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Outside Summer Traveler 2005

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China's Yunnan
The East's Wild West (cont.)


	From left: herding yak along the Shangri-La Gorge; cigarette break; the village of Jinghong, on the Mekong River; entering Beijing's Forbidden City (Joshua Paul)

THE TREK STARTED at an iron bridge that Mao Zedong's ragtag troupe of peasant soldiers reportedly crossed in 1935 in the middle of its 6,000-mile Long March. We hiked north through peach orchards and tiny villages of two-story packed-earth homes with beautifully carved wooden windows. During the summer, from June to September, monsoon rains sweep up from India and wildflowers poke through, but in March, only prickly pear cactuses and the cobalt-blue river enhanced the red-earth landscape. We were at almost 7,000 feet, but at this latitude,

"Shangri-La means 'moon and sun,' " a woman said. "No, No, No," another cut her off. "Shangri-La means 'people have good hearts.' When strangers come, they welcome them."

28 degrees—the same as Tampa, Florida's—the temperature was a perfect 72, warm enough for shorts and T-shirts. We took our time, stopping to look at a pile of stones with Buddhist prayers carved into them and to talk with farmers tending a barley field. We met a 46-year-old man whose face was as furrowed as a freshly tilled field. He told us that he had once seen a snow leopard, one of the world's most endangered and elusive animals, while out hunting on a nearby mountain. He didn't shoot. "It was too beautiful," he explained.

By the time we reached our first camp, under a stand of pines by the river, the sun was almost gone. But China's eight yuan to the dollar affords luxuries, and while we played, our guide, a 29-year-old Tibetan painter named Lobsang Tsultrem, pushed ahead with three packhorses and pitched our tents. We sat down to dinner—fried mushrooms, pork seared with red chilies, green beans roasted with garlic—and then huddled around a fire while Lobsang explained the practice of Tibetan sky burial. After death, he told us, bodies are fed to vultures, partly as a final sacrifice but also to bond with nature. "The birds fly to the highest mountains," Lobsang said. "So people are returned to the most holy places."

The next morning we crossed the river and slipped into a forest of evergreens and rhododendrons. Northwestern Yunnan is home to about 165 species of these colorful flowers, and in May and June, the best time to hike, the blossoms explode.

Less obvious but just as real were the ghosts and gods of the mountain people. With his broad, boyish grin, Lobsang pointed to a stone spire that rose hundreds of feet into the air. "That's the daughter of Mount Balagezong," he said. "Her father forced her to marry a man she didn't love. So she fled. That stone is where she hid."



	Left: The Gonju River flowing through the Shangri-La Gorge; Right: open-air offerings in the village of Bala (Joshua Paul)

Lobsang told us other mind-boggling tales—of couples drinking from a holy spring reputed to guarantee conception, and how a demon tormented locals for centuries until a benevolent god killed it—but there wasn't much time to think about the spiritual world. On the second day, 12 miles into the 16-mile trek, we began to climb. In some places the Hengduans rise thousands of feet over a few miles. After five minutes my shirt was soaked.

Luckily, paradise was waiting. At the top of the ridge, we arrived in Bala village, population 90. Chickens, donkeys, and pigs milled around between houses with large open-air courtyards, and I sat with a group of old women and asked them why the valley is named Shangri-La.

"Shangri-La means 'moon and sun,' " one said.

"No, no, no," another cut her off. "Shangri-La means 'people have good hearts.' When strangers come, they welcome them." For me, the view of steep, snowy peaks, festive prayer flags, and distant pine forests was plenty paradisiacal.

The next day we followed a dirt trail into an old-growth forest festooned with strings of fluorescent-green lichen that looked like tinsel. We hit snow at 10,000 feet, and the rest of the hike was the best kind of slog, as we picked our way between rocks, occasionally sinking to our knees.

In two hours we were sitting amid the ruins of a village that Lobsang said was sacked several generations ago, in a Tibetan version of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. It was hard to imagine Tibetans massacring one another in such a remote place, surrounded by 17,000-foot mountains that have never been summited. But the scattered stone blocks from the houses attested to the violence. The ghost town was a reality check: Paradise, it whispered, is fleeting. Which means it can also be momentarily perfect.

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