Shangri-la – Yakky Goodness

The road to Shangri-la.

Twenty years ago the town of Zhongdian in northern Yunnan province, China was just another sleepy mountain town on edge of the Tibetan plateau, but then the local government had a brainwave and changed the name to Shangri-la and now it’s a booming tourist town. Of course the town has nothing to do with the fictional paradise that it’s named for but as my bus climbed into a thin blue sky past snow-capped mountains, I was glad I had fallen for their clever marketing gimmick. The road wound through passes nearly 4,000 meters high and this early in spring snow sparkled on the verge and the air that snuck through gaps in my window felt frozen. At a pee stop next to a lonely petrol station, a brisk wind quickly sent me back to my seat. A week ago I had been sweating through Burma and I wasn’t prepared for the cold. The road was an amazing piece of engineering that either clung to mountains or tunneled through them and from my window I peered down sheer drops to rushing rivers of spring snow melt hundreds of feet below. My bus-mates were all Chinese and many of them screamed into phones or hawked and spat into plastic bags but I had started to tune this out as part of the background noise of Chinese travel and gazed out of the window in heated comfort enjoying the view.

            At Shangri-la’s bus station I dug in my bag for the ski jacket I had lugged through the tropics for months. I was glad I never chucked it away – I had come close – as I walked into the biting wind toward the old town. A divided road ran dead straight through the middle of the new town and I walked for an hour past low-rise office buildings, shops and restaurants. None of it looked more than 10 years old. The town stretched along a wide valley floor and behind the ugly concrete buildings, snow-covered mountain ranges rose on three sides. Dirty snow sat in drains and hid from the sun behind bins and lampposts. On the edge of the old town I checked into Kevin’s Hiker Hostel which I shared only with the friendly Tibetan owner and her enormous shaggy dog called Captain.

Shangri-la

            In the morning I hired a bike and spent the day cycling through Tibetan villages complete with fluttering prayer flags and grazing yaks. The roads were steep and crowded with trucks which belched smoke as they struggled to draw breath in the thin air. I wasn’t doing much better and as the highway climbed a steep pass that must have been around 3,500m, the cold air hurt my lungs as I gasped and pushed on the crank. On the far side I was rewarded with a view of ranks of stark white peaks marching ever higher over the horizon towards the Himalayas above a broad valley dotted with villages. The road dropped sharply and I whizzed into the valley in an aerodynamic crouch, wondering how fast I could go before my Chinese wheel bearings exploded and, presumably, sent shards of metal into my groin before painting my face onto the road. I had not been offered a helmet. At the bottom I rubbed my frozen hands and tried not to think about the ride back up as I pedaled through a distinctly un-Chinese scene. On the valley floor large rammed-earth houses tapered toward steep wood-shingled roofs where rows of triangular prayer flags flapped brightly in the pale sun. In the bleached fields, great shaggy yaks sat eyeing me off from under short horns. Structures like outsized deck chairs made from rough poles kept stock feed away from the last of the spring snow.

            I pedaled down a farm track though a village and followed a sign to Napa lake. In the village a group of men dressed huge logs with a double-handed draw knife, slicing off knots and small branches. They smiled and waved and I wondered where the wood came from in this high, barren place. Further into the valley 40 people were building a rammed-earth house. Four big poles stood at each corner of the square-ish house, leaning slightly inwards. On one of the long walls, a dozen men used heavy sticks like crow bars to pound damp earth between two thick planks which acted as formers – when the compacted earth reached the top of the planks, it would be left to dry and the planks would slide up the poles to form the next course, a bit like laying wall-length mud bricks. The women wheeled barrows or manned shovels. Everyone was stocky and red-cheeked and wore traditional Tibetan clothing. A finished house stood close by. It was covered with mud render and painted with pale designs. The shorter front and rear walls were wooden and recessed under a deep eave. I climbed a hill behind the construction site and watched for ages, listening to the men sing in time to their pounding sticks – a guttural, repetitive tune. My rocky hill formed the edge of a wide brown valley floor, very flat and dotted with shallow pools. Behind the village, a range of snow-covered mountains soared almost vertical. The sky was incredibly clear and I could see dozens of enormous Tibetan Eagles circling high above the plain. Occasionally two or three flew low and fast across the valley, passing so close that I could hear the whoosh of air over their wings as they pitched back and rode the thermal to their holding pattern high above me. Their mottled brown wings stretched maybe six feet across. On the valley floor herds of shaggy ponies grazed and pigs rooted in the peat under the watchful eye of a Tibetan Mastiff the size of a bear.
             As I sat snapping photos, a line of clouds appeared behind the mountains and the wind grew colder. With no sun, the 15kms back to town was cold and I walked stiffly back to my hostel slapping my frozen face like somebody you don’t want to sit next to on a bus. Shangri-la’s old town was a smaller version of Lijiang’s, with traditional Chinese bow-roofed houses lining skinny cobbled streets crammed with tourists. In a freezing restaurant the rosy-cheeked owner ushered me over to her table where an electric bar heater created a welcome bubble of warmth under the table. I ate fried yak and doughy Tibetan flat bread with endless refills of tea. On the street I bought a knitted hat and a packet of yak jerky – I was rapidly developing a crush on Tibet and part of me wished I could take the mountain road north to far-away Lhasa. But the Chinese government wouldn’t let me and – more importantly – neither would Alicia. I had to get to Shanghai.

Very little house on the prairie.