“So where are you from?” Jack asked him, breathing more evenly and comfortably now that the perilous climb was behind him.
“Korea,” he said.
“North or South?” Jack inquired.
He looked a little oddly at Jack. “South.”
“What, you don’t get many North Korean tourists here?” I asked our jovial host.
“No,” he said, and laughed. He was spending a month on the mountain, he told us, helping out the owner of the guesthouse.
“It is so beautiful here,” he said. “And so quiet.”
Except for the buzz saw. The guesthouse was expanding. Even up here, you couldn’t escape the thrum of Chinese construction.
The sun had nearly set as we vacuumed our dinner, when in stumbled the fashionable Chinese couple. There was much to surmise. He, I discerned, a young Shanghai businessman. Founder of an environmental NGO perhaps. Someone who valued the natural world—a rarity in China—and wanted to share this world, this majestic scenery, with the woman he loved. She. The Girlfriend. The girlfriend from hell, apparently. I’d seen her riding a donkey up the 24 Bends. She was not in her milieu. And then, once they’d arrived and she’d been apprised of the toilet situation here high above Tiger Leaping Gorge, well…she went completely ballistic. And this was interesting, because now her boyfriend, the tree hugger, the one who had suggested a stirring hike up above Tiger Leaping Gorge, felt compelled to loudly berate the toilet situation up here, dozens of miles from anywhere. He didn’t want this fight. We could tell. But fight he did, loudly, theatrically, in true Chinese fashion, yelling at the owner, who gave as good as he got. They screamed. On and on, into the darkness, beneath the glimmering light of a million stars. Until finally, the last shouts were made, the last curses were uttered, and the doors were slammed.
“They’re nuts,” Jack said. “But I don’t care. I am going to sleep so well tonight.”
There are few things more discombobulating than arising from a slumber and, as you shake the cobwebs loose from your head and try to answer the basic questions—who am I? where am I?—you step out and discover that you are facing a wall of rock, a wall like no other, a wall of Mordor proportions, dark and massive, a forbidding cliff of black stone rising to a cragged, snowcapped peak surrounded by wispy clouds. And a sky so blue that you are left so very awake, so very cognizant of everything around you, that you begin your day in a state of wonder, which is a good way to start a day. I was happy to be here, did not want to be anywhere else but here, somewhere far above the frothing Yangtze, in the mountains, away from everything.
Jack, too, arose in good spirits. Being here, high above Tiger Leaping Gorge, was an accomplishment, particularly for those with a fondness for fries and smokes, and we returned to the trail because that is what we did, walk like Mountain Men among the rocks. We had, I thought, hiked the hard part, conquered the ascent, and only had to follow an even trail until the descent to Walnut Creek, where we would end this hike. But, apparently, our troubles had not yet come to an end.
“Okay, you go first,” I said to Jack.
“Why do I have to go first?” he asked.
We’d reached an impasse, an obstacle. The path had been blocked. By goats.
“Look at the way he’s looking at me,” I said. “The one with the big horns. He has ill intent. I can sense it. And now he senses my sensing his ill intent—a recipe for certain disaster.”
“You’re not quite one with nature, are you?”
“I am one with my nature, and my nature is telling me that I’m about to be rammed by a goat.”
Jack strode boldly forward into this herd of goats, which scattered to the side of the trail. And then the goat, the one with the malevolent intent, returned to the trail, again blocking it. He stared. I stared. And then, resigned, I approached it buttocks first. If I was to be rammed, better from that direction.
“I had no idea you were such a pansy,” Jack said as I joined him on the other side of the herd.
“I am a pansy,” I agreed, “but not enough of a pansy to ride a donkey above Tiger Leaping Gorge.”
And so we walked. Onward along perilous ridges, dusty trails, surrounded by mountains, fearsome mountains—not storybook Alpine mountains, or Let’s Have a Coors Light mountains, but fearsome ones. Chinese mountains. Soon, we found ourselves at the Halfway Guesthouse, where we met the owner, the jocund Mr. Fang, who, after we’d professed our admiration for his accommodations and the fine view, announced that he, too, found his guesthouse and this view to be “smashingly good.” He had with him a copy of the book Himalaya, by Michael Palin. A backpacker had left it with him, and he wanted to know what exactly Michael Palin had to say about the Halfway Guesthouse.
“Well,” said Jack as he skimmed the chapter on Tiger Leaping Gorge. “He says that you have an exceptionally fine toilet.”
“Smashing,” said Mr. Fang.
“Oh, and you might want to read this,” he said, handing me the book. “Go on,” he urged. “Read it out loud.”
I looked at the page. The trek continues north clinging to the side of a rock face, the Yangtze a boiling froth 4,000 feet below. At one point a sizeable waterfall comes bouncing off the rocks above us, and we have to pick our way beneath over fifty yards of wet stone…
“Mr. Fang, do you have any jobs for Maarten here? He can clean.”
…the stony, slippery path reaches its narrowest point…
“All right,” I said. “This is where I turn around.”
And yet we did not turn around. We ventured forth. Ever onward. Until we came to a rush of tumbling water plunging over a cliff roughly thirty feet above.
“Do you think this is it?” I asked Jack.
“Could be,” he said. “If it is, they’ve built a bridge since Michael Palin came through.”
“Look. It’s very clear. You can see it. That’s where the trail used to go,” I noted, pointing to a trail that ended in the water. “And now they’ve built a little bridge that avoids it. Yes. Excellent. No problem.”
And so we walked on, mirthfully, in good humor, confident now that the beast known as the high trail above Tiger Leaping Gorge had been slayed. Whereupon we rounded the corner to see cliffs everywhere, a narrow trail—possibly four feet across—and below us, thousands of feet of air, empty air…and then we saw it.
“Okay,” Jack observed. “So we were wrong,”
It was indeed a big waterfall, fifty feet across, and it cascaded upon a trail of mossy stones before plummeting thousands of feet into an abyss of rock. It was a Certain Death kind of waterfall, one misstep and it’s over. No waddling around in corsets. Boom. Over. Done.
“I think I might turn around now,” I said. “I would rather walk for two days than cross that waterfall.”
But continue we did. We had come this far, after all. I made no attempt to stay dry. I crab-walked through it, heart palpitating, pants soaked, looking at nothing else but where I placed my feet and hands. The wet moss was slippery, and as I inched my way forward I felt like I was playing some horrifying game of twister. I’d never been more nervous in my life. People do slip. I’d slipped. I did not want to slip again. Ever.
Finally, we were off that cliff and we began our downward descent, gleeful, until we could see at the bottom of a rugged escarpment the village of Walnut Grove. Few places have elicited more ecstatic ramblings than this village near the terminus of the high trail at Tiger Leaping Gorge. So remote for so long, Walnut Grove was once the place to be in China to experience that remote, I’m-in-a-beautiful-setting-in-a-charming-Chinese-village-without-electricity-or-telephones-though-there-is-beer vibe. It’s what everyone yearns for in western China: authenticity mixed with beer. Today, however, Walnut Grove is essentially a truck stop. There is a low trail through Tiger Leaping Gorge, and whereas once it was a footpath, today it is a two-lane road, upon which tour buses and taxis and minibuses shuttle Chinese tourists to the very rock from which the tiger had made its leap. The road had finally
reached Walnut Grove, transforming a hamlet of Naxis and backpackers into just another chintzy town of cement-block hotels and souvenir shops.
But while the road followed the low trail, it’s all relative at Tiger Leaping Gorge. We’d made arrangements with a minibus driver to take us back from Walnut Grove to Qiaotou, where we’d left our packs, and as we sped over this road, hundreds of feet above the Yangtze, I noted the lack of guardrails, and the enormous potholes, and the huge boulders that had tumbled from above, and the fact that that the driver, driving one-handed as he barked into a cell phone, was of the Fuck You school of driving, and I made a mental note that however I got into Tibet, where I hoped to go soon, it would not be by car because it would combine so much of what I feared in China: heights and driving. And I saw that this mountain was looking to dislodge this road from its slopes, wanted nothing to do with it, and I thought there might be hope yet for Walnut Grove. Perhaps one day it would again be a simple hamlet. Because the road was evaporating, disappearing, tossed down into the river by a spiteful mountain.
When we arrived back at Jane’s Guesthouse, it was too late to go anywhere else. One would think that as the village at the trailhead of the famed Tiger Leaping Gorge there would be some charm in Qiaotou. Or at least something to do. But this turned out to not be the case. It was drab and dull, though as we found a restaurant overlooking the river, we noticed all the trash floating in the water, heaps of it, a colorful antidote to all this natural beauty, a depressive actually. No one would approach us to serve us, however, and so we moved across the street to a simple restaurant where we pointed at the dishes of other patrons.
“It’s kind of a dump here,” Jack observed.
“Yes, it is. But you know what? Tomorrow we’ll be in Shangri-la.”
In 1933, James Hilton published the novel Lost Horizon, a story about four people who, after their plane had crashed somewhere high in the snowcapped mountains of the Himalayas, found themselves led by an enigmatic Chinese man to the mythical wonderland of Shangri-la, a peaceful paradise in “the valley of the blue moon.” Where was this Shangri-la? people wondered. Some said it was in Tibet, others in Sichuan Province, while still others claimed that Shangri-la is actually in Pakistan. Xuen Ke, the Naxi bandleader, believes Lijiang is the true Shangri-la. But the Chinese government said No. You’re all wrong. Shangri-la can be found in Zhongdian, a town located on the finger of Yunnan that thrusts up into Tibet. Indeed, the government was so confident in its assertion that in 2001 they officially changed the name of Zhongdian to Shangri-la, leading some to point out that Shangri-la was always, in fact, a fictional place.
Nevertheless, the vaunted Shangri-la—a place of beauty and harmony—sets a very high bar as a choice destination for travelers who just happen to be wandering through China. So we resolved to visit this Shangri-la before Jack left to return to Hong Kong and then home, if only because we were so eager to get out of Qiaotou, a place, we discovered, notable for its barking dogs—dogs that barked through the night, relentlessly—bark, bark, bark, all night long.
The next day, we hopped into this minivan bound for Zhongdian. It was not at all like the spacious and comfortable minivans in the United States, but more like a toy minivan, made of tin, the tiny sort of vehicle that clowns would crowd into. The driver was a sane driver, possibly because the engine was no more powerful than a lawn mower’s, and we chugged up the hills at a speed of approximately twenty-seven miles per hour, heading ever higher into the mountains, paying tolls at tollbooths staffed by soldiers, until finally, we emerged upon a vast, desolate plateau spotted with large open wooden farmhouses. And to my delight I saw that there were yaks, huge shaggy yaks. A yak is a ruminant’s ruminant, the king of the bovine. We’d entered a region that was predominantly Tibetan in population, which explained the presence of yaks. With their immense horns and considerable size, they are intimidating, and yet in Tibet people not only use them to plow fields but they also race yaks. There is such a thing as yak racing.
Somewhere upon this plateau, we pulled into a dusty village, where we were joined by a gaggle of Tibetans: four, six, eight, nine. And soon there were twelve of us in a tiny bus designed to carry no more than four. We sat in laps. We stood. And we laughed, because it’s funny to be in an overcrowded minivan made of tin. Our fellow passengers were very friendly in their colorful dress. Or, rather, their clothes would have been colorful if not so dirty. One by one, they broke into song, and as we rolled along, singing the Tibetan songs of yore, Jack and I doing our best to join in, all seemed good.
If there is a stranger place to call Shangri-la than Zhongdian, I cannot image it. It’s a dirty frontier town, a place with a heavy military and Communist Party presence. And it sits near the edge of China, in a region largely populated by Tibetans, a place where the powers that be in Beijing seemed distant, and so to overcome this distance, Beijing manifests itself in Shangri-la with soldiers and ugly, boxy buildings of bureaucrats, functionaries, and Party officials. It was, of course, convenient to call Zhongdian Shangri-la. There was not a quicker way to turn a town near the Tibetan Autonomous Region into a Han Chinese city than by dangling the lure of money. And the name itself, with all its connotations of wonder and mystery and beauty, is nothing but a business opportunity.
But there was no wonder or mystery or beauty here. What had remained of the old village of Zhongdian had been swallowed by a scruffy Han city notable for its plethora of karaoke bars. Even the setting was uninspiring. I had expected that at the very least, the bare minimum, Shangri-la would be surrounded by soaring mountains, towering eminences dusted with snow. But this was not the case. There were merely a few scrubby, barren hills. True, these were 11,000-foot hills, far higher than most of the mountains in the Sierra Nevada. But when viewed from our current elevation of 9,500 feet, they looked scrubby, barren, and, well, decidedly small.
“So this is Shangri-la,” Jack said once we’d adjusted to the altitude. “It reminds me of Butte, Montana.”
The most intriguing part of the city, when we finally reached it, was the old town. This is because it was brand new. In the center of the city, where there was once a typical Tibetan village, we found hundreds of workers busy building a quaint replica of a Tibetan village. And here, too, there were many doors for sale, scuffed and dulled to make them look weathered and old. In the shops, there was Tibetan this and Tibetan that, knickknacks and leather cowboy hats like Jack’s, most likely made in a factory in Guangdong. We watched as, on cue, ruddy-faced dancers arrived on the old town square and gathered the Chinese tourists, held hands with them, and showed them how to dance Tibetan style. A small garbage truck drove by, announcing its presence with music, just like an ice-cream truck. Nearby, up a small hill and through an alley of shit—human shit, mind you, left there by the workers constructing the new Shangri-la—we made our way to a massive golden prayer wheel, which was being turned by dozens of devotees. They were Tibetan Buddhists, and we lingered for a while watching them turn this wheel. It was but a glimpse of what lay to the north. And it would be as close as Jack would get to Tibet.
The next day, we found ourselves in the bus station in Shangri-la, surrounded by men who flashed covetous, cunning looks at our belongings. It was here that Jack and I would part ways.
“Just break the trip down into parts,” I advised him. “A bus to Lijiang. You remember what Lijiang looked like, right? It’s full of Naxis. Then a plane to Guangzhou, and from there a train to Hong Kong. And you’ll have about forty-eight hours to do this if you want to catch your flight.”
Jack stared at me blankly.
“Do you want me to go ahead and file the missing-persons report now, or should I wait a couple of days?” I asked him.
“I think you can go ahead and do it now.”
When the bus arrived it was, as always, a scene of grim chaos as dozens of people scrambled for seats. Jack turned to me. “I don’t envy you. I’ve got some serious China fatigue.”
But I envied me. I was goi
ng to Tibet.
17
As everyone knows, Tintin in Tibet is far and away the best Tintin book ever conjured by the mind of Hergé, the Belgian writer and illustrator. As a young lad living next door in Holland, I did what all Dutch boys did: I wore wooden shoes, I put mayonnaise on my French fries, and I read Tintin. As I followed Tintin as he skipped from calamity to calamity around the world, these illustrated adventure books (do not even think of calling them comics) offered me my first glimpse of the world beyond the dikes. And Tintin in Tibet was the most outstanding book of them all. Oh sure, there are still some who claim that The Blue Lotus or even Cigars of the Pharaoh represent the apogee of Herge’s work. But they are wrong.
Tintin in Tibet begins with a plane crash. So, too, did James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. It makes you think. It made me think. It’s so easy to crash an airplane into the Himalayas, that vast mountain range stretching from Pakistan to Sichuan Province, a geological testament to the pushiness of the Indian subcontinent as it continues to slide into Asia. I’d once seen a T-shirt that said STOP CONTINENTAL DRIFT! But it cannot be stopped. Nothing can be done. The Indian subcontinent wants to be part of Asia. And we can only get out of the way. And it is all for the good—this long, interminable crashing and grinding of landmasses has given us some mighty fine mountains. Here, in the Himalayas, we have the highest mountains in the world. There is Everest, of course, coming in just a shade under 30,000 feet. But there are many, many other mountains in Tibet itself that reach up into the Death Zone, that breathless area surrounded by snow and rock where human beings are not meant to go.
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