China tourism: mixed blessing    

Tension: Domestic and foreign visitors will bring profit and profound Change to China’s cultural and natural heritage sites.

 By frank LangfittSan Foreign Staff WALNUT GARDEN, China-The first thing that strikes visitors to Tiger Leaping Gorge is its sheer size. Twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, the chasm plunges more than two vertical miles from the Serrated peaks of Jade

Dragon Snow Mounting into the churning rapids of the Yangtze River.

 More spectacular and more remote than the famous Thee Gorges, The area opened to foreign tourists mostly backpackers-in 1993.Today travelers can still hike in relative solitude, chatting with Villagers and stopping to rinse their heads in the waterfalls that Pour down the limestone and granite walls. In the next several years, all of that will almost certainly change. Local officials plan to carve a trail across the gorge’s eastern will, Which includes a giant stone monolith larger than Yosemite National Park’s 3,600-foot E1 Capitan. Across the River , officials from a Competing county have blown through a road that they hope to pave. Buses carrying an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 tourists annually Are expected to follow, altering one of the most tranquil and Spectacular Spots in China. “Tiger Leaping Gorge is an adventure area,” says XiaShanquan , who Goes by the name Sean and runs a rustic guesthouse in the middle of the gorge. “With two roads, it’s not an adventure.” Tourism, foreign and domestic, is exploding across the world’s most populous Country. Tiger Leaping Gorge appears to be among the next casualties. Cashing in on tourists Armed for the first time with disposable income, China’s emerging Middle class is hitting the road in unprecedented numbers. Local Officials and entrepreneurs are trying to cash in by turning some of the nation’s cultural and natural heritage sites into amusement parks. Visitors to the Mutianwang section of the Great Wall can ride up to one of the great wonders of the world in a chairlift or cable car and careen back down Along an alpine slide more than mile long .Competition between transport companies became so fierce at Mutianwang that one built metal barriers in April to keep another’s customers from climbing into the wall.Beijing’s Old Summer Palace looks more like a seedy midway than the imperial, garden resort it was in its glory days.

Attractions include bumper cars and what appears to be a hybrid of a Polynesian village and a Western frontier fort with to tern poles. Profit and preservation Few people more clearly illustrate the tension between profit and Preservation in China than Tiger Leaping Gorge’s competing hoteliers , Sean and woody. Distant cousins who grew up in the Gorge, the pair take starkly different approaches to economic development and occasions potshots at each other’s business practices Sean, a self-styled hippie in graying, shoulder-length hair and hiking boots, favors moderate development in keeping with the Surroundings, He opened Sean’s Spring Lodge in the early 1980s. Although he has expanded his business to 35 beds, his buildings Retain elements of the local architectural style, including whitewashed walls and carved wooden balconies. Sean, whose Chinese name means Summer Mountain Spring, Vehemently opposes the road and has pleaded with local officials not to pave it. “Many backpackers say if they put on tar, they won’t come back Again,” he says, as a jeep Cherokee rolls by, kicking up clouds of yellow dust. Woody who wears a blue, pinstriped shirt buttoned to the neck plays Donald Trump to Sean’s Jerry Garcia. He runs a group of Guesthouses known call actively as Chateau de Woody. This year, He built a boxy, four-story “guesthouse” with blue Glass, a style repeated ad nauseam in cities across China. The Building lies in Walnut Garden, a natural amphitheater of terraced Fields where travelers can gaze up 10,000 feet into the snow –capped Mountains Of Southwest China. Backpackers and locals gave the area An English name so it would sound more familiar and appealing to foreigners. The new structure is the aesthetic equivalent of a low-rise apartment block at the foot of the Grant Canyon. Woody, whose real name is MuCongjun, has contracts wish at least 25 tour agencies. He sees the new road as a potential gold mine. Asked whether the expected flood of tour buses might adversely affect the atmosphere, he seems almost surprised by the question. In addition to making him lost of money , the road should make Tiger Leaping Gorge safer and more convenient, he says, in the past decade, falling rocks, bandits and dehydration have killed Travelers along the trails. “I think the road is good for both villagers and tourists ,”says Woody, who picked up his English name from an American who thought his personality resembled than of Woody Allen, “Tourists don’t have to die from thirst and hunger. Consumer holiday Tiger Leaping Gorge takes its name from a section so narrow that legend says a tiger could lead across it. Two month ago, visitors got a glimpse of the bottleneck that awaits. On May 1, China’s Labor Day, 5,000 tourists poured into the upper can you .They created such a traffic jam that visitors had to get out and walk for a mile or more to see anything worthwhile. Chinese repeated variations of that experience across the country during the first week in May when the government Declared a seven-day holiday to spur consumer spending and bolster the economy. More then 200 million people took to the roads, rails and air. Foreign tourism compounds the pressure on the country’s evolving infrastructure. The World Tourism Organization estimates that annual overseas visitors will double to 130 million by 2020,making China the most visited country on the planted. Just southeast of Tiger Leaping Gorge lies Lijiang ,a picturesque mountain town of cobblestone streets, wooden homes and arching bridges embraced by a maze of rushing canals. Residents many of whom are members of China’s Naxi minority rinse their vegetable and closed in the clear, coursing water .Twisting alleys resonate with the “tap, tap, tap,” of chisels as workers try to renovate or rebuild old homes damaged by an earthquake four years ago. Local officials have worked hard to preserve the architecture and quiet ambience of Lijiang’s old city, which the United Nations Educational, scientific and Cultural Organization named a World Heritage site in 1997.Residents must submit construction plans for Approval and use wood, tiles and whitewash so their homes blend in with the surrounding structures. Such regulations may be standard in Western countries, but they are quit progressive in China, Where local officials have razed neighborhoods Rich in architectural heritage to make way for high-rises. As Lijiang’s beauty has attracted tourists, it has spawned intense commercialism. Flashing, red lights snake along the undulating tile Roofs that line the main shopping street Souvenir stores, 80 percent of them owned by Outsiders, sell a variety or kitsch in building wooden panels painted with the images of large-breasted Chinese women in fantastical, see-through ethnic dress. Even the shop owners concede that such outfits have never existed here. Ancient and modern Visitors exploring the city’s back streets often stumble upon two vastly different cultures side by side, At Mama Fu’s, where the menu Includes pizza and quesadillas, a young Chinese man in a baseball cap speaks into his cellular phone.

A few streets over, elderly Naxi women in blue aprons and caps pad about the streets with wicker baskets strapped to their backs.

The tension between the modern and the ancient is not as severe as it might appear. In the past two decades, the profit motive has been one of the most powerful forces in this nominally communist country .in Lijiang, a city with a thousand years of history, the story is not entirely different. Despite concerns about being overrun by visitors and preserving their way of life, some Naxi complain that they see too few tourists not.

STORY EVER TOLD BY SCOTT CARRRIER

I spent the evening next to the Wood burning stove in the café at the Long life Hotel, listening to Karen Carpenter sing that song about her favorite song, wondering if had fallen into a twilight zone. Perhaps my plane had crashed over the pacific and I was dead. Or  perhaps I was just fucking up in a major way here. Either way, the mark as on the wall seemed ready to pounce.

Then, as if on cue, a Tibetan man, about thirty-five, walked into the café and sat down next to me. He was short, with long hair that hadn’t been washed in a while and a face that broke into thirty pieces when he smiled. It was the smile of a man who’d spent a long time in the mountains. He was wearing a large wind-beaker, but his left sleeve was pulled up, and I could see that his arm was shrunken, his hand mangled and upside down..

   “Where do you come from?” he asked me in good English.

   “Utah, in America.”

   “Arches?”

   “Yes,” I said, “Exactly.”

   “I saw photos.Very beautiful.”

His name was XiaShanquan. But he went by Sean. he was a guide and owned a guesthouse in Tiger Leaping gorge. He’d come to Zhongdian for a meeting about tourism but was going back home in the morning. I told him I was trying to get to Haba, and he said I could go with him to his house in the gorge, which was only a day’s walk from Haba.

  “Are there fish near Haba?” I asked him.

  “There are fish in the Yangtze. People catch them with dyna-mite,” he said, laughing so hard he almost fell over in his chair.

  “But how about up on the mountain, in the lake called the Black sea?”

  “I think ,maybe there are snow fish in the lake. People catch them with insects,”

  “Grasshoppers?”

  “I will show you . I don’t know the name in English.”

  I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

  Tiger leaping gorge had the shape of a very narrow and deep v. At the top of the v were two peaks, haba show mountain (sixteen thousand feet) and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (eighteen thousand feet),and at the bottom was the Yangtze River (eight thousand feet), which seemed to go out of its way. Turning almost180 degrees, to run between the mountain. The name tiger leaping gorge came from the canyon being so narrow that tiger was said to have once leapt across it.

Sean’s guesthouse was twenty-two kilometers into the gorge along road that had been cut into the wall of the canyon. We rode there in a toy like pickup truck, Sean sitting up front in the cap with the driver and four other men. I sat in the bed with bags of rice and corn, five – gallon cans of gasoline, and five other people. The road was muddy, as there had been there straight days of rain, and the truck’s little engine struggled mightily, the rear wheels spinning and fishtailing. Sometimes we all got our to push and pull with a rope, sometimes we moved boulders that had fallen in the road, and sometimes we stood and watched while the driver crept between spaces just inches wider than the four-foot wheelbase of the truck.

  The road had been slowly gaining elevation above he river, so looking down at it produced an instant rush of vertigo. The river was monstrous. Exploding through canyon walls that were only twenty-five yards apart. I’d never seen anything so powerful, and it yanked hard on my heart. I could hear a stream of water running under the truck , and there was no road that I could see. If the truck were to slide over the edge, the fall line would start as a series of tumbles and pirouettes-a flinging of would pound everyone and everything into miscellaneous bits of unrecognizable pulp and flattened metal.

  I was deeply scared, but I was also happy, even overjoyed. It was wild and beautiful, and so it counted. It was what I’d come for.

AFTER TWENTY KILOMETERS, and truck stopped at a guesthouse and everybody got out “My place is two kilometers from here,” Sean said . “but the road is gone up ahead. We need to look at it.” 

  We walked up the road, lifting fallen boulders out of the way. It was getting dark., hard to see, but up ahead there was no road. the side of the mountain had slid away. I wanted to get closer, but Sean stopped me . “You see, it’s still dripping,” he said, pointing to a patch of mud sliding down the slope. “not good. It rains for three days and this is what happens.”

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “We can ran across it, very quickly.”

  “Run?” I said. My pack weighed fifty pounds. It was almost dark. The slope was slippery and steep.

  “Yes,” he said,  “ Unless you what to stay here or ride back to town in the truck.”

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  “Then follow me.” And he took off running. It was a mad dash for three hundred yards, some of which was out on the muddy slope, completely exposed, so that a slip would mean a long slide to some cliffs and then a longer fall to the river. I ran with my hand for balance, following Sean’s step as closely as possible. He ran fast, without stopping, and I thought I heard him laughing. And then I realized / was laughing it seemed impossible to run across that slope in the dark, and yet it also seemed as if all I had to do was keep up with Sean and everything would be all right. It was like ski-ing right behind a friend. It was follow-ing someone off a cliff. It was much fun as I’ve ever had in my life.

We stopped at a waterfall where the road started again. I was  saying something like “ that –was-unfucking-believable-you’re-completely-out–of–your-mind—I’ve-never-done-anything-“when  a boulder as big as house came crashing down the slope and rolled across where we had just passed, launching itself in to thin air and  disappearing into the darkness before being smashed into a million pieces.

“you like this?” Sean asked.

“I love this” I said, and we both laughed and ran down the road to wards his house.

Sean’s Guesthouse was two stories high, Framed in post and beam, with big windows looking out over the canyon. Standing on the patio out in front, I could see four or five lights from other houses across the hillside. I could see the dark outline of the mountain on the other side of the canyon. I could hear the roar of the river a thousand feet blow.

We ate in the kitchen next to the wood stove .It was there where he told me what happened to his arm. He was born healthy in 1964, but when he was two years old, during the Cultural Revolution, the red army came looking for his father. His father wasn’t home, so they grabbed Sean and Threw  him in the fire, and then grabbed his sister and threw her off a cliff. Sean said it was not just his arm but the entire left side of his body that had been burned.” They called me ‘flower pig’ be cause my skin was like a flower pig- many colors,” he said.

“There was no hospital?”

“There was no road, no bicycle, nothing. They would have had to carry me.” As a kid, he went to grade school, but the communist party wouldn’t allow handicapped kids in middle school or high school. So he educated himself.

When the communists allowed small-scale capitalism in the late eighties, Sean started the first store in the village, When they opened the area to tourism in 1993, he built the first Guesthouse. He learned six Language.

“Do you hate the Chinese for what they did to you?” I asked.

“Its not a very good culture,” he said And then he smiled and his face broke up.

That night, be fore I went to sleep, I realized that in order to catch my flight out of kunming in five days,I would have to walk all the way to the black sea lake and back to Sean’s Guesthouse in two days, which seemed like it might be impossible. Walnut Garden, were Sean lived, was on the south side of Haba Mountain. at about nine thousand feet. Haba village was on the east side of the mountain. At about twelve thousand feet. The lake was three thousand feet above the village. I would be able to do it only if I could see well enough to walk at night. I turned off the light in my room and looked out the window and saw nothing but black.

The next morning I told Sean that I was going to try to get to the lake and back in two days, and he said he didn’t think I could do it.” is very far, and there is snow up high, around the lake.”

“Snow is okay,” I said. “A little bit Anyway.” I told him I’d pay him to come as my guide, but he said he had clients who were flying into Zhongdian and he had to go back up there and meet them..

“Today,” he said you can go to Haba. Tomorrow go to the lake. But, I’m thinking, maybe there are no snow fish now. They are very expensive, more than eighty yuan[ten dollars] per pound.”

“You mean the lake has been fished out?”

“They take the film off the skin and sell it as medicine. It is a wild fish, so it is a medicine.”

“All wild fish have medicinal value?”

“Yes, for the Chinese. So maybe there are no snow fish left.”

That was kind of a letdown, but I still wanted to go to the lake. Sean give me some directions to Haba that included a shortcut that would take three hours off the eight-hours walk. I said goodbye and thanks, and I left feeling sad that I’d never see him again.

Copyright: (3865933, 03-13) Sean's Guesthouse

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