Kawagebo and its neighboring peaks gave Paley and me glimpses of plummeting glaciers and jagged flanks, but mostly all we saw were the green, green forests of their lower slopes. Throughout Asia, people venerate holy places—a tree under which Buddha preached, a hill known to have been home to a highborn lama, even an entire mountain range—by circumambulating them in a clockwise direction. Most take their pilgrimages seriously, traveling long distances to get to the sacred site, then, in the case of a mountain, spending a long time walking around it. Since it was spring and snow still covered much of the route of the inner kora, an exposed and rugged 15-to-18-day circumambulation of Mount Kawagebo and its sister peaks, we chose the outer kora, which involved only three days of hiking. As we climbed into our jeep the next morning, the mountains were obscured and a soft rain fell. We wound down to the Mekong, crossed the river, and soon reached a small parking area up a side valley. Unlike Lijiang or the Sumsanling monastery, there were no buses here, no tour leaders. The outfitters that come to this remote section of Yunnan are of the low-to-the-ground variety. By and large, adventure travel companies like Sydney-based World Expeditions, which leads small trekking groups in the Hengduan range, have managed to outrun the domestic tourism boom and lead travelers to a land that has changed little in the past hundred years. At the kora trailhead we found a few horsemen who offered to rent us their mules to carry our gear to the top of the pass, a climb of 3,300
vertical feet. We accepted, slung on our daypacks and camera equipment, and set off up a relentlessly steep trail that rose through a forest of blooming rhododendron and oaks covered in moss. From time to time we came across an explosion of prayer flags decorating a rock outcropping or group of trees where some high lama once meditated. We shared the route with a modest Tibetan family on pilgrimage: three middle-aged adults, two young children, and an elderly grandmother. They had looping strands of prayer beads dangling from their hands, and the classic Tibetan mantra—“Om mani padme hum”— on their lips. The men wore black leather dress shoes with slim and slippery soles, and the women simple Keds-like sneakers. Just as I was wondering how they would fare without Vibram soles on the steep, muddy trails, they left the path to take an even steeper shortcut, moving upward with the ease of mountain goats. With my Gore-Tex boots, hydration pack, and extra pounds of high-tech gadgetry, I felt ridiculous as our new Tibetan friends laughed and talked and chanted as though they were on a Sunday walk by the shore. When we stopped at a shelter halfway up, Paley and I joined the family in concocting a picnic from pieces of pork, fried green peppers, Tibetan flat bread, boiled eggs, bananas, a little dark chocolate, and smoky Tibetan butter tea. Struggling to converse with the few words we had in common, we learned they had come from a small village about a hundred miles away for just two days of pilgrimage—to visit the god Kawagebo, they said. They had nothing but two small bags, which the women carried. The youngest child, unfazed by the long and steep hikes, was no more than seven years old. At the top of the pass, we arrived at the shack, the mahogany pool table, and the gateway to Yubeng village. Even at first sight, the valley was as close to the mystical Shangri-la as I could imagine. Its propitious location some 12,000 vertical feet directly below Kawagebo, a peak that to Tibetans represents the mind in meditation—free of all obstacles, filled with all knowledge—gave it a deep sense of tranquility. In Yubeng we stayed in a rustic guest house, a recent addition to a farmer’s traditional, fortress-like home, with raw pine walls and floors, hard cots, and a five-watt bulb hanging from a wire, its wisp of electricity generated by a primitive hydraulic system 200 yards away. A narrow terrace served as a living room, lobby, and hallway and offered a panorama of the mountains that appeared, then disappeared, as clouds swirled around us. The other travelers in Yubeng were a mix of young Chinese, Australian, Israeli, and European backpackers, along with a few
FEAT.nov.Yunnan.qxp
9/18/08
3:14 PM
Page 109
GREENLAND (Continued from page 102) Americans. Two middle-aged Chinese tourists, the main market for the mules and porters, also showed up. In all there were hardly 25 visitors, apportioned between three guest houses, in the valley. From Yubeng village, it was a thigh-burning three-hour hike in the rain to a sacred waterfall, the second step in the outer kora. On the way, we passed the pilgrim family. They were already on their way down, still counting their prayer beads, still saying their mantra, untroubled by either the rain or their simple shoes. I thought of what Sarkar Crees had said earlier in the trip: “Tibetans accept whatever comes as a result of karma, so people feel very little stress.” My stress level, on the other hand, was decidedly less enlightened, especially on the final ascent up a steep, narrow ridge through six inches of cascading water. The blessings that come from reaching the waterfall—its waters cleanse pilgrims of bad karma and sickness—require circumambulating the falling torrent three times. But it’s hard to distinguish rain from river after the river falls some 1,500 feet. Nevertheless, I stood dangerously close to a rock ledge with a glacier far below, soaking up the water and, I hoped, good karma. A mile back down the trail, we came upon a shelter and a roaring fire tended by a Tibetan man with a good command of English. As we dried ourselves, he told us about the power of Kawagebo. In 1991, he said, a Japanese team of 11 mountaineers came to scale the unconquered peak. Local villagers tried to stop them, explaining that it is a sacred mountain and its protector god would not permit it. Intent on their goal, the team brushed the villagers’ concerns aside and started climbing. But before they got very far, an avalanche swept all 11, plus six Chinese helpers, to their deaths. They were the first—and the last—to make the attempt. Later that evening, back on the terrace with beers in hand, Paley and I joked about what Kawagebo’s protector would do if the Four Seasons decided to build on its flanks. The irony, of course, is that it is all too possible—even under the watchful eye of conservation-minded organizations like UNESCO and activist-educators like Sarkar Crees. How long, we wondered, can these groups hold out in the face of competing pressures on government agencies and a Han population eager to discover their land through mass tourism? How sensitive can the government be to indigenous cultures, religions, and languages when they are seen first as tourist attractions? And how long will it be before a gondola finds its way to Yubeng village or a budding entrepreneur flies tourists above the sacred mountains that Joseph Rock once called “the most glorious peak[s] my eyes were ever privileged to see”? ▲
miles—through an uninhabited landscape. Having only kayaked once before (near a sunny Mediterranean beach), I hire a local guide named Mikael Jacobsen to take me on a threeday journey around the islands off Aasiaat. Jacobsen, 37, is a former Danish triathlete and Greenlandic kayaking champion. As he loads the kayaks with filets of musk ox and reindeer that he hunted closer to the mainland, he squints knowingly at the wind and cold. Small icebergs dot the surface of the black shimmering water. Belugas and narwhals can be seen rising in the distance. As we push off from the shore into the 30-degree water amid a heavy, mid-May snowfall, I ask him to go easy on me. “We see a lot more icebergs in and around Aasiaat now,” Jacobsen muses as we settle into a relaxed rhythm of paddling. The hyper-oxygenated ice of the bergs glows blue in the water. I want to get up close to one and peer down at its bulk—seven-eighths of its total mass, experts say. But Jacobsen cautions me. Icebergs, he says, are extremely unstable. You never know when a piece of one might cleave away and drop on top of you or when the entire thing might topple over on its side and send up a sharp, steep wave that can flip a kayak like a coin. “Or sometimes ice just shoots out, going completely through a boat,” he says. “That’s the worst thing that can happen to a kayak.” And then he tilts his head back and makes a chortling sound in the back of his throat, which I understand is the best the human voice can do to approximate the sound of sharp, million-yearold ice shearing through the side of a kayak. As the brightly painted village of Aasiaat disappears in the distance, we enter the quiet of the fjords. Bare basalt shores hem the waters like dark blankets, a showcase for an array of birds and the occasional arctic fox. Jacobsen’s boat, an authentic canvas-covered Greenlandic kayak, cuts the water like a loon. This style of craft—long, narrow, finely ribbed—was invented here by the Greenlanders, and it shuns any association with its tubby plastic cousins that ply American rivers and bays. Jacobsen continues to chat, sometimes across 200 yards of silent water, about how life has changed in Aasiaat along with the weather. He points to the snow, which is falling thickly now. Years ago it would have been sunny at this time of year, he says. (The recent snowfalls in this area have been so consistent, in fact, that a heli-skiing industry has taken root on the west coast and on rugged Disko Island in the distance.) To make his case for climate change, Jacobsen could have drawn my attention to just about anything: Polar bears are less able to hunt seals on the ice here and have moved northward;