On 高黎贡山 Gaoligong Mountain

A couple of weekends ago, good old 彭智文 asked me if I wanted to climb 高黎贡山 (Gaoligong Mountain), probably because I’ve been asking since we arrived. It’s that massive majestic mountain range making daily guest appearances on my instagram. All of the American 腾冲 fellows, and most of the Chinese fellows signed on, making us a fit group of nine hikers. Early Saturday morning we stuffed into a van and rode to the base of the mountain.

It was a difficult morning of steps, steeps, stairs, and rocks. My pack was really heavy, which was obviously a disadvantage; I’d brought clothes for sleeping, clothes for the next day, a bathing suit, a towel, 10 bananas, two dozen unidentified stone-fruit, a few liters of water, dates, pumpkin seeds, keys, glasses, tp—a hundred too many things. Though it was a never-ending slow slog, everyone was mutually and simultaneously pumped, supportive, and exhausted. Finally we got to the top where we found a windy field, prime for photo-taking.

 

After some food and rest, we spent five hours trying to ride gravity, but mostly falling, down the mountain. Although it was easier, I was on a mission to finish; around 10am I had felt the first pangs of a dehydrated, caffeine-deprived headache, and by the afternoon, it was a fully-developed, skull-splitting agony. Never skimp on water: lesson learned.

Once we reached our paradise of clean beds and hot food, we turned right back around and hiked to a natural hot spring. It had been a long day, but we soldiered down the path nonetheless. The sun was setting when we crossed a bridge over a waterfall to a shallow temperate plash. It was the size of a swimming pool, and the water was clear and warm—a gentle end to our arduous feat.

Kite Day

Last week the entire school went kite flying, and it was incomprehensibly perfect. The students formed two lines and marched up through the mountains for an hour, while 杨维菊 and I had running races, sing-a-longs, and foliage-collecting contests. She wove me a crown. When we reached a picturesque plateau, everyone sat in little circles and shared fruit and snacks, resting between their kite-run jaunts. I walked from circle to circle, accepting watermelon juice, apples, oranges, and bananas, stealing a kite or two when I could. We stayed all afternoon, until dinnertime, when us teachers whipped up some 米线.

Sunsets Are Setting Suns

Thinking about my month away from China, children, and working, I keep coming back to my inability to distinguish between leaving and arriving. I keep thinking how surprisingly unsurprising it was to be ambivalent to the changes in landscape. As soon as every plane landed, as every bus arrived, I was home. Perhaps the planes and the buses were a sort of home too.

Riding away in a little van, I looked out over town and cried. I thought about my sense of belonging in my Chinese community, and how I would miss the mountains 高黎贡山. But as we drove to my parents’ new home, a cab driver introduced me to Seattle. I was exhausted, but the newness of the city was invigorating.

A month later, I looked out of the little porthole feeling a piercingly blunt melancholy. I thought about my sense of belonging in the Pacific Northwest, and how I would miss Mount Rainier and the Olympic range. But hopelessly wandering the streets of 昆明 Kunming looking for my hostel, I realized how excited I was to hear new stories from old friends.

There is some part of me, however, that is different. Upon hearing how it felt to be back, my mother wrote, “but you’re not the same.” How can I deny the simplicity and veracity of this statement? All I know is that adaptation is my constant. My surroundings will always change. The people I know will always change. But I will always change with them, and in that there is a sameness, a reassurance, a home.

I’ll leave you with two images. I was riding the bus back from downtown Seattle over the floating bridge, looking out on the lake with tears in my eyes. The sky was oppressively broad, wispy clouds shone orangey pink, and old Rainier radiated like the sun. The second is my arrival in 永安 Yong’an. The 菜花 canola flowers have begun to bloom, making the fields so vibrantly yellow it’s almost intoxicating. A dark ragged line of mountains carved itself into the sky, and a vortex of purple red clouds hinted at the sun’s casual departure.

Three Friends, Two Mountains, and One Angry River

‘What are you doing for 国庆节?’ I was often asked before the break. 国庆节 is China’s national holiday, celebrating the day the Communist party was formed. No one really cares, except for the fact that everyone gets a whole seven days off, from October 1^st to the 7^th.

‘Going to 怒江(Nu Jiang)!’ I would reply, stressing the NUUU because inevitably, the asker would knit their brow, then correct me. ‘Oh! 丽江 (Li Jiang), of course.’

At the end of our trip, I insisted that 怒江 was the new Jiang, a pun met with the eye-rolls and glares that good pun always should,  but I meant it. From what I remember, 丽江 is a knock-off of 大理(Dali) but sadder and just as touristy. 怒江, however, is beautiful, rich in the Lisu minority culture, and ‘off the beaten track.’ (Whatever that means… there was only one ‘track,’ which seemed to have been beaten quite frequently, or I assume so based on its condition).

怒江 is the prefecture just north of where I live, but over a huge mountain range. About half of the population is Lisu, an ethnic minority found in Burma, Thailand, India, and Yunnan. They have their own language, traditions, and history, independent of China’s dominant ethnic group, the Han.

Shout-out to my girl Jasmine for the idea. She suggested it to Diane and I, and though at first I thought, wait you want to go somewhere more rural than where we already live?… now I’m really glad we did. Also, I’m going to refer to the three of us as DAJ from now on, mainly because I can.

We all met up in 保山(Baoshan), and after the most glorious meal of our lives, walked over to what seemed to be the red-light district, to find a place to sleep. Over the next two days we took four buses and one police truck to finally get to 丙中落(Bingzhongluo)—the northern-most, most isolated, yet somehow most touristy town on our agenda. At this point there were eight of us: DAJ, two second-year Chinese fellows we bumped into at the bus station in 保山, two slightly annoying American college students we bumped into at the bus station in 福贡(Fugong), and a cool Chinese guy they had bumped into at a bus station in 昆明(Kunming). You see, it was rumored that to enter 丙中落 one needed to pay an 100元 fee. Yet my friend Jasmine, ever the networker, called her local-teacher friend, who called one of his friends from 怒江, in order to call his policeman friend, to ask him to sneak us in for free. We later met a nice German guy who astutely observed, ‘relationships… I think it’s called关系(guanxi)… seem to be pretty important here.’ So the eight of us, plus two policemen, piled into a fiver-seater, and drove right on through the toll gate to our destination 丙中落.  Another shout-out for Jasmine and her homie Yangxu.

Unfortunately there was not a single hotel room available. We asked high and low, but receptionists started to scold us, ‘it’s 国庆节 ! And it’s late!’ Splitting up didn’t even help, though it did help us lose the other Americans. A man sitting outside eating a pomegranate overhead our pleas, ‘I have a place you can stay. It’s just not cleaned up...’

We were skeptical. ‘Can it fit eight people?’

‘8, 10, 25—it doesn’t matter.’

Terrified, we continued to search. 丙中落 only has one street, and after walking it up and down three times, we started to consider the offer from the creepy pomegranate man. But finally I noticed a store solely selling live chickens and fish also had a 宿主 sign. Alright, maybe the rooms were a little yellow-tinged, but it was about half the price of every other hotel. We celebrated our find over dinner at a hostel called Aluo’s, which we really liked, so we made a reservation at their other location in 迪麻落 (Dimaluo) for the following night.

In the morning, it was down to DAJ again. We nabbed a map and decided to hike to 迪麻落 by foot. Psyched to not be trapped on a bus, we marched off into the wilderness with a vague notion of heading southeast. First we needed to cross a bridge. Pretty straightforward—head towards the water. Well after asking three different people, we still couldn’t find it. When we asked a woman a second time, she took us to the right path.  

‘Hmm, if it took us an hour to just find a bridge, maybe we can’t make it in a day…’

‘No!’ said optimist Aubrey.

We walked over the bridge and encountered a man with a fancy walking stick. Little did we know, he would soon be our salvation.

Along the angry river we went, until we met an old, skinny 北京人, a chubby dude with a big camera, and his preteen son. They proved to be enjoyable hiking company, and we walked until we came across a village, and stopped to ask directions at a church. (Bizarrely most of the area is devoutly Catholic, thanks to some missionaries back at the turn of the 20^th century).  They laughed in our faces, ‘it takes us a day to get to 迪麻落.’ Fine. We would find a road, and from there hitchhike to a place we could definitely walk from.

At the road, we parted ways with our new friends, and tried to flag down any and every car. Things were looking pretty grim, when a familiar face rolled up. The man from the bridge! Turns out him and chubby dude had been friends since elementary school. He dropped us off, and we were on our way. Only a 10km trek from this point. Except we hadn’t really eaten lunch and a cab suddenly rolled by, tempting us. But our cheapskate hearts saved us from sloth. ’30 块?!’ we scoffed. ‘No way.’

After a two-hour slow uphill march, we arrived at Aluo’s, road-weary and relieved. Showers (cold)! Food! 啤酒! Sleep! What more could we have asked for. We chatted with Aluo himself for quite a while, a strikingly handsome older gentlemen, with amazing 普通话(standard Mandarin, pretty much everyone in China speaks their own local dialect, or in 怒江’s case, the Lisu language). He told us we had to go to 阿路来卡 (Alulaika), about three hours up a mountain.

The next day, we headed up. The path was a steep one, but the views were more and more amazing the higher we climbed. Once we were at the top, we were literally walking on clouds. Naïvely thinking we would find a restaurant, it slowly dawned on us that 阿路来卡 is a tiny village of about twenty homes and a church. I was getting ready to fly down the mountain for food, when our new trek-mate begged a random household to cook for us. Though barely understanding Chinese, they were gracious and hospitable, serving butter tea, potatoes, spicy fried egg, and rice (so only potatoes and rice). We gave them two American quarters as a keepsake, and 60快 for the trouble.

I think the best part about this trip was how little stress, how little effort, how little planning any of us put into it. We took things day by day and it turned out to be an amazing week. I feel like I would only ever be so casual about something unless I lived, well, just over the mountain. It also makes me appreciate coming home to Yong’an, because it’s really just as beautiful, yet I don’t even have to share it with the tourists.