Marmalade Daydreams

Alright! Back in civilization (though on the trail a few days ago, despite being hours from the nearest dirt road, my friend Laura would say that every time we spotted a ramshackle lean-to masquerading as a noodle shop), and able to update. Sorry for the long delay between posts, dear readers -- you have my solemn word that it will never happen again. Let's see, we last left off with our hero heading into mountains in search of physical exertion and spiritual inspiration. Safe to say, I found both in two spurts of "trekking" (a word we don't use much stateside, but in Asian backpacking it generally means hiking during the day and staying in trailside guesthouses at night -- tourists camping is uncommon out here, though the nomadic herdsmen have made a lifestyle out of it). Trek the first was through and beyond the famed Tiger Leaping Gorge; trek the second into the Meili Xueshan mountain range, quite possibly the most beautiful mountains I've ever seen, on the border between Yunnan & Xizang provinces [Note: though Xizang province is commonly referred to as "Tibet", northwest Yunnan and western Sichuan were historically, and remain culturally, Tibetan -- though I'm not paying for a permit into Xizang province, much of my month in China has and will be spent in Tibetan lands, though perhaps not "Tibet" as defined in the modern sense (and as the title of this posting indicates, this isn't the last time I'm going to quibble with place names)]. I feel bad that, due to technical difficulties, I can't get pictures up immediately, but by sometime next week, the beauty of Miacimu and the awesome grandeur of Kawa Karpo will grace this page. You have my word. For those who can't wait, there's always Google Images. Oh, and I warn, this post is fairly long. You might want to read part now and save some for later rather than get travelogue fatigue. Consider yourselves warned.

After a brief return to Mama's Naxi Family Guesthouse in the old city of Lijiang (highly recommended -- call 0888-8881012: they'll pick you up at the bus station, take you to their cute guesthouse on the back streets of the, at times, overwhelming old city, swarming with busloads of Chinese tourists, and stuff you full of good food at a nominal price. Mama packs you a lunch when you leave, and gives you a sachet of herbs for safe travels), I caught a bus to Qiaotou, trailhead for Tiger Leaping Gorge. For our longtime readers, I will try to go easy on the poetic wax as last summer I described the immensity of the gorge in detail, but, to quote Beryl Bainbridge's The Birthday Boys), an excellent (fictional) book on Scott's disasterous attempt at the South Pole, in this landscape "any man with eyes will see that he is as consequential as a raindrop in the ocean." Imagine five Manhattans composed in stone; reportedly 13,000 feet from the raging brown waters of the Yangtze to the craggy peaks looming impossibly high above; you hike a clear trail through farming villages directly across from 10,000 foot cliffs of black and orange; recent landslides leave exposed scars of pure white limestone beneath the weathering; older landslide scars are now colonized by tenacious trees, testament to life's ability to flourish in any foothold. I do have some pictures up on my flickr site, but even a wide-angle lens would find it impossible to frame the massiveness of the place within a viewfinder -- I have some collages in the works for when i get home and learn how to use Photoshop. For now, take my word for it -- like the Grand Canyon, it is one of those places that makes space visible and fills me with the vertigonous desire to dive deep, catch an updraft, and effortly glide the gorge's length, marveling at creation.

The first morning, staying at a sweet guesthouse in one of the aforementioned villages, I went to take a shower and found a massive spider guarding the spigot. No problem, I did't think it's poisonous, and I fully realized my relative size advantage. Nothing to be scared of. Yet, as I lathered up, I didn't take my eyes off of it, so I had a clear view of it scurrying across the shelf into my pile of clothes. I took my time enjoying the warm water (first hot shower since Dali), imagining it laying a cluster of eggs in my t-shirt, which would burst open at some point on the hike, inundating me with a swarm of ravenous babies... Finally the beast emerged from my rumpled clothing, and I watched it climb the wall to meet its even larger mate on the ceiling, just over the doorway. At that point I grabbed my clothes, not needing to have their hundreds of eyes gloating at their complete victory over my courage. Perhaps driven by a need to be away from their hairy legs, I cruised the trail that day, powered by Snickers, to Sean's Guesthouse, a very happy place above the middle rapids, where I taught the ladies how to use the heavy exercise hula hoop that they unsuccessfully tried to twirl, and was treated to an evening of trading travel stories, drinking beers below the starry sky, and basking in the glory that is Kenny G.

The next morning I got a guide to take me up a masochistic route from the lower gorge around Haba Snow Mountain, through ferny forest and across sandy desert, amidst a multitude of wildflowers (stopped counting at 35 varieties) whose petite pistils seemed to mock my breathlessness, my pounding heart, and my intense thirst. I knew a liter of water wouldn't be enough, but what happened to my purification tablets? Filled my bottles from the clearest stream I'd ever seen, straight off the glacier, and I guess it was clean. How long does giiardia take to kick in? On second thought, don't tell me. I guess the upside to taking doxycycline as my antimalarial (despite it amping up my sun sensitivity) is that it kills all kinds of microbes. That way I feel better about having eaten roadside cured yak fat for lunch yesterday (an awful lot like bacon, fried up with chilis and green onions -- I only ate about half a bowl). Haven't gotten sick yet...

Stayed the night at another guesthouse with another funny Naxi mama who stuffed me full of food (I wonder if the Dongba religion and Judaism have any formal similarities or if it's simply cultural?). Unable to finish my excellent spicy fried salted yak beef, I took it to go, and it stayed good for the next five days and made excellent trail food. The Naxi village of Haba (which has four villages self-segregated by ethnicity) was pretty cute -- some kids trying to squirt me with their homemade waterguns -- and I wasn't allowed to leave until I promised to return and summit Haba Xueshan's glacial peak with Mama's younger brother, a mountaineering guide.

Rode the bus the following morning with Mama's seventeen-year-old daughter on her way to "Shangri-La" (more on this later) to take her high school final examinations (was originally planning to hike, but my feet needed a day off to prevent blisters), and I got off in Samba village, home to, not a sexy South American dance as I originally pictured, but Baishuitai, a pretty amazing series of limestone terraces that is the most sacred site of the Dongba religion. As "Katie", another seventeen-year-old Naxi girl, whom I met on the roadside and who had excellent command of the English language, repeatedly informed me, if one "prays with sincerity at Baishuitai, I think that you must be filled with total complete peacefulness and joy". Unfortunately she told me this after I'd already been up to the terraces and failed to pray, but I was feeling pretty peaceful and joyful as it was. She also used the phrase, "I have a dream" four times during our ten minute conversation, in ways ranging from the fairly appropriate (she dreams of being an English teacher in her village) to borderline frightening (she dreams of me writing her a letter). While I pondered that and waited for a ride, a local woman told me that she would "love" me if I stayed the night at her guesthouse. I'm fairly sure she meant in a platonic way, but following up on Katie's dreams, it unnerved me. After watching her very matter of factly slaughter, pluck, and eviscerate a chicken for a tour group's lunch, I ready to get out of Dodge.

Just after "Katie" said her goodbyes ("I must return to my peasant family") and as I was getting latched onto by another guesthouse operator, I managed to wave down a minibus being driven by a tough looking Tibetan woman who agreed to give me a ride to my destination. She plied me with delicious apples, we had fun making small talk out of my phrasebook (I actually owe most of my conversational Chinese to these few hours), she sang some beautiful Tibetan songs in that strong voice that most women of the region seem to have and use frequently, I gave her my renditions of "Blue Sky," "Amazing Grace," and "Heard It Through The Grapevine" (I think she enjoyed it), and everything was dandy. Then she asked me if I would drive. Coincidentally, the thought had just passed through my mind, there is no way that I would ever drive this minibus on this road. I'm not sure if it was the vehicle's enormous turning radius and the sharp hairpin turns throught the mountains, the landslides that routinely blocked half of the road, the lack of any guardrail between the road and the countryside below, or the livestock which we continually encountered (actually, it was probably some combination of these factors), but I was determined not to drive.

I felt kind of bad -- she had been driving for days, the engine for these vehicles is right below the driver's seat, and she was sweaty and tired, just wanting to close her eyes for a little bit. But I would feel worse for her if I was behind the wheel. I was a good sport. I told her that I wasn't very good at driving standard, but I'd try. She stopped on a flat space, and, attempting to start the engine, I pushed down on all of the pedals at once. She saw she was dealing with complete incompetance and settled for a little roadside break with a crisp apple and pouring a bucket of water over the engine. Oh, I guess now's as good a time as any to mention, it seems that large Chinese vehicles don't have radiators. Every couple of hours or so, the bus pulls over to a hose or a rainwater barrel on the side of the road and waters the engine, I assume to prevent it from overheating. I don't really get it, but it's part of life for truck- and bus-drivers and it's a nice opportunity on those long trips to get out and stretch the legs.

I'm really glad that she got back behind the wheel -- around the next bend, on an upward incline, the road was full of goats. I'm sure I would have either hit an animal, swerved off of the road, stalled out and coasted backward into another vehicle, or any combination of these catastrophes. Shortly thereafter, we encountered a suicidal horse attempted to clothesline our bus with its tether. My driver friend handled the situation with aplomb, expertly honking until the rope was flattened against the asphalt, and then flooring it. We ended up pulling into dusty "Shangri-La" (long aside on that coming up) around sunset, and she tried to check me into a three-star hotel. I went along with it, checking out the room and everything, but when they told me the price (about $50), I laughed, thanked her very much for the ride, slipped her a few bucks for gas (which she refused, but I threw it into the window and ran away), and went straight to a hostel I knew from last summer where I had a dorm bed for $2.50.

Okay, about the whole "Shangri-La" business. James Hilton wrote a book, Lost Horizon, that I had to read in ninth grade for Mr. Perlman, and it got turned into a popular movie in the thirties. It's about a place in the Himalayas that's pretty sweet: a monastery in a beautiful valley below a perfect snowy peak, where there's lots of fruit trees and no one has to work. Even if you haven't read the book or seen the movie, you probably know that the name "Shangri-La" is synonomous with paradise. Alright, well I guess a number of places in the region that I'm travelling in have recently made claims to actually be the place described in the book. This is a bit ludicrous as Hilton had never travelled to Asia and, more importantly, it is a fictional work. Regardless, in order to settle the battle over Shangri-La, whoever is in charge of such things in Chinese government actually changed the official name of the city of Zhongdian to "Shangri-La". Does anyone else know of an instance of an actual city renaming itself after a fictitious place? It's insane, especially because Zhongdian, while a pleasant enough city with a large Tibetan population, is certainly not paradise.

I didn't stay there long, just long enough to help turn what I've been told is the world's largest prayer wheel (enormous enough that children ride it like a carousel), have some excellent fried eggplant and spicy lamb barbecue, and be disappointed that "barley wine" turned out to be the same thing as Tiger Leaping Gorge's "corn brandy (homemade)" -- baijio, Chinese moonshine. Early the next morning I was on the most amazing/frightening bus ride of my life -- six hours of non-stop winding roads with severe dropoffs -- heading up to Deqin and Meili Xueshan, as I've said, the most beautiful mountains I know of. (Actually, their Chinese name means something like "Very Beautiful Snow Mountains".) Originally I didn't think I had time to do a trip up there, but after talking to a very enthusiastic Chinese traveller in Dali, I decided to sacrifice my time in Yunnanese cities (most of which I'd been to last summer anyway) to have a few days to hike around in these very isolated mountains, very holy to Tibetan Buddhists. Very pleased with the decision.

On the bus to Deqin I met Kate, Mel, and Laura, two Canadians and an American, respectively, all young scientists who'd lived together in Chapel Hill, NC, and all much more hardcore than I ever aspire to be. Kate and Mel had just cycled and camped from Kashgar to Lhasa (very far, across huge mountain passes and inhospitable terrain at enormous altitudes), raising money for poor Tibetan kids. They were now planning on doing a twelve-day kora (circuit) around the range. This is a sacred pilgrimage, as the range's central peak, Kawa Karpo, is one of the holiest mountains to Tibetan Buddhists, as it is the physical manifestation of the mind of one of their central deities. Laura just spent the summer teaching in "Shangri-La", and she's been to the base camps of Everest & Kailash. The three of them are talking about summiting Mont Blanc this year, which requires technical mountaineering. As I said, I aspire not to such heights, but bless their souls.

Laura had been here before, and the Lonely Planet had very little information on the area, so I tagged along with them up to the end of the road, Xideng Hotsprings, where I took a bed. The ladies were camping, so they hiked off to set up their tent somewhere in the woods (not too far off, as I soon found them on the horse farm next door -- probably the last flat ground for miles), and I set myself up for a good soak. I suppose I set myself up for a fall, as I was picturing the Japanese onsens (fairly paradaisical); regardless, I wasn't too happy to discover how gross Chinese hotsprings are -- basically a slimy bathtub that you can fill with tapped warm spring water. Anyone who's seen my shower curtain in Brooklyn knows that I'm not too much of a germaphobe, so I prayed that I wouldn't contract any fungal or bacterial infections, filled the drainage hole with a washcloth, and sat my bare ass on those mouldering cracked tiles. At least the electricity was out, and by candlelight I couldn't see exactly how disgusting my immediate surroundings were.

I met up with the girls in the morning, 8 miles of constant ascent (3000+ vertical feet) to a pass completely saturated with prayer flags, and an easy descent through beautiful forest, trees whose twisted black branches were draped with Spanish moss like pale green tattered silks, until emerging in the midst of absolutely stunning snowy peaks. As I said, photos to follow, but it was obvious to us all: this village, Yubeng -- isolated from the outside world by steep mountain passes, heir to a lush valley at the base of breathtaking peaks -- this was the true Shangri-La. I went up to the base camp of the tragic 1991 Sino-Japanese attempt to ascend Kawa Karpo (apparently upset the mountain gods -- all seventeen climbers died). The camp was incredible -- clear glacial river getting its rage out amidst a meadow that spread like carpet up to the edge of the glaciers. There was a small glacial lake another hour's hike up, but I was being a big girl's blouse (thanks Laura) and went home adequately awed. I woke well before dawn that morning to a sky glittering with stars and planets, saw an enormous meteorite, and felt okay about returning to the world at large.

Yesterday, with a fairly unpleasant nine-hour unpaved busride (that of the yak fat luncheon), I crossed the border into Sichuan, and spent the night in Xiangcheng, a Tibetan border town wherein many homes are still traditionally made of whitewashed pounded earth in trapezoidal forms (photos to come). My guesthouse was an amazing structure of this variety: the ground floor was a cellar where sides of yak hung drying amidst bins of vegetables, and my upstairs bedroom was like a temple with twenty-foot ceilings, walls and headboards all gilded and handpainted with auspicious signs and animals. I'm hardpressed to remember ever sleeping in such an opulent bedroom, especially for $2.25, which can't buy me a tuna fish sandwich at home.

Just arrived in Litang, a bustling town in western Sichuan (formerly the Tibetan Kingdom of Kham), that currently bustles more than usual, I imagine, as I have just missed the week-long Horse-Racing Festival by a couple of days. Just as well, as I have heard that, due to an enormous influx of Tibetans from all over the Plateau, the town's few guesthouses are completely booked for that week. Indeed, on the bus ride into town this morning (another rollercoaster ride through 16,000 foot passes of boulder fields and tundra), I saw several encampments of nomads with their decorated horses tethered prominantly outside, and the streets are filled with people engaged in enthusiastic conversations (about horses?); older folks sit twirling handheld prayer wheels; men play cards, slapping down their hands emphatically; women play mahjong, loudly clacking the tiles; kids running around doing stupid kid stuff.

Because I am generally loathe to be the type of traveller who walks around photographing the populace (barring situations like this morning when, wandering the dirt roads of the old town, whose stone buildings with exterior walls of pounded earth lie nestled between grassy hills, I was accosted by bands of incredibly cute children whose demands to be photographed I indulged and whose demands for money I ignored), I will instead attempt to use words to paint a picture of the older Tibetan populace. Imagine an alternate reality in which the cowboys lost, the Indians built cities much like ours, and the Native men combined the cowboys's sense of fashion with their own and that of thirties gangsters. Wide-brimmed hats ride the pates of most males, from the elderly to some adolescents -- even monks in their maroon robes and golden undershirts can be seen wearing fedoras or cowboy hats; most men sport some jacket, whether denim, leather, a cloak lined with animal furs, or a pinstriped sportscoat; sunglasses, jeans, dangling cigarette, and a gold tooth complete the look for many, though the older crowd generally eschews dungarees to complete the suit. Women generally wear their hair in braids, have silver jewelery with coral or turquoise, and wear long drab dresses or robes with colorful belts and smocks. Their faces have a dark nobility like that of the Plains Indians, but with a bit more humor mixed into the somborousness.

I'll try to add a more permanent link in the sidebar once I figure out how to transform Chinese characters into English so I can navigate the site a little better, [I think it may be time to get out of this Internet cafe as I just used the restroom, and it appears the patron to use it before me slaughtered a chicken in there -- the floor is covered with wet feathers and indescribable grime (actually, not that different from the floor in the hot springs)] but, for now, here's another link to my pictures page. I haven't been able to upload everything yet, but there's some shots from the Tiger Leaping Gorge hike that are pretty nice. Check back in few days -- hopefully I'll have the stunning Meili Xueshan pics up. Tomorrow, I go check out the monastery founded in the 16th century by the 3rd Dalai Lama, birthplace of the 7th and 10th Dalai Lamas as well as any number of "living Buddhas". I can see it from the roof of my guesthouse. Cool.

Kisses, J.