Travel Tales

Comments of A Social Work Student in Kanzisie Village, Shangri-La

By Shan Tsang, Hong Kong Polytechnic University Student Intern, August 2006

I think that placing social work students in rural villages, such as Shangri-La is a good idea. It allows students to step into “different shoes,” and get a taste of a life much different than their own. Living with the villagers we study, helps us understand their life better. Social work students should be flexible enough to work with whom ever their clients may be, young or old, urban or rural.

For me, the most valuable experience of my summer in Shangri-La was being with the rural village women. I found that they were sincere, pleasant to deal with and full of passion. Building up my relationship with them and gaining their trust, made me feel that my project was successful. The most touching moment was when the school kids told me how much they loved me.

To read more about the PolyU students summer 2006 intern project in Yunnan, see our website heading “About Us”

Memories of Shangri-La

By Natalie Kwan, YMHF Intern Summer 2006

My first memory of Shangri-la was sitting on the plane as it landed in the tiny Diqing airport. Little butterflies of doubt were fluttering through my head – what have I gotten myself into, I thought. Two months in the middle of nowhere, with no-one I knew. These doubts dissipated into thin air as I walked off the plane: the sky was appallingly blue and literally took my breath away. It was beautiful.

Thus began my internship for the foundation. I must admit, I felt listless the first few weeks. The money for the centre had not arrived yet, and so there was little I could do. So I busied myself – I followed the PolyU students on their round of questioning tourists; I taught English to students at a primary school with the AC students; I traipsed through the cobblestone streets of the Old Town and inspected every little shop and large souvenir stall in the area.

During that time, I learnt an abundant amount. This ranged from learning how to dance in the main square (though I gave up after several songs) to adjusting to the slow pace of Shangri-la life. After several rainy days, I realized that walking on the slippery, muddy cobblestone roads in slippers is not advisable. And in several weeks, I had gained the confidence to approach strangers and speak in somewhat broken Mandarin. I could enjoy Shangri-la’s laid-back lifestyle to the point where a breakfast and some grocery shopping could satisfy me for the rest of the day. This, I suppose, prepared me for the next stage.

The money finally came for the centre, and we had two weeks to renovate, redecorate and repair the centre for its opening. Gone were the days of aimless loitering – they were instead replaced by deadlines, meetings and inspections. Again, it was a novel experience – I had my first taste of a nine-to-five job after working for several hours straight on a brochure for the opening; I caught a glimpse of the slippery world of contracts and agreements (thankfully Eric expertly dealt with that). My most memorable experience was going to visit the Centre every day and watching the preparations advance progressively and to be a part of the whole preparation (even mopping the floors!). That is not to say there were no difficulties: our banners originally read ‘Welcome HKFW (Chinese Version)’ – literally – and our neighbours where unhappy about the Centre’s new toilets.

The opening was a success and an accomplishment for all of us, though I must admit it was a bit of an anticlimax. After days of frantic working, there was little left for us to do, except to wait for the renovations to finish and to prepare for our trips home. To be honest, I couldn’t bear to leave: there were so many things I hadn’t done yet, from visiting the Meili Mountain to making felt. With a commitment to the Centre and a list of unfinished business, I definitely hope I’ll be coming back to the squatting toilets and picturesque scenery of Shangri-la

The Road To Meili Snow Mountain

By Ximena Acevedo, Young Professional, August 2005

Sahra and I got back last night from taking a drive through some of the most spectacular scenery I have ever seen. We hired a driver and jeep to take us to Deqin, to see the Meili Mountain Range and visit the Mingyong Glacier. We set out early on Saturday, and luckily, we had pretty good weather as we headed up the mountains. At the beginning, we headed out of Zhongdian County, which is composed of beautiful praries, wildflowers, and cows and yaks in the middle of a valley. We then passed Napa Lake, which is formed after the snow melts and two rivers meet. We continued on until we reached Benzilan and we stopped to eat. Outside of Benzilan, are many little Tibetan villages, surrounded by fields of huge sunflowers. It is incredible to see where these people have chosen to live... there is hardly anything aside from a cluster of homes, perched on cliffs. And it's lovely to see Tibetan-Chinese women on the side of the road with their colorful headscarves and baskets on their backs.

We continued on and stopped at the Dongzhiling Monastery which was perched on a cliff overlooking incredible and dramatic mountainsides. This is one of the most beautiful monasteries i have ever seen. In the middle hall, where about 20 Tibetan monks, chanting... so their voices were heard melodically as we explored the different levels of the place. Luckily, there was a monk who was opening up different prayer halls for a Chinese man who was leading a mini tour for a white, middle aged couple. It was then that we got to go in and see the most beautiful Buddha I have ever seen. And the paintings in the hall were incredible. I couldn't take pictures, and i got reprimanded because i was pointing at this cool 3-D effect that was in one of the paintings to Sahra, and apparently, it is most disrespectful to point at the Buddha with your finger. You need to point with your entire hand. (oops!!)

We continued on to then drive through the Binghai Snow Mountain Range. There was no snow on these mountains yet, but the colors were magnificent. These mountains were intense reds, grays and purples. I felt like i was seeing mountains on Mars. This was probably my favorite part of the drive. We stopped a little ways later when we saw the first mountain with snow on it. The mist and clouds were coming in which created a very mystical feel. We were definitely above 3500m at this point so we could feel our breathing being very short. There was a young monk sitting at the side of the road, waiting for what? Who knows. What really struck me is that the people who live in this area have built their homes into the earth. So there is just a little roof and door that sticks up at an angle from the ground. I'm not sure if the home is just one little room, or if it goes much deeper into the ground. (on our drive back, we stopped to take pictures of one, and the people inside saw us and ran out to greet us and pose for pictures. before we knew it, about 10 people had come out of this tiny house!!!)

We continued on and stopped in front of the Meili Mountain Range before going to Deqin. Unfortunately, though the weather was warm, the clouds that were actually present were hovering right over the mountain peaks.. so we didn't get to see the famed and worshiped Kawakarpo. We stopped in Deqin to do some shopping and took some lovely pictures of the local people. they were really nice to us and i doubt they hardly ever see any foreigners passing through here. Most places we've been, we've been of the few non-Chinese. We stopped at a costume shop in the market and the lady had a great time making us put on Tibetan headdresses and having us take pictures.

After this, we stopped at a small little monastery and continued on to the Mingyong Village were we would sleep that night. We chose a hotel that had a nice view of the mountain from which the glacier originates, but unfortunately, that evening we had no electricity. We therefore bargained down the price and were able to pay less that $2 each... for a room with a private bathroom and a western toilet!! (Believe me, a real toilet is a rarity!!!!)

The next morning, we woke up in time to watch the sunrise and then head out on a two hour hike to the glacier. You can rent horses, but we wanted to do it on foot. The scenery was really beautiful, walking through a temperate forest and eventually starting to pass lots of piles of rocks that the Tibetan pilgrims leave along the route. This path we were on is part of a 7 day trek that circumnavigates Kawakarpo, and Tibetan Buddhists come and do this once a year. the path was very steep at points and it was hard to breathe at this altitude. Eventually, we finally began to see glimpses of the blue ice. At the base of the glacier is a small monastery with Tibetan prayer flags everywhere and then the rest of the way was by wooden steps along the edge of the glacier. We had had our hopes to be able to walk on the glacier, but it was actually very steep as it careened down the cliff. It was really impressive to say the least. i read that this glacier is a geographic rarity, as there are no glaciers at this latitude and longitude. On our way back down, we passed a group of monks who were also doing the climb.

The drive back was even more spectacular than the one there, since the weather was GORGEOUS. We didn't have time to stop everywhere, but we definitely got to take great pictures at the Binghai Mountain Range. And to top it off, when we made it back to Zhongdian County, there was a complete rainbow (the second one i've seen on this trip) and the sun was lighting up the lush green praries and tibetan homes so we stopped to take our last great pictures of the day.

All in all, this is a really beautiful area, with really interesting culture and village life as Chinese and Tibetan cultures intersect. The old town of Zhongdian is undergoing a lot of renovation, as artists and wealthier foreigners and alternative Chinese people are moving in. i suspect it will look very very different when I come back. Sahra's mom is starting up a foundation with her friends here to promote local handicrafts so that will help the economy here. They also want to promote the idea of not letting big business get a strong hold here and turn it into the Disneyland-type tourism that they create with most of their cultural treasures. I definitely plan on coming back to Yunnan and to Shangri-La, as we've seen pictures of other spectacular places in the area that we didn't have enough time (or money) to check out.

A Trip to Dimaluo

By Alex Ebel, MA Student

(Dimaluo is in Weixi County, Diqing Prefecture)

Getting off the truck first coming into Dimaluo, I found the village looked much less like China than I imagined and much more like a picture of Africa on a “please donate” card received in the mail in the States. I spent 17 days in the village offering simple advice to Alou, a local running a traveler’s lodge, and during that time lived more or less as a citizen in a place with more pigs than people. I will here describe a bit of what I saw. First, however, some background on the village:

Dimaluo is a small village located 20 km from Yunnan’s border with Tibet and 50 km from that of Burma. The people of Dimaluo are all ethnic minorities. The Nu, Lisu, and Dulong people have lived there for 200 years, the Tibetans coming 100 later. For as long as people have lived in this beautiful, remote village, influences have streamed in and been adopted. Dimaluo is an enigma. This tiny hamlet nestled in among steep, inhospitable mountains and far from any node of civilization has marvelously been influenced by an incredibly large variety of visitors.

Alou speaks the four local languages as well as Mandarin Chinese. Before attending Catholic mass, the primary Sunday activity of the village since the French missionaries visited in the late 1840’s, his wife and children put on traditional Tibetan clothing while he listened to a CD playing Celine Dion and Bryan Adams.

Throughout the village, many houses in the village had TV’s and VCD players and all had traditional wood burning fire pits. Basketball and Catholicism seemed to be the activities which most brought the village together and one of the two courts in the village was located next to the church. From celebrating the new year twice (both Catholic and Chinese) to singing “Say You, Say Me” without any idea of the meaning, the villagers of Dimaluo, like those of many other ‘underdeveloped’ places of the world, have picked up bits and pieces of different cultures and in doing so changing them, forming a unique set of customs and style of life whose evolution is at once amazing and comedic.

The sphere of influence affecting the flora and fauna of Dimaluo spreads larger even than that affecting culture. Sitting on the borders of three major climate regions, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Tibet, the wildlife of Dimaluo has been affected by almost every visitor who has chanced to come through the narrow valley. Ferns and bamboo shoots spurting up like office fountains out of the hills fight for space with alpine spruce below the snowline. According to UNESCO, the area supports 25% of the world’s animal species and 50% of China’s. The area was a refuge during the last ice age and has been described by UNESCO as “one of the world's least disturbed temperate ecological areas, an epicenter of Chinese endemic species and a natural gene pool of great richness.”

Dimaluo, through some miracle of history, has harbored and been affected by far more plants and creatures than its remote location would suggest.

The village has had electricity for four years. The houses in the village are all made of wood and almost without exception house pigs and cattle beneath. In one of the houses I sat and warmed myself around the fire. Dirty old newspaper was used to insulate the cracks between the wood plank walls while a small, shiny flat-screen TV projected an ever-changing hologram of Jesus that lit up the room. Alou marveled at this and remarked that he would give a week’s work for one. Every house I visited had a painted image of Jesus or a saint with small Mandarin characters underneath explaining its meaning. This I found peculiar given the majority of the villagers’ Mandarin was limited to buying and selling soft drinks and baijiu to the ethnic Han engineers working at the dam down the road.

Residents’ all depended on farming and herding for subsistence. Every day pigs, cattle and donkeys were herded out to pasture. The children not yet in school would spend daylight hours playing at the edge of town, throwing rocks at the animals to keep them from coming back into town to nibble at the bright green crops planted around the houses. The food the villagers ate was quite simple, from Tibetan yak butter tea to the ubiquitous Chinese tomato egg stir-fry, from hash browns strikingly reminiscent of my father’s (extra garlic and onion) to many varieties of steamed or fried bread.

In the village, the only concrete structures that exist were put in by the government. There are concrete reservoirs placed strategically up and down the wide dirt path that winds through the village. The only public toilet is also a government work, as is the town square/basketball court combination.

For its next trick, the government is putting a dam in just south of Dimaluo. A team of engineers and workers stays at the government built apartment building. These Han Chinese were just as foreign as I, as an American, was in Dimaluo. They looked different, spoke a different language, and as far as the residents were concerned lived on the other side of planet.

20 houses will be displaced by the project. The villagers, for the most part, are apathetic. They know little about how to fight the dam. They look helplessly down the road and make plans to move. Alou’s perspective is surprisingly reminiscent of what I learned about Democracy in high school. He said that as he is a citizen of the PRC, the government exists to serve him and as such it ought to look out for his best interests. He opposes the dam and has voiced his opinion. His voice, he said, has had no affect to date.

As I left Dimaluo on foot, Alou accompanied me the 5 km to the nearest concrete road. As we passed the houses on lower ground and then the dam, I thought about the words “economic development” and all the implications they had; what they meant to the dam workers, to the displaced people of Dimaluo, and to the odd spectator who, much like myself, simply watches and has the privilege of a 3rd person, superficial reaction. I asked him what the people are doing about the dam and its effects. They will continue living, he said. They will move and start again.

Dimaluo is, above all other things, a place of striking contradictions, and this seems to hold for its future as well. Alou’s largest complaint about life in the village was that the education level was far too low. I wonder that perhaps Alou’s lodge will succeed. Perhaps the dam will provide cheaper electricity and the ever increasing reach of the Chinese government will make it to Dimaluo to ‘develop’ the area. Perhaps all these things will bring the village better education and living standards. What then? As it was confronted with Catholicism and basketball, so will it be with the rest of the modern world.

Coming to Dimaluo I was expecting to end up an undergraduate Columbus, peering over the edge of the world. Instead of the primitive society I expected, I found a community and a style of life built on a strange confluence of cultures and an amazing capacity for adaptation.

I think of the last time I stepped out of the back of the used army truck that took 30 locals and one harried American into the village. I offered to help unload the gratuitous amount of pig feed, the bucket of fish and other things considered imports. Asking about the dam, I was told that it will come, that Alou and company will adapt. The flippancy with which this topic was handled sparked a little naive prediction in this starry-eyed liberal arts student. I imagine that all the hubbub of ‘modernizing China’ and the global influence that is slowly creeping into the village will be adopted and adapted in stride like a larger group of missionaries or another public works project. Change will come, Dimaluo will adapt, but these differences are much less earth shattering to the basketball players and the worshippers of Dimaluo than they are to the globalization theorists I read and the 3rd party observers of which I am one.

Painted on the sides of the church in Dimaluo are pictures of angels, Chinese characters, and a few Tibetan religious designs. In this church I attended a funeral. Chants sung at the service reminded me more of African chants on my Paul Simon CD than Catholicism or China. After the service we walked the coffin back through the village up and up a hill. On the walk the villagers picked up large stones and when we arrived piled them next to the grave.

The sounds that ensued: the grunts and orders of those lowering the coffin into the ground; the clumps of dirt hitting the coffin – first loud and hollow thumps then quieter and quieter thuds until they faded into the roar of the stream below; the sound of the gathered rocks being piled around the grave; again the chants, falling back into the noise of the rushing water. From my view point on the hill I could see other villages up mountains and down valleys, I could see their churches and basketball courts and could almost make out the karaoke machine undoubtedly playing somewhere in the distance.