I'm back! I've just had a fortnight or so in the far north of yunnan province in south west china. The area borders Tibet, and most of the people in the area are Tibetan: They look Tibetan, dress Tibetan, speak Tibetan (kinda sounds like arabic to me) and carry big Tibetan knives on their belts.
It's a fascinating area to be in because so much of their lifestyle has been preserved by remoteness from the rest of China. Even now, if you don't fly it takes 15 hours by bus to get to the nearest train station in the provincial capital! I'd never been to high altitude before (3000-4500m), and it was interesting to note stuff like how you get tired very easily for the first few days, and how my bottle of alcohol hand sanitiser burst open when our bus went up to 4500m!
The thing you'll like best of all, though, is the village that I went to up there called yubeng. Amazingly, to this day it's only accessible by foot or by horse, via a five hour trek over a mountain. It's at about 3200m, at the foot of meilixueshan (meili snow mountain), which is a 6900m, glacier-covered monster.
Our guesthouse was owned by the richest guy in the village, and the guys we stayed with in the next room all got insect bites from their beds. The toilet is just a shed on stilts with holes in the floor. The guy's house was traditional tibetan, like all the houses there; all mud walls two feet thick and a framework of whole pine trees. The animals lived downstairs to help cope with the -20c winters and up in his loft/ barn we found loads of un-threshed wheat, potatos, and wooden saddles for yaks. The inside was brightly painted like a temple, but had no plumbing whatsoever. They have a little electricity from a small hydroelectric power thing, but to run the TV you need to switch off the lights. Hygiene there was a joke. My wife saw the boss wipe his nose, then wipe his two hands together, then take a filthy cloth and wipe the inside of a couple of bowls. She didn't dare tell us. They didn't have any meat for us to eat, either, because everything is brought over the mountain by horse. I guess the pigs and chickens there were just enough for themselves. From the terrace outside our room we could look up on mei li snow mountain, which is the reason everyone goes there. The thing is 6900m tall, the place we stayed at was about 3200m up. You literally sit there and watch the clouds going by, hoping to get a glimpse of the top (which we didn't). What you can see is forests and a couple of little glaciers. On the second day there we walked throught the forest along a melt-water river for a couple of hours up to the glacier and a sacred buddhist waterfall right next to it. When we got back we found that a nine year old girl in our group had been bitten by a leech. A tibetan local staying in the same place took a bite, too, so my first aid kit is a little depleted of iodine, plasters and bandages! After all that climbing, though, the highest point we got to was 4500m, in the bus, on the way there.
Even in the towns in this area, everyone uses wood stoves because it's the only readily accessible fuel that's not too expensive. The rising numbers of tourists have made a positive difference to people's income in some villages, because they take people up the mountain paths on their horses. Interestingly, villagers are making cash now from picking wild mushrooms that make their way to Japan. The mushrooms may be tasty, but my own preference is for fried, dried, smoked yak meat, with local pan-cooked bread and butter tea
There are all kinds of other things there that are noteworthy, like how some Tibetan men share a wife to avoid breaking up the family, and that they still do sky and river burials (some kids said it involves cutting up the body and chucking it into the river, that they'd be too scared to watch, and that that's why tibetans don't eat fish). The only tibetan that I asked about it thought the beijing government is 'not bad', and said his grandma was in tibet when the chinese army came over. According to his retalling of her story, they tried to do a peaceful liberation and 'only killed really bad people'. The guy was a driver and had a picture of the very same car in lhasa, after driving six days to get there.
I picked up a traditional Tibetan knife for about four quid after I saw that the locals really do use them dailly. They have a full tang, and are peened over or bolted at the end, and the blades are some kind of high carbon steel. The main distinguishing feature is the silver/ tin sheath with wooden inserts. The sheaths are all decorated with patterns kinda hammered onto them with a little tool like a nail. My vocabulary totally deserted me just there, but you get the idea. I'll try to get pics up sometime.
All in all, the trip put a whole lot of ideas into my head. Pub/ cafe owners in tourist areas there that signed contracts a year ago, before it got busy, said they're paying 250 quid a YEAR in rent for the beautiful wooden buildings. Put that together with the fact that you can buy a horse for 200, the wood stoves, the mountain walks, etc, and I'm tempted to go and stay out there for a while. I could get a little place, fit the stove, get a few chickens, a yak or two...
