Author: Darcey

Without the help of all our friends in Yushu, we would not have had the opportunity or the good fortune to successfully run trips in Qinghai province. They are like family to us, and there is much they can do to help the current situation in Yushu. We need to help them in the hope that they can then help others.

Tashi Maqu Dorje is originally from Yushu and is a former AsiaTravel colleague. At the end of 2006, Tashi left AsiaTravel to pursue a medical degree. One of his greatest attributes is his almost native command of the English language.

During the summer of 2007, he was our local trip planner for the Tibetan Grand Horse Racing Festival and luxury camp in Yushu. He worked closely with AsiaTravel Directors Veronique d’Antras, Sunshine Shang and Paul Moreno in making the trip a reality. He put AsiaTravel in touch with the many people, including his family who worked at our camp in Bartang (around 45 kilometers south of Yushu).

Samdeg is a schoolteacher who has been our camp manager in Yushu and helped in the trekking portion of our trip, setting up the remote camp. His relatives had grazing rights to the land where we set up camp, and our camp gear has been stored in his uncles’s house in Bartang for the past two years.

Samdeg’s family had a house in Yushu near the Rokpa-sponsored Orphanage School. He is a very kind, patient and diligent man, making the daily drive to the village school where he teaches. It was because of this that he was not home in the morning of the quake. His late mother and sister were tragically not as lucky, and he is suffering greatly as a result of these two losses.

Niyma Tenzing is the director and manager of the Rokpa Orphanage School in Yushu. He is instrumental in running and maintaining the orphanage, which cares for around 500 children. A number of graduates from the Orphanage School have attained a proficient degree of English at the University of Xining, and some become Tibetan doctors. A number have also returned to Yushu to further expand and run the orpanage’s activities and education.

AsiaTravel deeply thanks our friends, partners, and clients for their continued interest in helping those in need in Yushu, Qinghai province, which was recently hit by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake.

As we have received many emails from past clients and friends asking about the situation, we wanted to provide further on-the-ground news from Yushu.

 

Our Europe Team Director, Veronique d’Antras, has been at the forefront of AsiaTravel’s efforts to help the people of Yushu. After coordinating a truckload of supplies to be sent to Yushu with Tashi, one of our Yushu partners and a Qinghai native, she hopes that it has arrived. The road from Xining to Yushu – a major route into the Yushu area – was damaged by the earthquake, and traffic has subsequently been delayed.

While there has been an incredible influx of volunteers into the region, there are a few setbacks that are making the distribution of aid more difficult. For one, areas outside of Yushu that were affected by the earthquake are incredibly remote, meaning that rural villagers are still in most need of aid. Furthermore, the Tibetan/Mandarin language barrier, altitude sickness, and cold weather, including snow and hail in the region, has slowed down volunteers. Because of the inclement weather, several aid trucks overturned on the road from Xining to Yushu. Several journalists noted that long lines were forming for food distribution.

A mass prayer ceremony for the victims was held by monks and others in Yushu on April 20th, following the cremation of around 1,000 bodies by the Yushu Tibetan monks on April 17th.

On a positive note, one of our Yushu partners, Samdeg, has been located. He was previously deemed unharmed, but was unreachable for a few days after the earthquake occurred. We are now working with him to set up AsiaTravel tents to provide those in the region with temporary housing

Furthermore, Xinhua reports that post-quake reconstruction has been on the agenda. A reporter learned on Monday, April 19 from the Government of Qinghai Province that the overall objective of reconstruction will be building a high-altitude ecotourism city. (Source: Xinhua, April 19, 2010)

The Chinese government declared a nationwide period of mourning with flags at half mast on Wednesday afternoon, April 21st (Beijing time), to express condolences to earthquake victims. All public entertainment was put on hold. (Source: Guardian UK, April 20, 2010)

———-

Photo credit: Land of Snows

Michael Zhao, of New York-based Asia Society’s CHINA GREEN, has produced another incredible video on environmental change in China and its societal and cultural implications for the Chinese people. AsiaTravel was happy to contribute photos for such a meaningful video.

 

“Fading Shangri-La 失色中的香格里拉” highlights the rapid change of Mt. Khawa Karpo, or Meili Snow Mountain in Chinese, which is hailed as the most sacred mountain for Tibetans in Yunnan. The video is an important follow-up to Orville Schell’s (also of Asia Society) February 2010 article, “China’s Magic Melting Mountain,” about which we previously blogged.

Visually stunning and more relevant than ever, this video highlights the impending threat of a lost Tibetan religious figure, holy land, and spiritual community in Yunnan as Mt. Khawa Karpo’s glacial peaks continue to melt.

From the CHINA GREEN website:

Mt Khawa Karpo, known by Chinese as Meili Snow Mountain, is among the most sacred mountains in the Tibetan world. It is here in the steep valleys that novelist James Hilton set his Lost Horizon, describing the utopian wonderland of Shangri-La where time stands still. Tibetans have long worshiped this holy mountain, regarded as one of the highest spiritual gods in this mountainous region of China.

Yet as the earth warms, glacier retreat and ice loss here over the last decade have reached alarming levels and the melting is only accelerating. As a result, locals worry that the soul of this holy land – their Shangri-La – is slipping away. With it, a supernatural source of blessing for their people and communities is feared to be disappearing.

Watch a trailer of the video here (and for the full version, go to CHINA GREEN’s website): Fading Shangri-la trailer on YouTube

In recent days, AsiaTravel has been working with our local partners to get on-the-ground knowledge of the Yushu tragedy, and to provide needed supplies and aid.

Since our last post on Yushu, we have been notified of the following:
– AsiaTravel’s Europe Team Director, Veronique, hopes that the truck she helped coordinate to bring supplies to Yushu has arrived to the area. Since the road from Nansheng to Yushu was damaged by the earthquake, traffic has been slower.
– At this point, villages and other local areas outside of Yushu proper need the most aid.
– Volunteers are having some difficulty with relief efforts due to the language barrier and altitude sickness.
– One of our local Yushu partners, who was previously deemed unharmed but was unreachable, has been located and we are cooperating with him to distribute tents.

AsiaTravel has decided to take a three-fold approach to our aid for those suffering in Yushu, which includes two NGOs and aid for our local partners and friends affected by the earthquake.

1) Local partners: we are donating money to purchase medicine for our local partners’ families, in order to better facilitate their and their loved ones’ recovery from this tragedy.

2) Orphans: we are donating money to The Orphanage School, which is run by international NGO Rokpa, to help those children orphaned in the region.

3) Monks: we will also be donating to the Yushu chapter of Himalayan Consensus, an NGO dedicated to ethnic diversity and cultural sustainable development. The coordinator, Laurence Brahm, has sent goods to Damkar monastery where AsiaTravel visits during journeys for the Tibetan Yushu Horse Festival.

How can you get involved in these aid efforts?
– For The Orphanage School/Rokpa, please visit their website and scroll to the bottom of the page on how to give Single and Regular donations online and via mail.
– To donate to Himalayan Consensus or AsiaTravel’s local partners’ families, please email Alex at alex.grieves@wildchina.com with the subject line “Yushu donation.” Alex can provide you with contacts and donation information.

UPDATE: Follow Rokpa’s Yushu Relief blog for up-to-date information on developments in the area.

———-

Photo credit: Land of Snows

Have more questions about the situation in Yushu? Have other news from Qinghai, and ways to help? Please email Alex at alex.grieves@wildchina.com.

AsiaTravel wishes to send our deepest condolences to the victims of Wednesday morning’s 7.1-magnitude earthquake in Yushu, Qinghai province (northwestern China, bordering Tibet). Our thoughts are with our local Qinghai partner and his staff as they and their families deal with the aftermaths of this tragedy.

China’s official news service, Xinhua, is currently reporting a death toll of 617, with 313 people missing and 9,110 injured.  A  search and rescue operation is currently underway, with the central government allocating $29.3 million for disaster relief.

AsiaTravel is also taking action: our eco-friendly camping tents used for our signature Tibetan Yushu Horse Festival journey are now being used in Yushu to house earthquake victims. Our team in China will continue to monitor the situation on the ground and provide updates.

As another summer draws to a close, we find our mind drifting to one of our favorite places to enjoy fall scenery in China – Shangri-La and the surrounding Tibetan areas. Although it is doubtful that it is actually the place James Hilton described in his novel Lost Horizon, Shangri-La taps into many of the themes that have enchanted readers of the book since it was first published in 1933.

 

Every autumn, we are drawn to this corner of Yunnan near the Tibetan border, where the Songzanlin Monastery looks down upon a valley where yaks graze in meadows crisscrossed with crystal-clear streams and the leaves of the trees in surrounding hills are ablaze with color.

Songzanlin is only the beginning of what this area has to offer. Towering snowcapped mountains, the headwaters of the Mekong River, alpine forests and massive glaciers combine to make this one of the most breathtaking areas in one of China’s most scenic provinces. Bringing it all together is the otherworldly holy mountain known to Han Chinese as Meili Snow Mountain and Tibetans as Mt. Kawagebo.

Just as with Hilton’s Shangri-La, this sacred geography is removed from the trappings of modern life, with time moving at its own pace. The days are characterized by warm sunshine and cool breezes while the nights are crisp and intoxicating.

Regardless of which journey you’re on, this corner of the “roof of the world” never fails to invigorate and rejuvenate.

 

Around a decade ago Yunnan was still a bit off most travelers’ radar, but today it is one of China’s top draws for both international and domestic travelers.

For international travelers, it wouldn’t be difficult to argue that the main factor that put Yunnan on the map toward the end of the 90s was the opening paragraph of the province’s chapter in Lonely Planet’s China guidebook:

“Yunnan is without doubt one of the most alluring travel destinations in China. It’s the most geographically varied of all of China’s provinces, with terrain as widely divergent as tropical rainforest and icy Tibetan highlands. It is also the sixth-largest province in China and the home of a third of all China’s ethnic minorities and half of all China’s plant and animal species. If you could only go to one province, this one might well be it. [emphasis added]”

It was one of the most succinct (and accurate) summaries of what is one of China, Asia and the world’s most topographically, biologically and ethnically diverse regions. It was only a matter of time before the world realized how unique Yunnan is. Domestically it is already well on its way to becoming a “brand” of sorts like California or Tuscany.

Which brings us back to domestic tourism – and again to the Lonely Planet, who recently published it first Chinese-language guidebook introducing a part of China to Chinese people. What was it? Not surprisingly, Yunnan.

Former Lonely Planet contributor Chris Taylor’s recent review of the LP’s Chinese-language guide to Yunnan captures the through-the-looking glass feeling we had when we got our hands on a copy of the book:

“There is perhaps no greater irony of modern travel than being photographed by the natives with digital SLRs. Times have changed and now foreigners are part of the colorful backdrop for Chinese on personal journeys of discovery in their homeland. Add another layer of irony: in Yunnan, some of those Chinese travelers are now armed with a Chinese-language Lonely Planet guidebook to the province.”

As recently discussed in this blog, the popular destination of Lijiang is now held up as a model of how to not use tourism to develop a city. But that’s not to say Lijiang isn’t worth visiting. It’s all about knowing where and when to go to avoid the crowds.

The LP Yunnan guide won’t affect Chinese travel habits the way it did with laowai (foreigners) but it is still noteworthy in that it shows how important Yunnan already is to China’s domestic travel market.

This no doubt means that there are plenty of destinations overrun by unsustainable commercial tourism, but these places are all connected to a tight network of agents, shops and “scenic areas” operating on a code based upon kickbacks. Unfortunately for the Chinese market, there are no domestic AsiaTravels offering real off-the-beaten path options.

———-

Photo credit: Amazon

Who needs a time machine when you’ve got frogs?

Secrets of the development of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau have recently been revealed to us by Popeye-forearmed frogs whose evolutional divergences coincide with major tectonic events connected with the raising of the “roof of the world”.

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and Kunming studied 24 different groups of the tribe Paini, gaining new insights into the collision of India and Asia, which led to the formation of spectacular peaks of the Himalayas and the breathtaking landscapes of the Tibetan Plateau. MSNBC reports:

“Geologists know a lot about that area, but what they haven’t been able to do is give a sequence to the timing of the rise of particular mountain masses and particular ridges and pieces,” David Wake, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley and a co-author of a new paper detailing the findings, said in a UC Berkeley statement.

“We use these frogsas a surrogate for a time machine.”

The rather unique frogs live in fast-flowing streams, requiring the male frogs to have strong forelimbs and coarse chests so that slippery females don’t get swept away by swift currents during mating.

The team of scientists found that the Paini originated in the Indochina region of Southeast Asia before moving into western China 27 million years ago, when a divergence occurred creating two new groups of frogs: the lowland Quasipaa frogs of South China and Southeast Asia and their high-altitude cousins, Nanorana in Tibet.

The Quasipaa frogs diverged into South China and Southeast Asian groups with the raising of the Truong Son mountain range on the border between Laos and Vietnam. But the real action was taking place in Tibet roughly nine million years ago, where the Nanorana subgenus was adapting to cold, dry and oxygen-poor conditions. A third group of spiny frogs was also isolated on the Himalayas 19 million years ago as the Tibetan Plateau pushed higher.

As tectonic events separated the frogs, each group evolved different features from other groups, becoming less and less alike.

The story of these frogs illustrates the inseparable relationship between geographical diversity and biodiversity. As Asia’s surface transformed, so did its animal and plant life. This variety of topography, flora and fauna in Tibet, as well as Yunnan and Sichuan, is one of the main reasons that this part of China is where several of AsiaTravel’s most popular tours take place.

AsiaTravel’s Family Adventures in Tibet and Soul of Tibet tours offer unforgettable experiences in this land of diversity. If the roof of the world is a little too high for your tastes, you can always explore the incredibly biodiverse foothills of the Himalayas through our South of the Clouds.

———

Photo credit: Flickr

Our journeys are great ways to enjoy the beauty of China’s countryside as well as the dynamism and history of its cities, but they are also unique opportunities to meet inspiring and unforgettable people.

During a recent visit to Shangri-la, we were honored to meet Lobsang Khedup, a Tibetan monk who is not only working to help impoverished youth from the Tibetan regions of Yunnan, but who is also helping preserve the 1,800-year-old tradition of thangka painting.

Thangka painting is the traditional Tibetan style of painting deities using paint made from local minerals. Deeply imbued with the ethos of Tibetan Buddhism, this painting style focuses on the facial expression of the subject. Ideally, the longer one looks at a thangka painting, the more subtleties emerge from the deity’s facial expression.

A native of Shangri-la, Lobsang is a thangka painting master. An average painting takes him around a year to complete. The high degree of detail and difficulty of thangka painting combined with advancements in printing and copying over the last century have resulted in a dwindling number of thangka masters.

Lobsang started the Tibetan Thangka Academy in 2008 and now has 16 students from the countryside who are studying under him and another master.

Students at the academy not only study the art of thangka painting, they also take classes in Buddhism and English. Their education is provided free of charge, with funds provided by the Shangrila Association.

“When painting, your feelings are the most important,” Lobsang told us in his study. “But you also need knowledge and wisdom – without education you cannot paint.”

In addition to teaching its Tibetan students the art of thangka painting, the academy offers classes to the general public in both thangka and traditional Chinese painting styles.

Lobsang has done such a good job of preserving the dying thangka art that the Shangri-la government has commended and supported the academy. We admire Lobsang not just as an amazing painter and socially minded individual, but as someone savvy enough to navigate the difficult political landscape in his home.

Teeming with geographical, ethnic and biological diversity – plus some of the best food in China – Yunnan has always been one of our most popular destinations.

The charming small towns of Lijiang, Dali, Jinghong and Shangri-la and the Naxi, Bai, Yi, Dai, Hani and Tibetans who live there have provided our clients with unforgettable travel experiences and new insights into China.

These popular places aside, Yunnan is brimming with countless lesser-known destinations that are also well worth a visit. One of our favorites is the former trading outpost of Shaxi in Yunnan’s northwest.

Blessed with blue skies, sunshine and cool breezes year-round and located in a verdant mountain valley with no airport, tall buildings, car traffic or noticeable pollution, Shaxi is almost too good to be true.

For centuries Shaxi was a busy trade hub linking the Yunnan and Tibet portions of the Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan route. Traders coming up from the south on the route would bring tea, cloth, alkali and daily necessities, while Tibetans would bring yak furs and traditional medicines.

In addition to being a convenient halfway point for Yunnanese and Tibetan traders, Shaxi also had an important commodity of its own: salt from the nearby Misha salt wells.

The majority of Shaxi’s residents belong to the Bai ethnic group, who are known for their hospitality and their green thumbs. When the caravans were passing through town, it was not uncommon to see the different faces and costumes of the Yi, Lisu, Han, Naxi, Hui and Tibetan ethnic groups, especially in Shaxi’s main square, where goods were sold.

The caravans could have as many as 40 or 50 animals, mostly mules with some horses. Just as important were the muleteers, who were usually responsible for 10 animals.

The caravan routes died out around 60 years ago, eliminating the main source of revenue for the economy that had thrived in Shaxi. The town reverted to reliance upon agrarianism and has passed the decades quietly, missing out on benefits – and drawbacks – that other Chinese cities have experienced since the late 1970s.

Now, just as quietly, Shaxi is experiencing a renaissance of sorts through tourism. The local government has spent quite a bit of funds on cleaning up the old town for visitors and has done a surprisingly good job of it.

Without any advertisements, few shops and no cars, plus several dozen well-preserved old Bai homes, in many ways Shaxi feels frozen in time.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing in the old town, there is a small handful of cafes and restaurants there, as well as one of our favorite new boutique hotels in Yunnan, Laomadian.

Laomadian is a compound of several old Bai homes that has been tastefully renovated by A Fang, an extremely welcoming Taiwanese woman who has long been interested in the history and cultures of northwest Yunnan.

Just a few doors up from Laomadian is the courtyard home of Ouyang Shengxian, a 70-year-old Bai man whose father and grandfather were some of the last of the muleteers.

We spoke with Ouyang on a recent sunny Shaxi morning in his 100-year-old home, where he recalled the days of visiting caravans for us. As he told us stories of the old days, with visitors from afar and banditry, we felt extremely fortunate to be able to sit down with a man who is truly a link to a bygone era.

The history and people of Shaxi alone make a visit worthwhile, but there are also plenty of natural attractions.

The crystal-clear Heihui River flows just outside the old town, with paths on both sides that are ideal for strolls in the sunshine. There are several photogenic bridges along the river and several small towns dotting the valley.

Up in the hills surrounding the valley, there are plentiful hiking options. If you have the time, we highly recommend any of the two- or three-day treks in the hills, which will take you through several Yi villages.

If you’re shorter on time, Shibao Mountain is a great place to spend a morning or afternoon before hiking back downhill to Shaxi. The mountain is home to Buddhist grottoes that miraculously survived the destruction of the Cultural Revolution and are some of the most important artifacts connected to the spread of Buddhism into China from India via Tibet. These grottoes are highly treasured – visitors are not allowed to take any photos of them.

Interestingly, there is also a large indentation in the stone near the grottoes that locals say resembles a human vagina. It is a tradition for pregnant women from around the valley to pray to it with the hope that they have a smooth delivery.

After checking out the grottoes on Shibao Mountain, we hit one of the trails that leads back down to Shaxi and the surrounding valley. We scanned from one end of the valley to the other and were unable to see a crane or any other construction – this is nearly impossible in today’s China.

Work is underway on a new highway that will make Shaxi more accessible to the outside world – all the reason to visit Shaxi sooner rather than later. The local government has declared its dedication to sustainable development and is working with international NGOs to that end. We hope that for their sake, and the world’s, they can manage to preserve Shaxi’s pristine beauty for generations to come.