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MARK CLIFFORD
A trio of mangy ponies led by local Naxi
villagers picks its way gingerly down a steep, rocky trail in this far-off
corner of China. One of the riders, her face layered with make-up, wears
high-heeled shoes that wouldn't take her to the next bend in the trail on foot.
Her chain-smoking companion concentrates on his mobile phone rather than the
scenery.
Welcome to ecotourism, Chinese-style. These are newly
rich city slickers, out for an afternoon pony trip near Lijiang, in the
northwestern corner of Yunnan province. It is a chance for fresh air and the
opportunity to literally look down on the distinctively garbed Naxi
``minorities''.
Our guide, a slight, cheerful 24-year-old Naxi woman
named Lily Zhang who would prove indispensable on the trip, uncomplainingly
picks up as much litter as she can - cigarette packs and sweet wrappers - flung
from the saddles of the environmentally unconscious riders.
At the top of the steep ridge we are climbing, a
beautiful alpine meadow is being torn apart by a construction project. Across
the meadow, goat carcasses are strung up at the front of three ripped plastic
tents set up to sell fresh meat to the pony riders. Goatskin pelts hang on the
back of the tent frames.
The tours started just a few months ago as local
villagers began to cash in on Lijiang's booming popularity as a destination for
the mainland's swelling ranks of tourists. On the trail or off, the dress code
here is heels for the women, suits for men. Of them none, apparently, can ride
without someone to lead the horse.
Change is coming to historic Lijiang and the
surrounding countryside. The UNESCO Heritage city with its canals and old
wooden houses attracted 300,000 tourists last year and the figure will be
substantially higher this year. But even in mid-October, more than a week after
the end of the national holiday, its lanes are so jammed with mainland tourists
that Causeway Bay on a Saturday afternoon seems almost empty by comparison. But
pony riders and all, it is still possible to get away from the crowds - at
least for now.
We started our climb from near the village of Yuhu, an
unremarkable place but nonetheless home for many years to Joseph Rock, one of
the most extraordinary foreigners to live in China. Rock was not only an
explorer extraordinaire, but a linguist and scientist. His expeditions
throughout northwestern Yunnan resulted in thousands of plant specimens being
sent to arboretums in the United States.
It was Rock who alerted the world to this
extraordinary area, where high mountains and deep river valleys result in one
of the richest natural environments anywhere on earth, from sub-tropics to
alpine. And, because the area is so far south, it was protected from the Ice
Age, preserving ancient specimens that were frozen out further north.
Walking up the ridge, we make way for the pony riders
descending this northern flank of the 5,596-metre Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, an
imposing snow-capped peak towering over the Lijiang region. On its far side,
the mountain's steep faces drop more than 1,000m to the Yangtze River, forming
one wall of the world-famous Tiger Leaping gorge. We climbed steeply, up some
600m in the space of a few kilometres, to reach the meadow.
The pony riders and the goat carcasses are far behind
us now as we wind over a final, mercifully gentle ridge before glimpsing our
destination: Wenhai Lake, nestled improbably in a bowl on the southern flank of
Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. The basin is home to about 1,000 Naxi tribesmen who
dominate the area around Lijiang. We drop down and walk through the largest of
two villages on the lake to our destination, the Wenhai Ecolodge.
The lodge is testament to the promise of ecotourism in
remote, picturesque areas like Yunnan. Solar energy and a micro-hydropower unit
power the lights - and the electric blanket that keeps us toasty on crisp
autumn nights that leave frost on the ground. Biogas from the toilets provides
fuel for cooking as well as heat for the greenhouse where many of the
vegetables are grown for the delicious meals served up by local cooks.
And what meals they are. Plump, healthy hens wander in
and around the courtyard of the traditional Naxi building. They provide rich,
tasty eggs scrambled with tomatoes to make up one of the eight dishes we have
for dinner. Our favourite is cold, pickled cucumber marinated in soy with
generous slivers of ginger and garlic. Boiled pumpkin is another favourite as
we pick at the dishes. I also like the bitter melon fried with egg, and spring
onions cooked with green peppers and pork. We finish the meal with steaming
soup made of greens and loaded with tofu, enriched by the rapeseed oil that
it's cooked in.
Best of all, most of this food is grown locally. Most
of what doesn't come from Wenhai, such as the soybeans and rice, is grown in
the more temperate regions of nearby Lashi Lake.
Paradise, however, is rarely what it seems. The
struggles of the tiny ecolodge illustrate the difficulties of establishing even
the smallest-scale development. The lodge grew out of a project initiated by
Canada's Simon Fraser University in the early 1990s to promote ecotourism. A
56-household co-operative, comprising most of the villagers, was eventually
formed in 1995, with each member chipping in a minimum of 60 yuan (HK$56).
However, the project was nearly wiped out in February
1996 when a destructive earthquake hurt tourism and forced residents to focus
on more immediate rebuilding efforts, rendering the scheme dormant.
A few years ago a modest US$35,000 (HK$234,000) in
Japanese aid money helped renovate the lodge. Volunteers from the Nature
Conservancy helped install solar heating. They put in the nearby micro-hydro
unit to provide additional electricity. It was Nature Conservancy know-how that
installed the biogas heating and the solar panels used to heat water for
showers.
Nature Conservancy volunteers researched and produced
a series of information boards about the region's edible flora and fauna. They
produced an impressive handbook to the Wenhai area - from cultural history to
ecological guide. Each of the lodge's 12 rooms is named after a particular
flower. All in all, about as nice an ecoexperience as one can find in today's
China.
Yet the lodge has struggled since its opening two
years ago. Visitors are few. As with many ecotourism projects, marketing
activities have been inadequate. Bad timing also hurt. Then, as if the
earthquake wasn't bad enough, the Sars epidemic devastated tourism just a few
months after the lodge opened in November 2002.
Intensive training of local guides came to little, as
all but four of the 28 trained by the Nature Conservancy melted away,
preferring to cater to the hordes of mainland tourists who flock to Lijiang.
The village co-operative was in disarray.
Nonetheless, earlier this year, Cun Xuerong, an
enterprising Naxi who had spent several years in Shenzhen, took over the
management of the lodge, paying an annual management fee, hiring locals to cook
and clean, and keeping all of the proceeds.
But when our group arrived in mid-October, Cun told us
that only about 80 people had come so far this year. ``Business is no good,''
he complained.
That is a shame. The lodge is almost literally in Jade
Dragon Snow Mountain's shadow. From my bed - heated by the solar- and micro
hydro-powered electric blanket - is an extraordinary view across the village
fields and up to the mountain. The next morning we have a filling breakfast of
yak-butter tea (reflecting the proximity of the area to Tibetan villages across
the Yangtze), rice, mantou (white bread) and scrambled eggs with tomatoes. Then
we head upland through fields where women are getting ready to pull turnips and
tending other hardy crops that can survive the cold snaps that are setting in
mid-October.
We walk over a pass and into another, harsher world.
We have left Naxi territory and are now among the Yi people. Our destination is
Xuehua, a village of some 30 families. The local dongba, or shaman, and
his wife greet us. Lunch is the mantou and some hard-boiled eggs we brought.
The family throws potatoes in the fire to bake them
and we peel the blackened skins with our hands. The afternoon sun, the dogs
playing in the farmyard and the couple's two young grandsons are welcome. The
man had come here from neighbouring Sichuan during the Cultural Revolution, a
time when China's so-called minorities suffered along with the rest of the
country. After lunch he fills a long, straight-stemmed pipe featuring a small
brass bowl. The towering cannabis plants around the corner of the house, next
to a stand of bamboo are better suited to the climate than tobacco, which
apparently doesn't grow at this altitude.
We walk back to the village and around Wenhai Lake. It
is a beautiful body of water nestled in this high-lying valley, with cattle
grazing on its shores. It is also deceptive. Although it is perhaps eight
kilometres in diameter - it took us two hours to walk around it - the lake is
seasonal, disappearing in the spring, before the rains.
One of the more interesting sites is the Sacred Rock
Hat of Karmapa, the greatest living Buddha of White Hat (Tibetan) Buddhism.
Local legend has it that Karmapa was lounging by the lake when he realised he
was late getting back to heaven. He left in such a hurry he forgot his hat and
sticks. Locals had long venerated the stones. But come the Cultural Revolution
and its war on superstition, the stones were blown up to be used to for dam.
The material proved to be too porous, and the rubble of the sticks remains.
But the ruin of these relics and the poignant fate of
the Cultural Revolution survivor in the Yi village we had just visited are a
reminder of just how destructive China's recent history has been.
Paradise this is not. There has been more
deforestation in the past 10 years than in the past 100. Ecotourism is supposed
to provide income but illegal logging is more lucrative. The only tense moment
of the trip came on the first day, when I tried to photograph three logs being
carried by a donkey whose owner ran up to stop me. Although logging is
prohibited, we saw many other horses sledging logs out of the Yi village.
The illegal logging is facilitated by a new road built
to Wenhai and up to the Yi area. It was finished only this year and although it
is barely passable to Wenhai and impassable beyond, it sure makes dragging logs
out easier. And we saw an even more destructive practice, a small
charcoal-making works in the hills above Wenhai Lake. Despite a drift to the
city, the population pressures remain intense, here in this corner of rural
China as in so much of the rest of the country.
Tourism has its problems. Still, the litter that the
mobile phone-toting city slickers leave behind isn't as bad as the destruction
wrought by the charcoal-makers and illegal loggers struggling to survive in
this impoverished, fragile land.
For now, it remains as beautiful and exotic as you're
likely to find in China - cigarette butts and all.
If you want to go: Start with the Web site
www.northwestyunnan.com for information on the ecolodge and to arrange a tour
of Wenhai and nearby Lashihai, where 50,000 birds (57 species) stop during the
winter migration season
EDITOR@THESTANDARD.COM.HK
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