Thursday, December 3, 2009

The holy Mountain II







Eventually we approached Deqin. About six kilometers before we arrived in the town, I saw Dewen's new Inn 100' above the road, all alone on the front of a low mountain. They deliberately chose that spot because the view of the Holy moutain from there is overwhelming. The Inn looked really attractive although with the amount of scaffolding and construction equipment around, it appeared to still be a ways from completion.
I went into the wretched little town, which oddly fits completely into the crease of a moutainside. I cannot ever recall seeing a town in a mountain valley quite like that. Because the hotel is not finished, Dewen had instructed me to take a taxi out the opposite side of town to another mountain view area where he and his partners owned a bar and coffee house in the midst of a few other restaurants, hotels, and a Buddhist temple. His bar was kind of a 60's hippie dreamland. It was warm and pleasant and his employees were kind to me and helped me to go down (this is the world of steep, and everything was really down, or really up) to a nearby hotel. Dewen had told me - and sent pictures of the bar's monkey, dog and cat. He really loved the monkey, and all cats and dogs love Dewen as he is himself about 10% monkey, 45% do and 45% cat. But by the time I got to Dali, he told me that his partners had said that the monkey had managed to undo its collar and free itself of its chain and vamoose. They claimed that it came back to eat (the dog's food) and that maybe Dewen could catch it when he came back. I think they were just trying to soften the pain for him and that none of that was true because when I got up there, they were just saying the monkey was gone. Unfortunately, some one of them has another tiny, ugly monkey of some sort that is an endangered species. They say they keep it hidden, but when I was there, they showed it to me without hesitation. It is a little bigger than a hand and kept inside peoples' shirts or jackets and sleeps most of the time. This is exactly the kind of contraband that long distance truck drivers pick up and carry around to sell to places like this and I would bet that little money has less than a 1% chance of survival there.
The nearby hotel was the oddest place. It was new or renovated, and as so often is the case in Asia, incomplete. It was about 95% complete, but wires stuck out in odd places, and construction junk was all over, and many things were unfinished. Everything in this remote location has to be trucked in at great expense (Dewen said his cost on a chicken would be $10 and retail far more), and even unfinished hotels charge a much higher rate than a few hundred miles south. The room was large and faced the mountain. The owner had tried - rather too hard - to be avant garde and bought a lot of silly furniture that would only be purchased in No. America by black people. Goofy beds with huge white fake leather headboards, lots of knobs (none working ) for radios and speakers and lights and buzzers, and cheap side tables with chipped mirrors and flashy, tacky junk all over them, wires running on top of the carpet all over the room from misplaced outlets, everything already worn out and shabby even tho it could not have been very old.
Most astonishing was the open lobby. There, in front of a large and dirty picture window intended to showcase the mountain, was a rack of 80 actual French Bordeaux and Beaujolais wines - precisely set to face the brightest sunlight in the world, with necks all vertical. The wine must have been vinegar as it sat there.
I went out for a hike and met an old Dane - my age. He really had travelled a lot and was a great guy to talk with. I felt better about being an older solo traveller after I saw him as he looked like an adventurer who did what he wanted when he wanted. I adjusted well to the altitude, altho hiking took a lot more effort. Dewen's plan for me had been unachievable. He thought I should make a two day hike toward Mt Meili which would require hiking eight hours a day, sleeping in a rough cabin at night, and hiking eight hours back the next day. I told him that I was too old to hike eight hours. Oh no, he said, you don't need to - you will a nice Tibetan guy with a horse, which you will ride and he will walk along with you. The reason is that 5.5 hours of the hike the 1st day is an incline (read steep mountain path). You will ride up the hills on the horse, and then at the top, you lose the horse and just was downhill for 2.5 hours to the cabin. The next day, you only go up for 2.5 hours and then it is downhill all the way back. Simple, and only $100. He did say that, well, actually, often it is not really a horse, but a donkey. The Chinese traditionally speak this way -what is always a Golden tiger to Chinese is always a golden retriever to us.
When I got to the town and saw emaciated, small donkeys walking around everywhere on all the streets, I knew what my horse would be like. I also had recently read a traveller saying how sore his butt was after riding an hour or so on the back of a skinny donkey. It was really cold in Deqin, even with the sun up, and damned cold with the sun hiding. I could even think about my already sore butt (from busses and because I am so skinny there) and aversion to cold and exhaustion due to altitude and decidedly was negative on that adventure. He also thought I should go for a week to "Paradise valley" which is really remote. If it had been summer, I probably would have done both, but instead I settled for some nice local walks.
Mount Meile is nasty. A few years ago a joint Korean and Japanese expedition set out to climb her heights. There was an avalanche and I think 13 or 16 of the Japanese were killed. Some Tibetans said the mountain just doesn't like Japanese and anyway, they should not be climbing a holy mountain. Since that time, it is forbidden to climb Meili.
Eventually, I boarded a huge bus and went back south to Zhongdian and then a nice minibus on to Lijiang again. The trip south was much more beautiful and comfortable than the trip north had been. At one point, the giant, lumbering, noisy bus broke down. We were right at the tree line and it was one of the most beautiful points of the trip. My best mountain shots (some shown here) are thanks to the breakdown of the bus.
Cell phones are a curse. The distances I covered going North and then South were not much more than 100 miles in five and six hours. The changes in China are so vast and rapid that all the highways were newly paved. Some places, off in the distance, we could see the new high speed rail lines that China is building all over the country. The slow pace was due to the steep mountain climbs, up and down, up and down all day, sometimes along the Yangtze and often along the Meekong rivers, always on very tight switchbacks. We would be in many places where the drop was 2,500 ft to the river on a road wide enough for a couple of donkeys where two huge trucks and busses would meet on a point - horrifying - and we would wonder how they could pass. There was seldom any shoulder wider than 24" and almost never the slightest impediment to block an errant driver from going over the edge. We did see wreckers pulling up two vehicles on cables from having gone over the side.
The vehicles were all manual transmissions so shifting was almost non-stop. In the midst of all this, the drivers were often on their cell phones shouting and barking (had to be wife phone calls) while trying to shift, pass other vehicles, navigate 180 degree turns and avoid rockfalls. It was hairy.
The real miracles among all this were the greatest heroes/heroines of the whole trip. Everybody everywhere with a brain was in admiration of the long-haul bicylists. You would see them coming down the mountain passes from Tibet and know for every decline they must have climbed at least as much. I saw one couple - probably in their 50's - twice and they were just plugging along the narrow roads, having lived thru the canyons, the big trucks and busses just brushing by them. The thing about seeing them out there is that a vast amount of this space is uninhabited and once they leave any small town, there is no help, no food, not even much flat space to camp at night. They are committed. People always observe that they are usually alone and I always say that many start out in pairs and trios but always split up because cyclists are such hard headed individualists and of course, on a long haul, physical capabilities are seldom equal. I personally cannot understand how they get enough protein to deal with the physical demands - especially at 10,000 feet against a wind. Everybody I spoke with everywhere was in awe of these supermen and superwomen.

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