Monday, 9:15 pm, Lijiang
Today was a crazy adventure through the hinterland on horseback. We started from outside of Lijiang, and went to an area called Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Ecological Park. The Chinese are not into the whole brevity thing when it comes to names of places, or official or governmental titles. The day started out with the “normal hurry up and wait,” as we rushed over to the ranch to confirm our reservation, and then waited for someone from the ranch to arrive and tell us where we needed to go. This is, of course, purely my own non-Chinese speaking observation. Getting to the horse departure area, and then mounting up and leaving didn’t take much time, and by 10am we were on the trail. As some of you know, I was a Boy Scout. I even got my horsemanship merit badge, but that’s all fine and good, except these horse don’t know the commands I learned some twenty years ago when I last rode a horse. Our agenda for the day was to visit a subsistence farming community, and eat lunch there. They grow and raise their food, and rely very little on the outside world. Then we would go to Wenchai eco-tourist site. This is a low impact resort that relies on backpackers and horse riders as its guests. From there we would return to the ranch, and then as a unannounced surprise, go visit a community center and elementary school that received a PLACES Award in 2004.
When we got started, each of us had a horse, and each horse had a Naxi guide. I haven’t felt more like laowai, or foreigners than on this excursion. We started up the pass and the scenery was unbelievable. The hillsides were full of wild rhododendrons and cotoneasters. It was amazing to see all these plants we consider as ornamentals growing wildly in the mountains. My guide was by far the youngest of all the guides. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say he was 17 at the oldest, out of a group whose average age was 55. The trip took about two hours to climb over the pass and descend into the valley of the Wenchai village. We dismounted and walked around the valley which was, as we were told, also a floodplain in the winter months. One strange thing about China, to me anyway, is the silly wedding photo shoots. Weddings here are also big business, and when we finally got to this remote valley, there was a wedding photo shoot happening in the valley, in and amongst the wildflowers. I have to admit the photos will probably turn out nice, but the fact everywhere we go, there has been a wedding shoot.
The village of Wenchai is perhaps the most remote and utopian, in the lacking influence from the outside world version of utopia, place I have ever been. As a group, I imagine we doubled their interaction with westerners of the year. The houses and buildings sit on the edge of a high mountain valley that floods in the spring and fall, and is at about 10,000 ft so it gets kinda chilly up there. In the town, we ate lunch at a local family place, a place to eat for passers-by. After the meal, we headed to the Wenchai Eco-Lodge. The eco-lodge was a noble idea originally, but after its ten or so years of existence, it is in dire need of help. The lodge was built with the help of the Nature Conservancy, and then after a predetermined amount of time, the lodge was turned over to the villagers to run as a co-op. The idea was to run the heat on biogas, but the biogas system was not operational. The electricity was to come from the local stream through mini-hydro turbines, but because of changing climate, the lodge needs to tap into the main power grid for power in the months when the river is in low flow periods. The lodge seemed highly underutilized, and dilapidated. We met with the manager of the facility, and he provided the aforementioned information. He discussed the co-op and the money they receive from the lodge, and the dividends or about 15-20RMB ($2.25-3.00) a month. That may seem trivial, but these people generally earn 800 RMB ($118) a year. So, that money helps, but the fact remains I felt like the place was on the brink of failure. And to finish our meeting, the manager of the property said the Central Government is planning to dam the river and flood the valley, which would eradicate almost all of what we had visited that day. This was probably the most depressing information I could have possibly imagined. The total population of the area is maybe 200 people, and that is even a high estimate, but to think the Chinese government could just eliminate this peasant style of living with no regard for the environment or culture they would be destroying, well, par for the course I suppose.
After leaving thoroughly depressed and conflicted, the rain started to come down. Not heavily, but just enough to be problematic for a haul over a mountain pass. We mounted our horses, and disembarked for home. The rain came and went, drizzling on us every so often. As we were leaving, we started up the pass at a different location from where we had entered the valley. As we left the main road in the valley to start our climb by trails, something seemed amiss. Our guides were a pretty talkative bunch, but the tone of their voices was changing by the minute. The guides were, unfortunately for us speaking the language of the local Naxi (actually pronounced Nah-she, not nah-key, like I originally posted). There was a point, not twenty minutes of having left the village, the guides started yelling at a woman in her farm field, who was about a quarter mile away. We started to wonder what was going on. We then got to a point where we had to turn around, and we realized it, we were lost. The guides had no idea where the trail had gone. We back tracked a few hundred yards, and started back up the hill. We found the trail, and then continued on, until the trail petered out, and became over grown. The guides began yelling, and saw another Naxi group in the ravine, about 400 yards below us, and started yelling at them for directions. We had to dismount about five times where the trail got too steep to be on horseback, or where foliage got to be too thick.
After what seemed to be an hour, we finally made it to a trail that was a real trail. We started along the trail and I noticed it was really an easy trail. It dawned on me we were heading back down in to the valley. We got to a certain point on the trail where the guides finally realized there was no way over or around the headwall above us. We turned around again, and started to backtrack. Well, by now we were all thinking we might have to get ready to spend the night in the back country of China. We started back up the trail, and I started to get a good feeling about the trail. It had started to switchback, and I could see a major road ahead. We made it to the road, and soon realized it was the road back down the hill to the ranch. Needless to say spirits lifted, but soon we realized how much further we had left to travel to get back. On our ascent, we had passed a reservoir, and that was the high point of the pass. At this point, my “sits bones” were killing me, and my knee was hurting from the stirrups being too short, and the weird angle horse riding bends the knees. I got off the horse and decided to hike it out from there. I got to a certain point in the trail, and decided to start trail running. It was a blast, got me down the hill quicker, and was a great way to burn off some of the frustration of getting lost on a Chinese mountain. When Jason (aka J-Bo), he decided to trail run as well, and I finally got to the bottom, we beat the last people down by about 30 minutes.
At the ranch and after talking about cold beers, hot meals, and nice beds, we piled into our taxis. Much to our surprise the vans started heading away from Lijiang. A lot of us were confused. The vans pulled into a parking lot, and we all were told to unload. No one understood where we were. Then we found out the award winning school and community center were located here, and our professors had decided to stop. SURPRISE!!!! All we wanted was a cold beer, food, a shower, a bed, anything other than more sightseeing. We spent about twenty minutes there, and I don’t know if it was my hunger, sore muscles, or what, but I started to knit-pick the design. There were some things that didn’t quite make sense to me, and for all of you non designers out there, I’ll save you the trouble of more rambling, all you other design heads, I’ll talk to you about it later when we look at photos.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment