To The Edge of China

We just got back from a ten day trip out to the edge of China Monday morning. Access to this blog post is very limited in China, however, so I won’t be able to post a map, which would be very helpful. I’ve posted pictures from the trip onto the flickr page. There’s a link to that page just above this post.  If you aren’t interested in the technical part of the trip, skip the next four paragraphs.

The basic trajectory of the trip was from Kunming to Lijiang by train, then from Lijiang to Qiaotou by bus, then a two day hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge (along the upper Yangtze River) to Walnut Grove, another bus drive to Baishuitai where we saw first hand what happens when you let people trample over delicate stone formations of mineral deposits. A night there followed by another bus trip to Shangri-La - a town China randomly picked to capitalize on the James Hilton novel - and then over a 4000 meter pass via Deqin to Feilaisi, the last stop on the road to Tibet.

The trip up to that point was on the beaten path. There are enough buses and well-marked roads to get from point A to B. In the case of Shangri-La to Feilaisi, there’s only one road.

Once you get to Felaisi, you have two options: pay an exorbitant fee to keep going up into the restricted areas of Tibet, which is technically visible from Feilaisi, or go down the headwaters of the Mekong river and hike up into one of the most impressive mountain ranges I have ever seen.

We chose the latter. We took a minibus 1.5 hours down, through drought-stricken mountain sides along the Mekong, around dramatic bends in the river and over rickety bridges to the other side. Our minibus dropped us off at an unfinished guesthouse and we began our steep ascent up over a snowy pass to the village of Yubeng - only accessible by dirt trail either through a very steep gorge or over the pass, which we were traversing. We stayed in Yubeng for a night and then basically made our way back to Kunming in reverse. Yubeng really did feel like the end of the earth. We hiked a few minutes beyond Yubeng and were very aware that we were stretching our tether back to the last semblance of civilization. The mountains, reaching up to 6000 meters, loomed in front of us and the cold, thin air hurried us back to the village as if we were fleeing a haunted house. The edge of Yubeng was a very surreal place for me.

Two, quiet Tibetan men stood out to me during our trip. I don’t know their names and I spent no more than a few minutes with either of them, but their lives out on the edge of China fascinated me enough to dedicate the rest of this blog post to them.

The first one we met ran a little refreshment stand in Ninong, a village on the Mekong river (known in China as the Lancang River) at the entrance to a gorge that services Yubeng - 25 kilometers further up along a trail 1-2 feet wide path. I have no idea how old he was. Mountain men like him look to be 60 by western standards, but he may have been my age for all I know. Actually, I know he was older. He had a kind of patience and silence that I think only comes with age. His refreshment stand was at the end of a road where minibus drivers pick up hikers and take them back up to Felaisi. The drivers were all aggressive, feisty loud and young. The refreshment stand keeper stood far apart from them and was obviously an elder. By the time you get out that far into northwestern Yunnan, nearly all of the locals are Tibetan.

This refreshment stand keeper came into our lives during an interesting predicament. His stand is about an hour’s drive from the nearest town so, in order to get a ride, you need to call a driver in advance and arrange for him to meet you at the end of the road. We had done this the night before from Yubeng and even found a few other hikers to join us and share the cost. However, once we had gotten to the meetup spot, two hikers who had gone before us took our van and left us stranded. Other drivers came and went but they had no space for us, as they had their customers to take care of. Through the hustle and bustle of a dusty little parking lot at the end of a gravel, mountain road, our refreshment stand keeper was a solid constant. He quietly urged us to take shelter from the wind in his little shop. He would silently offer us his cell phone to call another driver to come pick us up. He had spent many years in this little spot and surely seen many more travelers in much worse predicaments than we were. His quiet calm was more fascinating to me than was my anxiety of getting back to civilization.

He was the first who greeted us and, after all the vans had packed up their passengers and made their way up the switchbacks, we were left with him and his refreshment stand. We bought a couple of warm cokes from him and obliged his offers to come sit inside, out of the wind. His shop doubled as a home. He had fastened some tin siding to the frame of some kind of gravel depot. A container holding white, ground stones was lofted about ten feet into the air and around the hoists at one end, he had built his little shop. I imagined trucks coming in periodically to pick up gravel for nearby road construction projects. Maybe he ran the gravel operation, too? It’s hard to say. Our communication wasn’t of the verbal kind.

His refreshment stand was as austere as the mountain conditions we were in. On one shelf, he had warm sodas and beer. On the other shelf, bowls of ready-to-eat instant noodles; just add hot water. He had an electric hot plate in one corner that shared the single electricity source with an ancient television set. In another corner was a curtain pulled in front of a bed, dividing his shop from his home.

From what I could tell, he lived out there by himself. After he had convinced us to come in, have a seat and buy a coke, he sat in the corner by the hot plate and tended a kettle of water which he was using to make tea for himself. Two birds landed on top of the wall surrounding his shop, in the little gap between tin siding and the gravel loader above us, and he watched them for a few minutes. I had the feeling that his life was very introspective and solitary, but not necessarily lonely.

I imagined him as the owner of a  hamburger stand in Orla  that my dad and I ate at on our way to the Guadalupe mountains in West Texas about 20 years ago. The man was ancient and holding on steady to a town that had obviously lost its appeal to everyone else long ago. He survived on the trickle of passers-by who knew his was the last hamburger stand for a hundred miles. It was a place that, if you were stranded, you would be there for a long time - but it was ok, because he’d take care of you with a hamburger and a coke.

Our refreshment stand keeper on the banks of the Mekong didn’t serve hamburgers, but he provided the same service as the old man in Orla. He had carved out his  little niche in the world and he seemed perfectly happy with it.

We called a driver to come pick us up, but about 30 minutes after he said he’d be there, another driver showed up who said he was willing to take us out. Our refreshment stand keeper warned against this. He wagged his finger at our driver and told him that he shouldn’t take business from another driver - it wasn’t the way things ran around there. I don’t think the old man was much involved in the minibus transport business there, but he had watched it enough to know how it worked. Sure enough, we got halfway up the mountain and met the other driver coming down to get us. An argument ensued, but both of them ending up winning. Our driver refused to take us any further and demanded $10 for driving us less than a mile while the second driver demanded the whole sum of taking us on to Felaisi. The old man was right about it not being a good idea to take business away from another - it just turns out that we should have heeded his advice and recognized that we were the ones who would ultimately be played.

The second man was an inn-owner just outside of Shangri-La. We had found his place accidentally while wondering around Shangri-La. There was an office there arranging eco-tourism homestays. They were closed, but the phone number for his guesthouse was posted up on a big sign outside the office, so we called him. The next day, we went out to his home out on the edge of a yak pasture filling up a huge valley reaching for miles around. The valley was made all the more impressive by the fact that it was at least 3000 meters high - nearly two miles above seal level

Again, it looked like he lived alone. No other guests were staying there and his children were off studying in Lhasa. A woman stopped in every once in a while to cook, but I don’t think it was his wife. Again, language barriers prevented us from perfectly understanding what was going on.

The Tibetan Inn keeper had plenty of western NGO literature, however. He also had the most comfortable beds we’d had in all of China and was teaching himself traditional Tibetan needlepoint. He was too much the perfect image of a rugged, Tibetan mountain man living on the edge of humanity. We hypothesized that  some UN fund manager’s assistance had found him, gave him more money than he knew what to do with to modify his home into a guesthouse, advised him to sell his traditional needlepiont work and then turned him lose on the Shangri-La tourism sector with only a phone number on a sign as his marketing campaign.

He was a very friendly man, again, very quiet and introspective. He had a little plot of land behind his house that was plowed - maybe for a small crop later in the year? There was also a haystack behind the house, so maybe some of the yaks were his? Or maybe the western NGO had encouraged him to maintain appearances for visitors. All I ever saw him do was his traditional needlepoint and play solitaire on his brand new Dell desktop computer. In his affable silence, he was an enigma to me. He chanted buddhist prayers in the morning over breakfast, using hand sgnals to communicate with us in order to avoid breaking his prayer rhythym.

As we were driving back to Kunming, I confided in Bryn how fascinated I was by these two men, living their austere but happy lives so isolated from everything else. She commented that I had a slight fascination with the prospect of living out in the mountains all by myself. She’s right, I’ve often fantasized about giving up modern life and becoming a recluse in the mountains - as have many men, I imagine. I remember my dad stocking up on supplies in late 1999, relishing the idea of a societal collapse from the Y2K bug.  But I know the realistic side of that all too well. I know that I could slip into hermitage all too easily, but that proactively engaging with the world is far too important to me to let my life get too isolated.

But, like the thought of a warm beach on a cold, blustery day, these two men will remind me of the broad spectrum of directions that lives can go in while I carry out my life in ciites. Maybe one day, after I’ve had my fill of humanity, I will join them - in my own way, of course. I wouldn’t want to interrupt their solitude.