News for Margo

read with great interest the comments on running into Margo Carter, the Australian woman who moved to Tiger Leaping Gorge about ten years ago, ran a cafe at the start of the Gorge and became a life partner with Sean, a Tibetan who runs the Sean's Guest House in the center of the gorge. The comments that Margo was eccentric, or rude, seem so totally out of place with our experience, and thus I thought I should relate our tale. Mel and I met Margo in March 2009. I had heard about the great trek through the gorge and was very excited to do it. Mel (the more cautious half of our team) was a bit apprehensive because it was unclear from the maps and our reading, what we would do if we found the hike too hard and wanted to quit mid way (it actually is quite easy as you can always walk downhill to the road and hitch-hike back). At any rate, when we arrived at the Gorge we ran into Margo...I told her of my desire to hike the entire gorge and sleep overnight on the trail... Mel on the other had mentioned his apprehension. She said "no problem" - I can help you both... and proceeded to offer to accompany us for two to three days (at an exceptionally modest fee) and be our guide. So the three of us took a taxi to Sean's guest house, in the middle of the gorge, where we had a wonderful night in relatively luxury surroundings. We all ate at Sean's by the campfire, and enjoyed meeting many other travelers and learning a bit about the gorge history. It was a delightful experience. The next day we took off on our trek. She was an interesting woman who had moved from Australia to explore China, and fell in love with the natural environment and decided to stay. During our two days together we traded tales, and she was very accommodating to walk and talk at our pace. We stayed overnight at another guest house, enjoyed a fresh chicken stew (the chicken was killed in front of us) and continued on the next morning. Margo was opinionated... she did not like the commercialization of the gorge nor the fact that she saw many locals trying to take advantage of visitors. However our experience was that she eluded kindness, sensitivity, and had a keen intellect. We continued to communicate when we returned home, and were shocked when a few months later we heard about the accident. The details were always very sketchy, and disturbing. I have a great picture of Margo, which I'd like to send you... so let me know how I can do it, and hopefully you will post it on your site. I'd like to promote in her memory the kindness she showed us during the few days we were together.  – Diane Dey

http://www.bryan-crosby.ca/gallery/

Margo – Queen of Tiger Leaping Gorge

Sometimes my RSS feed tosses a news morsel my way.  Today is was a piece regarding the passing of an apparent fixture on the Yunnan backpacking circuit.

Via In the Footsteps of Joseph Rock

His group were surprised – to say the least – to be passed by a lone western woman traveling at speed (alone, that is, except for her dog and a local guide with a horse, left trailing well to the rear) and they noted that she was only lightly clad for the trail. Not only that, but they were taken aback by how rude she was to the trekking group, refusing to talk with them at all during their brief encounter on the trail.

Things got stranger later in the day when they saw her again and she chose to camp alongside them, but again was uncommunicative. That was until she started saying that she would ‘turn them in’ to the local authorities and warning them that they would be turned back at local police checkpoints further up the Salween (Nujiang) valley and the local Tibetans would shun them. The group were un-nerved by her unfriendly and bizarre behaviour (she would only talk to them in Chinese at one point) and her apparent threats.

Margo left early the next day and they never saw her again. In fact, they were some of the last people to see her alive.

…Margo’s body was found several weeks later at a large tree near the Shuo-La pass, and the Yunnan PSB are now investigating the case. It appears likely that she simply underestimated the harsh conditions of the trek and the difficulty of the terrain that she would encounter.

I ran into this woman, Margo, when I trekked Tiger Leaping Gorge in the summer of 2007.  It was  about halfway to Walnut Grove, about 2/3 way through the gorge. She was leading this motley crue of travelers with a mixture of backpacks and suitcase on a Intrepid tour through the gorge.  Intrepid Travel is a company that organizes tours at the grass-roots level, largely utilizing public transit options and accommodations.  I’ve kind of viewed Intrepid tours as traveling for people who want the independent experience but are too afraid to do it themselves.

I recall thinking to myself…”Who the hell is this woman and how’d she end up here?”  She looked like she was in her 50’s, but was dressed like she was in her 20’s and blabbed away like she was the encyclopedia of all things China…in the loud, obnoxious way.  She also had a rather ‘in-your-face’ condescending approach when talking to locals and to travelers.  The kind of approach that makes one wince and think “I’m not with this person…” I attributed it too eating too many gorge mushrooms.

Exiting the gorge, one had three options…trek back the same way, take a taxi back (the road was washed out at the time) or trek out the backside, take a ferry across the river and hope that there is a bus/tax on the other side.  I opted for the ferry because I don’t like retracing my steps, however there was concern about transportation on the other side, so I cut a deal with the tour leader (a former American ESL teacher, I believe) to tag along on the bus they had arranged on the other side of the ferry that would take everyone back to Lijiang.  Margo was along for the whole ride. It’s been awhile since this trek, so I can’t remember too many details, other than the tour leader shaking her head and lamenting simultaneously about the many, many problems she was having with her tour group and how outrageously embarrassing this Margo woman was.

I remember after I did that trip and I would hear of other people traveling through Yunnan and up to Tiger Leaping I would always say “yeah, you’ll probably meet this weird Aussie woman when you trek the gorge…it makes the trip even more interesting!”.

Highly eccentric/weird people who choose this sort of life are in a way, sort of timeless and part of the cultural landscape of the region.  Cringe?  Yes…but they make life interesting.  Besides, if one wants to be a modern village/city/town in China these days, you’ll need your foreign loonies. 

I was thinking to myself, “oh yeah, I probably have a travel post archived somewhere about the time I met this incredibly odd foreigner in the middle of Tiger Leaping Gorge”. So I searched around…and searched again…and found out that not only do I not have a post about that interesting trek through Tiger Leaping Gorge, I can’t seem to find any record of any of that summer 2007 trip from Kunming to Kathmandu.  To be honest, I can’t remember if I even wrote anything.  I just assumed that I just did given that it was a trip that fulfilled many, many of my adolescent travel goals.  But, it seems I didn’t…and I’m kind of down about that.  I’ve got stuff from my time in Mongolia and Japan to Europe and India…but nothing about South East Asia either.  Bummer. 

The trip to china was originally inspired by our earlier visit in 2002, but the specifics of this visit came in part from two of my son's friends Jeremy Sisselman and Anthony Berzack who had traveled throughout Yunnan province in 2007. Jeremy and Anthony (two healthy young twenty-something year olds) told us that one of their experiences was exploring North Western Yunnan Province which included the lovely stone path city Lijiang and a mountain range area called Tiger Leaping Gorge where they did an enormous hike. It sounded like fun.
 Regarding the hiking portion, Mel was a bit concerned that we might get lost on the trail and he was right.  There were many twists and turns, and the path was poorly marked. Competition between Chinese guest house owners, which dotted the trail, meant that on occasion someone would scratch out the trail arrows and re-direct hikers so that they passed by their establishment.  So instead of wandering solo, we hired Margo as our personal guide who really made the hike a wonderful experience from a human as well as natural viewpoint.
 Margo was a very lively and friendly Australian transplant. She had visited the gorge 12 years ago, fell in love with the area, and never left. She is married to "Sean" a Tibetan whose family has lived in the area for five generations and  originally developed the trail for hikers. Our hike took two days (approx 5-6  hours of hiking a day), covered about 22 k and had elevations of 900 meters - and for me was a highlight of our trip. It gave us a totally new view of China, because the area is in contrast to the rest of China so sparsely inhabited. In addition while much of China was over-run with Chinese tourists, almost everyone we met hiking was from a Western country (and young) - it appears that the Chinese have not quite gotten into hiking as of yet - at least not with the fever to which they attack everything else.
 The night we spent on the path we had a "black chicken" stew. The chicken itself is not black - just the skin.  It was wonderful. As you can see from the pictures in the afternoon we had seen the chicken being slaughtered so we knew it was exceptionally fresh.  We watched the chicken being cooked in a smoky kitchen and ate some very delicious baked potatoes cooked in the heat of the wood stove. Margo spoke fluent Chinese which functioned as a conduit for us to communicate with the Tibetan Chinese guest house owners. If any of you are thinking of going to China and would like a wonderful guide we would strongly recommend Margo; she is willing to guide anywhere in China. One more comment , she kept the pace of hiking to OUR pace not hers or you wouldn't be reading this letter now.When we finally reached Qiaotou around 11.15, it was baking hot. A man came onto the bus telling us we had to pay the 30 yuan each for a ticket to go into the gorge, and a woman who sounded vaguely Australian called into the bus to say she had some important news to tell us. It turned out this was Margo who runs the Gorged Tiger Cafe in the town, and provides food, information and baggage storage for gorge walkers. She had moved the cafe to a new location a few days earlier and it was only half painted inside. A group of Americans whom we had spoken to at Lijiang bus station were there too, as well as the English people from our bus. Margo offered drinks and food - we needed to stock up on water, and had some tea while we caught up on the news. Apparently there had been an attack on a lone female walker on the trail below Tina's Guest House, down towards Walnut Grove. There had also been reports of hikers getting upset stomachs after staying at one of the guest houses. It seemed there were more perils than just falling off the side of the gorge!

Margo also had a pile of sketch maps available showing the route, and we took one - it had been impossible to get one in Lijiang. We weren't quite sure how far we'd get on the first day, as we were starting so late, but hoped to reach the Tea Horse !

LET LEAPING TIGERS LIE

Visit southwest China’s Famous gorge before two dams put it under water, advises Michael Beatty

Victorian-born Margo carter surveys the drizzle sprinkling onto the muddied street outside her Gorged Tiger Café in Qiaotou, southwest China.

“well, the wet season’s started, but that hasn’t stopped the buses,” she says. “There seem to be more every day.”

The buses are lined up on the road as if for a drag race. From Qiaotou they’ll hurtle down a 5km winding stretch of road that boasts Unprotected

2000m drops and leads the first part of a monstrous gorge that flanks nearly 30km of the jinsha River in Yunnan province.

The buses are packed with tourists, about 90 percent of whom are Chinese. They have come to reflect on the towering rock majesty of Tiger Leaping Gorge,

So called because at one point the walls of the gorge are so narrow, the locals say a tiger once leapt across to escape a group of hunters.

The gorge now hosts hundreds of visitors every day; some are too old and frail to walk down the 2000-odd steps to the raging river but the locals have capitalized on that problem. They offer either a stretcher or horseback service, and along the track Naxi children pose in traditional costume and charge one yuan for a photo.

But it’s not the Chinese tourists their large, erratically driven buses who are Margo’s customers. Hers are foreign backpackers who call in at the Gorged Tiger Café before setting off on the exhausting trek through the gorge to Daju. She dispenses tea, coffee and beer, and offers advice about clothes, provisions and accommodation.

Margo was born in Bendigo, Victoria, and makes special recommendations for Sean’s Guesthouse, an eight-hours walk from Qiaotou.

Locally-born Sean (xiashan quan) is Margo’s husband, whom she met while trekking the gorge nearly 10 years ago. She has lived in china for eight years, speaks reasonably fluent Mandarin and has a fair sprinkling of the local dialect. Sean looks after the Guesthouse with the help of assorted family members and Margo runs the Gorged Tiger Café, meaning they spend a lot of time apart, and there are no phone lines or internet cables in the gorge.

But natural wonders far outweigh the lack of electronic trappings. The gorge is 2500m deep, with the Haba and Yulong Snow mountains towering a further 3000m, The sheer size is Breathtaking, but trekking can be hazardous, particularly in the wet season. Landslides are, quite common often obscuring the existing tracks and leaving puffing trekkers wondering where to go next (although for those with limited fitness, local transport is available on the road below).

     From the entrance of the gorge, where large buses deposit their tourists from Beijing and Shanghai, the road is mostly dirt, with loose rocks and gravel often making steering tricky. Even though none of the larger buses ventures off the bitumen, to the uninitiated, the drops make the journey terrifying. During the past 10 years, small guesthouse have sprung up on the walking trek and by the road. Sean’s lies in a tiny hamlet bearing the unlikely name of Walnut grove Goats graze on the mountainside above and patio tables face a gigantic wall of rock that seems to stretch into the heavens.

Sean is an engaging host with a longer ponytail and a crippled left hand; he attributes the latter to a beating he received during the Cultural Revolution. He’s passionate about the future of the gorge and sees big problems ahead.

“They’re talking about paving the road and that will mean anin flux of large tourist buses,” he says.” instead of building small guesthouse that blend in with the environment, they’ll build gaudy hotels that will ruin the area  and eco-tourism will disappear. The locals won’t be able to compete and they’ll lose their livelihood.”

It’s already starting to happen: the owners of Woody’s and Tina’s guesthouse have constructed building that would not look out of place in modern Shanghai. A big hotel chain is also interested in acquiring land in Walnut Garden and if  the road is paved, development will undoubtedly follow. But the real problem facing the locals could be much worse. Two large dams have been proposed by the Huaneng Power Corporation. One would create a200km reservoir that would drown whole communities and the farmland of the Naxi people. Would be displaced and Tiger Leaping Gorge would effectively be come a stagnant lake.

No environmental impact study has been completed, but work has already begun, with engineers Drilling narrow tunnels into the mountain. Part of the the corporation’s apparent immunity could be because it is controlled by Li Xiaopeng, the son of former premier Li Peng .Incredibly, most local Naxis seem to be unaware of what the future holds. But back in Qiaotou , Margo knows only too well. “It would be a disaster,” she says.

“We have something unique here; not just for China, but the world. Would the world allow the US to flood the Grand Canyon? Of course not. Well Tiger Leaping Gorge is deeper than the Grand canyon.” The future looks uncertain. See it while you can: six years from now, the Gorged Tiger Café could be under water.

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