Himalaya (2004)

by Michael Palin

  At Quiaotou, a few miles downstream from Shigu, they’re pushing an ambitious new road through the gorge. This will be the easy option: the Low Road, but we’re going to walk the High Road, a trekker’s trail that clings to the sheer side of the mountain. Our guide, Li Yuan, is a tall, stooped figure with close-cropped, greying hair and a livid scar running down one side of his face. He has six horses to carry our equipment. They’re waiting patiently on the edge of town, tiny specks beside an army of bulldozers and earth movers. Adding a touch of surreality, women of the local Yi minority step daintily through the rubble on their way to market, dressed in sweepingly long, bright dresses, huge silver earrings and square, black hats, perched, like mortarboards, on the back of their heads.

  We purchase tickets for the two-day walk from a small tourist centre beside which is a map of where we’re going and a warning in English that ‘Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the most dangerous gorges in the world which is not convenient to sail’, before concluding poetically, ‘However there is a kind of beauty making of magnificence tugging of people’s heartstrings’.

  Before we can have our heartstrings tugged, we have to survive a mile-long walk along the road out of town, as coaches swish by, stirring up clouds of dust. As we cough our way along in their wake, we can at least feel morally superior to the bus-bound tourist and soon we can feel physically superior as well, as our track winds up the hillside and the road slips out of sight below. We climb steadily upwards through scrubby woodland with big views of the southern end of the gorge unrolling below. Following a stone-built irrigation channel, we arrive at a farmhouse, in whose courtyard we loosen our boots and sit down at a table set with bowls of walnuts, sunflower seeds and crisp, delicious pears as round as apples.

  The farm also has rooms and is run by Li Yuan’s wife. Like him she is quietly efficient, attentive and smiles a lot. She’s also a fine cook, providing us with a sumptuous lunch of rice, fresh mushrooms, liver and green chillies, kidney, pork, tomato and egg and a bowl full of quivering grey tubes that no-one touches.

  They’re both from the Naxi (pronounced Na-hee) people, one of the rich mix of ethnic minorities in Yunnan.

  Lunch is easily walked off on a thigh-stretchingly steep climb known as the 28 Bends. Trudging upwards in a tight zigzag, I count off each one carefully and still find another 20 left at the end. The reward is a long, level pathway following an old trade route along which horses from Tibet were exchanged for tea from Yunnan. It leads through warm slopes of camphor, bamboo and pine, across a stream, then downhill through a grove of walnut trees. By now the valley has become a gorge, and I have to concentrate carefully on the increasingly narrow and precipitous trail. It’s narrow and the drop precipitous. Far below are the angry, white-whipped waters of the Yangtze, dropping 700 feet (213 m) in a dozen miles. A lethal series of 21 rapids took many lives before two Chinese made the first passage of the river in 1986, entirely encased in a sealed rubber capsule. Sometimes the water is so far away and so hemmed in by mountainside that we can only guess at its ferocity from the distant roar.

  As the evening light slants across the gorge a terrific panorama unfolds. On the other side of the gorge the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains, easternmost bastions of the Himalaya, rise in a series of smooth columns, sinuous ravines and needle-sharp pinnacles, their dark grey sides streaked with waterfalls. What makes this place different from Annapurna, Everest, even the Karakoram, is that the tremendous height is so close. When I stop on a narrow ledge to look around me, I find myself having to plant my feet very securely, for it feels as if the soaring vertical walls across the gorge are exerting some magnetic force, determined to tear me from my flimsy ledge.

  No-one speaks now, and as we plod onwards round the mountainside, silenced by the sheer scale of the place, there is only the reassuring sound of the horse bells, and the distant hiss of the river unthinkably far below.

  It’s dark by the time we reach Bendi Wan village and an overnight stop at a place called The Halfway House, run by the redoubtable Mr Feng De Fang. I’ve felt rather Hobbit-like for the past hour, as the scenery increasingly grew to resemble a Lord of the Rings backdrop, and the feeling that I might have morphed into Frodo Baggins is only increased as we pull the doorbell in the dim, lantern-lit entrance and are shown into a stone-flagged courtyard hung with gourds, pumpkins and stacks of drying corncobs.

  Mr Feng is a slim to cadaverous young man, quietly busying round and making sure we have a warm fire to sit beside, and from his dark barn of a kitchen he and his wife produce an excellent meal of pork and fresh-picked wild mushrooms.

  There’s a small, very hot shower down below and the rooms are like those in an old alpine chalet - cosy, cool and with very thin walls.

  Kept awake by a noisy game of Chinese chequers on the balcony below, I bundle myself up in the duvet and tot up the day’s work. A 12-mile walk, a 2500-foot climb and, apart from the quivering grey things, two of the best meals since we started out all those months ago.

  Day Seventy Seven : Tiger Leaping Gorge

  On the steps leading down to the lavatory of The Halfway House a wooden board is nailed up with a Chinese inscription that translates as ‘Number One Toilet in Heaven and Earth’. As a bit of a connoisseur, I put this ambitious claim to the test. I can report a plain and simple squat toilet, in a room half open to the elements and cantilevered out over the mountainside, with a narrow, angled channel running away into the garden below. Once in the crouch position, however, the real beauty of this little facility becomes apparent. The land seems to fall away, and all that can be seen are the walls and saw-tooth peaks of Ha Ba Snow Mountain on the other side of the gorge. In normal circumstances I’m out of these places as fast as I can, but here, feeling myself suspended above the earth, halfway to the realm of the gods, I am tempted to linger long after my work is done.

  This morning an ethereal mist lingers over the mountains, making breakfast on the terrace a chilly affair. Mr Feng De Fang produces coffee or green tea, walnuts, pancakes with smooth local honey, scrambled egg and fresh apple pie in a crisp batter.

  We sit and eat too much and look out over the terraced fields below, where beans, sweet corn and wheat defy the forces of gravity and an odd mixture of walnut and palm trees cluster around farm buildings whose stone walls are set solid and sturdy against earthquake impact.

  It’s a serenely calming view, timeless save for a mobile phone inside a doctored mineral water bottle which hangs out over the balcony on the end of a stick. I ask Mr Feng if they keep it out there for security reasons but he says no, it’s the only place they can get reception.

  Mr Feng speaks good English, which he says he learnt from British hikers on their way through. Maybe this accounts for the fact that, as we have a group photo taken, he encourages us all with shouts of ‘Lovely jubbly!’

  The track continues north, clinging to the side of the rock face, the Yangtze a boiling froth 4000 feet (1220 m) below. At one point a sizeable waterfall comes bouncing off the rocks above us and we have to pick our way beneath it, over 50 yards of wet stones. I’m most concerned about the horses but they’re a lot more sure-footed than I am; perhaps there isn’t such a thing as equine vertigo.

  The stony, slippery path reaches its narrowest point. The other side of the gorge looms so close that perhaps a tiger might just have made it after all.

  Then we’re descending fast on steep and potentially lethal tracks of crumbling, chalky rock past bulky rhododendron bushes.

  An almost unstoppable momentum delivers us eventually to the river as it emerges from the gorge. It’s 100 yards wide here and the jade-green stream twists and turns and eddies and swirls between banks of bleached brown boulders. We’ve been told that a ferry crosses here but it seems highly unlikely. There are no moorings or jetties and the water looks decidedly tricky.

  Then I make out some movement on the far bank and a small, steel-hulled boat emerges from beneath the shadow of a colossal overhang and, after taking the current in
a wide arc, runs in towards us and docks by ramming its stern hard up between the rocks. Painted lettering on a metal arch at one end of the boat announces it to be the ‘Tiger Leaping Gorge Ferry’. We clamber in and a man with a long bamboo pole and the looks and physique of a Spanish gymnast pushes us out onto the Yangtze with a flourish.

  The boat seems very fragile all of a sudden. Its two outboard motors do their best but the current seems in control and swings us downstream beneath the overhang, where it’s very hot and very quiet. For a moment I’m anxious. The power of the river and the power of the boat seem unfairly matched. The looming rock face above us offers no comfort.

  The outboards surge, choke and surge again, but we hold our own against the current and soon we’re grinding up onto a gritty beach.

  An hour later we’ve climbed up to where the vehicles are waiting and I look back at the Yangtze, silvery in the twilight and calm and serene now after the trauma of the gorge, and I turn my back on it with a pang of regret.

  Day Seventy Nine : Lugu Lake

  There are 26 officially recognized nationalities within Yunnan, the most ethnically diverse province in China, and this morning, after a drive over the mountains and through gentle foothills spotted with Yi farms, we’re entering the homeland of the Mosuo, who, like the Yi, are primarily Tibetan in origin. Their numbers are small, around 36,000, and are concentrated around a lake that straddles the border with Sichuan Province at a height of nearly 9000 feet (2740 m).

  I’m going to meet Yang Erche Namu, known simply throughout China as Namu, a Mosuo woman who, after winning a national singing contest, ran away from home and found fame and fortune as a singer and later a model in China, Europe and America. Already I’ve had a glimpse of what to expect at Lugu Lake. The tourist authorities, as anxious to bring people to these ethnic areas as they once were to keep them away, have made much of the matrilineal tradition of the Mosuo. A billboard on the way here showed inviting girls in local costume above the slogan ‘Lugu Lake Women’s Kingdom. God Living There’. They meant ‘Good Living’ but for the men who troop out to the lake in search of liberated ladies it comes to the same thing. The irony is that there aren’t enough Mosuo women willing to live up to this hype and they have had to import Han Chinese sex workers masquerading as Mosuo to satisfy the demand.

  It seems to be working. With 60,000 tourists visiting Lugu last year, the lakeside village of Luoshi has become a boom town, with property prices rising as fast as the multistorey, log cabin-style hotels.

  Today the waterfront has an out-of-season feel to it as I set out to find a boat to take me to the hotel Namu has just opened on the other side of the lake. A few tourists are out photographing each other, an elderly Mosuo woman walks beside the water, spinning her prayer wheel, and a line of little black piglets trots out from beneath the timber-framed buildings. In almost every shop, whether it’s selling groceries, Mosuo jewellery or tourist tat, there is a stack of Namu’s books and CDs. She’s prominent on all the covers, her trademark dark hair centre-parted and framing her face mysteriously, like a half-open curtain. She displays a range of personas: Namu looking ruminative, Namu looking beguiling, Namu looking distant, Namu showing a shapely, fish-netted thigh. She certainly looks like someone who’s outgrown Lugu Lake.

  A canoe paddles me across to a wooden jetty on which Namu is waiting to welcome me. Grabbing at the steps and clambering a little clumsily upwards, I already feel she has the advantage over me, and a kiss on the cheek followed instantly by the buzz of her mobile confirms that.

  Her hotel, built on the site of an apple orchard, only opened four months ago. It resembles a Wild West fort. A walled outer yard leads to a pine log facade with tall double doors that open onto a courtyard, enclosed on all sides by two floors of accommodation. Between phone calls Namu escorts me, effusively, into a dimly lit room with a flagging wood fire at one end, a huge television at the other and, somewhere in the middle, the sewn-up, cured carcass of a pig. She insists on butter tea for us all, ‘made by my mother’, fiddles with the TV remote until she finds a pop video for us all to watch, then, with a lingering flutter of her big dark eyes, disappears to deal with a group of her fans who are staying here tonight.

  My timber-clad room is draughty and bitterly cold, and Namu’s fans are in celebratory mood, drinking down in the courtyard and committing Karaoke, very loudly, until the wee small hours. Eventually, they stagger to bed and I hear doors slamming shut. Unfortunately, they’re noisier asleep than they ever were awake and snoring that must be seven or eight on the Richter scale shakes my pine-clad peace. Around dawn I fall into a deep sleep, from which I’m woken by the sound of fierce and powerful expectoration.

  Day Eighty : Lugu Lake

  I’m becoming quite endeared to Namu’s superstar pretensions, partly because she’s so unashamedly open about them and partly because I’m pretty sure that deep down she knows it’s all a game.

  Joshua, a Beijing-based American journalist, is following her around. She introduces him with an airy wave of the hand.

  ‘He’s doing a story on the real Namu,’ she says, without much enthusiasm.

  We talk at breakfast about the strength of superstition in modern China. Joshua lives on the fourth floor of his building in Beijing, because the number four is considered unlucky and so the apartment is correspondingly cheap. Eight, on the other hand, is auspicious, and mobile phone numbers with eight in them are only available at a premium.

  He sees I’m reading Namu’s book about her childhood, Leaving Mother Lake, and we talk about the world it describes: a society that has no words for husband, wife, marriage or virginity; in which women make all the decisions about who they go with and who they stay with. A man may be an azhu, a close male friend, but that’s as close as they get to any form of marital obligation. They practise Zouhun, ‘walking marriage’, in which a man and a woman may spend the night together, but he walks back to his own home in the morning. Couples share neither ties nor possessions. Women inherit all the property and bring up the children.

  We’re interrupted by Namu’s piercing voice, rising from the courtyard.

  ‘It is my uncle’s house, we have to bring something!’

  J-P, who wants to film Namu at the childhood home where her uncle and aunt now live, suggests we take some Yunnan ham.

  ‘No!’ barks Namu. ‘Not good enough.’

  A little later, bearing Yunnan ham, augmented with cigarettes, sugar, a bottle of brandy and a bottle of whisky, we’re picking our way across a ploughed field, over a suspicious-looking stream, past a sow with a gaggle of piglets in tow and into a dark, old, smoky, timber farmhouse. In a small courtyard chickens peck away around feeding troughs made from hollowed-out tree trunks. The main room has no windows, only a hole in the roof, whose rafters are coated with thick black grime from the fire. Chitterlings and pigs’ bladders hang from the beams. Smoke-veneered, wooden panels around the sides of the room are hung with celebrity calendars, posters of pop stars, and cut-outs of glamorous ladies. While Nigel lights this atmospheric but gloomy interior, Namu preoccupies herself with her looks, holding up a hand mirror and adding a touch of make-up before producing a pair of clippers from somewhere and trimming her eyelashes. Her aunt, a good-looking woman with a black, turban-like coil on her head, whose sole concern seems to be to provide us with refreshment, puts three large lumps of pork fat in a bowl on the fire and drops tiny pancakes filled with wheat flour into the bubbling mix.

  When we start filming, a black cat nestles down beside me, looking very sweet but tormenting our sound recordist with loud meows at unscheduled times.

  Our talk turns to Namu’s relationship with her mother, which is clearly at the heart of everything that’s happened to her.

  Not only was she not the boy her mother wanted, she was also what she calls ‘a crying baby’, to such an extent that her mother was driven to give her away and she was sent to live with an aunt. At the age of eight she was sent away again, this time to stay with an u
ncle who had lost his loved one in an accident and lived alone with his yaks up in the mountains.

  Namu speaks of this with a nice touch of understatement.

  ‘That was a very interesting time, and very hard. My uncle never speaks and the yak never speaks, so…’ she gives a short, piercing laugh, ‘…so I had a really interesting childhood in the mountains.’

  At 13 she went through the Mosuo woman’s rite of passage, the traditional skirt ceremony.

  ‘The lamas help you choose the day,’ she recalls. ‘And then in the morning, very early, mamma prepared the skirt, beautiful, long, long skirt, and beautiful jacket and hair things and flowers and the key. The key that is the power for you to continue to take care of this matriarchal family.’

  The key fits what they call the Flower Room or Flower Chamber, which was Namu’s first room of her own. From that time onwards she was entitled to choose who she wanted to share her room with.

  Mosuo boys, on the other hand, have to wait until 18 for their freedom, which is marked by a ritual burning of their bed.

  She describes the process of courtship.

  ‘When a man come to your house, normally he leave three things, one belt, one knife, one piece of clothing. If the woman doesn’t want him back any more she lays them outside the door as a sign.’

  ‘What if she decides she’s made a mistake and wants to see him again after all?’ I ask.

  Here it becomes wonderfully Victorian.

  ‘She will ask her grandmother to go to tea with the boy’s grandmother. They will bring like a bamboo box, some chicken meat, some Tibetan momo, some Tibetan wine, and when the lady receive all this she will tell the boy, why don’t you go one more night there.’

  The freedom of choice offered to the girls did not fool Namu. She recognized that it was another way of keeping her tied down, and all her instincts were to break out of the confines of the village and see the world.