View of Tiger Leaping Gorge from the hiker’s trail.

“Man man shou shi” called the bronzed and leathery man with a crew cut and a donkey as he waited for me to stuff my sweater in my backpack. He was telling me to take my time, as he was planning on following me. Since embarking on the trail winding along Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan Province, I had slowly peeled off the top three layers of clothing I had worn in anticipation of frigid mountain air. Betraying my background as a not-at-one-with-nature New Yorker, I found myself ascending a mountain as the daytime temperature rose rapidly. The jacket and two fleeces went first, followed by the wool sweater, but there was little I could do about the long underwear, at least not with the donkey man following closely behind.

The man tailing me was patiently waiting for me to collapse on the trail. He hoped that I would subsequently avail myself of his donkey and allow him to carry me in a formless, sweaty mass for the rest of the trip. Of course, this made me all the more determined to continue on the narrow, rocky footpath, wishing to match the ruggedness of my surroundings.

Below, the steep shoulders of the green mountain range shrugged into a glistening strip of the Yangtze. Yet as the trail grew steeper, I found myself hardly noticing the majestic scenery and instead focusing on my feet, gingerly feeling around for a firm foothold amid sand, pebbles, and gnarled vegetation. As my hiking companion pulled further ahead and disappeared around the sharp twists, the man stayed a few paces behind and offered the donkey for 10 Renminbi (approximately US$1.25).

“Do I look like I’m about to give up?” I grumbled as I shifted my weight from rock to rock, my knees growing increasingly numb with each step.

“Just about,” he replied. Partially in recognition of my exhaustion and partially to distract myself from the uphill battle as we approached the steepest portion of the trail, known to backpackers as the Twenty-eight Bends, I began to bargain with him. By the time we embarked on the first few bends, I had already talked him down to five Kuai. I’m aware that this amounts to a discount of about 60 cents, but I share the shameless disdain for getting ripped off of many other foreigners It’s not so much a matter of money, but of dignity; no one wants to be the sucker, and no one wants to be the stupid laowai who gets cheated. But perhaps our tenacity in haggling stems from our paranoia that being tricked is unavoidable — and indeed, sort of a right of passage here.

I allowed the donkey to carry my backpack, but remained determined to make all Twenty-eight Bends by foot, or hands and knees if need be. I continued talking with him as he rode the donkey with my pack on his back. Whereas other guides I had encountered at Chinese tourist destinations were mainly desperately impoverished villagers, he was surprisingly cosmopolitan compared to his humble surroundings. He was a miner by trade, since in his area, few people could rely solely on farming for income. He had two children in college and one in the army. The company he worked for had taken him to several Chinese cities on business and once to Thailand as a reward for his hard work.

“I haven’t been to America, though,” he said.

His “been there, done that” tone indicated that, having been outside the country, America didn’t hold the same fascination for him that it did for other Chinese, or maybe that he at any rate preferred Yunnan to any place abroad.

The homes we passed on the trail were scattered, drab brick huts with tile roofs overlooking terrace-farmed crops. I had trouble imagining that any of the inhabitants would leave Yunnan — one of the poorest provinces in China — in their lifetimes, but I suppose the donkey escort, along with the satellite dish hanging over a pair of old women shelling walnuts by the roadside, proved that the villages flanking the Tiger Leaping Gorge trail were as unpredictable as the terrain.

After about an hour of protracted agony, we reached the top of the Twenty-eight Bends, the apex of the trail, whereupon Donkey Man gruffly deemed me lihai or “powerful” and said he was impressed that I made it up by myself.  We edged down to a cliff overlooking the Gorge, where we were greeted by a scruffy villager who took “toll money” from those who used the path to the cliff, which he supposedly built himself.

Liberated from my oppressive layers and most unforgiving chunk of the trail, I could finally take in my surroundings. In the afternoon sun, the Jin Sha Jiang, or Golden Sand River spun a mercury thread between the bases of two chunks of velvety green and gray rock, the Jade Snow Mountain and the Dragon Snow Mountain. The Gorge’s namesake refers to a spunky tiger, the head honcho of the animal kingdom in Chinese myth who made the only successful dash in history across the 3,000-meter deep cleft. Since then, dozens of mortals (that is, overconfident Westerners) have misstepped into the depths of the Yangtze and floated into backpacker lore.

But the footprints that dotted the path before us were evidence that, the hike, which followed the precarious curves of an old miner’ trail, is becoming increasingly manageable, barring extremely bad fortune. The path varies in width from about two knees wide to just large enough for a local farmer and his cows to cross as the American tourist awkwardly yields onto the grassy shoulder. We passed only two other hikers in two days, so it seemed for a while that we had happened upon a place in Yunnan not yet invaded by the tourist industry. However, there were signs that the pristine trail had been deflowered since the rise of the Lonely Planet series. The farmers on the path were not surprised to see foreigners but rather smiled in amusement at hikers striving to “chi ku” or “eat bitter,” with the masochistic trek. The yellow and red arrows directing hikers where to go and marking the distance to various guesthouses (Woody’s, Tina’s, Sean’s) also betrayed the fact that the gorge had long since become an official destination.

Local tourist industry workers: the donkey man and toll collector.

Necessary self-deceptions

In 1997, Salon.com ran an article entitled “The Tragedy of Tiger Leaping Gorge,” by Simon Winchester, in which the English travel writer lamented that civilization was threatening to trample the natural treasures of the gorge.

“There is electricity,” he wrote. “There is talk of telephones. I saw a satellite dish.”
He recorded one villager’s gloomy prediction: “Soon … there will be no more walkers, only cars that will speed through the gorge in a matter of minutes. There will probably before long be a proper hotel in Walnut Grove, not the cozy inn that exists today, and it will no doubt take credit cards, and in its rooms will be color televisions that show CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV.”

Thankfully, six years later, the Gorge has not yet been totally ravaged by tourists, perhaps because the local industry self-regulates its development to keep things charmingly “rustic.” Yet we were not disappointed that our Naxi host at the Tea Horse Guesthouse knew how to make omelets (though the walnut pancakes we requested more closely resembled a plate-sized muffin). The menu, written in English on bamboo slats, also offered hot cocoa, oatmeal, and banana crepes alongside the traditional Naxi baba flatbread. And although CNN doesn’t reach most television sets in rural China, we spent the evening watching Chinese soap operas in our hostess’s living room.

The manager of the guesthouse, a contemporary Naxi matriarch, decided to open her own business when she realized that her house was perfectly situated at the point where many exhausted hikers, en route to other guesthouses, expired and came to her for a warm bed. Tea Horse is apparently the only true Naxi bed-and-breakfast on the trail; the rest, explained our host as she cooked dinner over a country-style wok about a meter wide, are now run by Han people who have settled in the area. Of course, cultural authenticity is a malleable concept when it comes to accommodating guests. Clad in gold hoop earrings and a traditional headdress, she giggled as she offered us a local specialty, Yunnan marijuana leaves in a white teapot.

In the morning, my New Yorker hamstrings still tender from the day before, I was thankful for the few Western amenities we were afforded, including a trickle of running water, before setting off on the remainder of the trail. Our route for the second half of the trail, mostly descending, hugged the craggy mountainside, snaking parallel to the sparkling rapids below. We were undisturbed except for the occasional goat or dog encroaching on our path, and the telephone poles that cut into our camera viewfinders.

As we approached Walnut Grove, the trail merged with a highway at the construction site for a bridge designed to reduce the great tiger leap over the Yangtze to a bumpy four-minute crossing by truck or taxi. But Walnut Grove, unlike Winchester’s grave premonition, was not replete with four-star hotels. It was rather a quaint example of the kind of rural prosperity that the Chinese government is trying to promote in the Western part of the country: lush green terrace farms, simple but well-kept stone homes with fluted tile roofs, and the fresh construction of glossy wooden houses inspired by ancient Naxi architecture. Winchester may have denounced the Gorge’s fall from sublime isolation, but for a peasant family who can put their children through college selling soft drinks to backpackers, the tourist industry is not only a welcome element of modernity; it may be the only chance to clamber at the wealth that the Reform Era has promised the masses.

Again, I encountered the ambiguous footprint of legions of backpackers, who like me sought the singular delights of Yunnan’s mountain landscapes but were not quite willing to admit that the experience was now hardly unique. The wooden signs on the road advertising the town’s guesthouses boasting cold beer and the only Western-style toilet in Walnut Grove did somewhat puncture the lofty pride I felt for having completed the two-day trek. Then again, I might not have completed the journey were it not for the small — yet upon closer examination, not so subtle — comforts that capitalism’s invasion of this once-virgin territory afforded me.

Likewise, if the journey had been any rougher, I’m not sure an urbanite like myself would have been able to appreciate thoroughly the sweeping beauty of the gorge. For the momentary pleasure of conquering the trail, I figured it was worth the slight shame of deceiving myself slightly with the idea of being a true adventurer. Like being duped out of a few kuai by local peddlers, harmless falsities can produce true emotional rewards. The idea is just to let go. The Gorge had been christened by many before me, but in my mind, the green terraces of Walnut Grove were the picture of the Yunnan countryside’s pre-Liberation nubility.

The only true Tiger Leaping Gorge purists may be the idealistic Westerners wrestling with the liberal guilt of their complicity in the tourist industry. The locals didn’t seem to mind, as long as every flapjack they flipped was the equivalent of a deposit in their children’s college savings account. Incidentally, the villager Winchester quoted in 1997, “a kindly man whom passers-by had once named Woody,” is now the proud owner of “Chateau de Woody,” a guesthouse noted in every backpacker guidebook for its charming vistas and Western snacks. The sign outside proclaims a motto befitting the backpacker subculture: “Eat. Drink. Live.” A simple plan for a corner of the world that is growing as complex as it is beautiful.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > ECONOMICS>

“Tourism Helps Boost Yunnan Economy”
Article by Feng Yikun
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/english/China/37548.htm

“An assessment of economic development policy in Yunnan Province”
Article by Andrew Watson, China Representative of the Ford Foundation
URL: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/china/AWP.html

TOPICS > PLACES >

“The Tragedy of Tiger Leaping Gorge”
Article by Simon Winchester
URL: http://www.salon.com/june97/wanderlust/china970610.html

China.org.cn’s report on Yunnan Province
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/e-xibu/2JI/3JI/yunnan/yunnan-ban.htm

TOPICS > PEOPLE >

The Han people
URL: http://countrystudies.us/china/41.htm

The Naxi people
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/e-groups/shaoshu/shao-2-naxi.htm

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Michelle Chen