Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

A is a good advert for finding something that you like doing that isn’t bad for you, then doing it as much as you can. What A likes to do is ride his bicycle. He has ridden his bike all over Asia but he especially likes to ride it in Yunnan, has done for years. When he runs out of money, and can no longer ride his bike (boo!) he goes home to Canada and works planting trees till he has enough money to return to China and (yay!) ride his bike some more.

Now he works in Zhongdian as a guide, leading mountain bike and hiking tours, and he has just opened his own mountain bike tour company. When he’s not working he spends his time breaking trails, meaning figuring out how to get over mountains on a bike.

About two months ago A gave a Tibetan contractor a thousand quid or so and a sketch – it would be exaggerating to say, ‘on the back of a cigarette packet’, but not by much – and he left to guide a tour group around the local holy mountain and ride his bike a bit, and then two days ago he returned, and, da-da, now he’s got a house!

It’s small, just a brick shell downstairs and one big wooden second storey room, but it’s proper Tibetan style, with intricate detailing around the windows and the staircase and a balcony from which you can see the snowy peaks. It doesn’t have plumbing or electricity yet and he has to go to the public toilet and shower. He got back just in time to tell the contractor that he wanted a sink put into the kitchen – not something, apparently, that Tibetan workmen would assume.

The rent on the land is about eighty pounds a year and he has a ten year lease. So – his very own Tibetan style batch pad, built to his own design, in Shangri La, for a grand. Even if he doesn’t renegotiate the contract at the end of the lease, he’ll still have only spent one hundred and eighty quid a year on the place.

I went to his house warming party. We hung prayer flags from the balcony and let off firecrackers to scare the ghosts away.

The resident foreigners came and some locals. In contrast to the hipster Dali scene the foreigners here are rugged, outdoorsy types who like hiking. They complain about the lack of availability of accurate topographical maps and the annoying Chinese habit of building roads into nice remote places. They discuss rumours of trails that exist between villages or over mountain passes. And they talk a lot about wood – should you varnish, paint, stain? Old or new? – because they’ve got, or are renovating, beautiful Tibetan houses. .

K was angry about an NGO that goes into the villages and gives every house a solar powered water heater. It’s absolutely useless. It won’t boil water to make it potable, so it’s only purpose is for washing. But Tibetans basically don’t wash, and if they do they’re tough enough to do it in cold water. And the solar panels come packed in polystyrene chips, which the villagers, not knowing any better, scatter around, and their pigs and chickens eat them and get ill. But someone in Brussels or Beijing can tick a box and say, here’s a solar powered village, what progress.

And K said how he went to this one village which was a really beautiful place up in the mountains, and some NGO had sorted them out with electricity. And the first thing they had done was to get someone to lug a TV up there. And he said he asked them why they weren’t happy any more and they said, ‘now we know we are poor.’

What K’s NGO does (among other things) is to go into villages and build a small basketball court. It’s a great idea, actually; a flat surface for threshing and drying grain, holding meetings on and dancing; no one can steal it, break it, or sell it and it’s not screwing with anyone’s culture.

A is very intelligent but he gets words muddled, like he said Top Gun was a homoerogenous movie and someone was vegetarian for ethnical reasons. His stories tend to be about some guy he knows who cycled across this or that desert for a year or whatever. He never boasts about his own exploits. He biked across Mongolia and he rarely mentions it, but he did make one off the cuff remark that brought home how hardcore it was – he mentioned that he had had to have ten days food on him at all times because from one week to the next he couldn’t be certain of coming across any settlements. He complained about how embarrassing and awkward it was when a Mongolian nomad, as a gesture of hospitality, invited him to sleep with his wife. He told me about a mutual friend who cycled around Tajerkistan then into Afghanistan and is now working for the Danish embassy in Kabul and how this guy can’t understand how come none of his friends want to go and visit him there. I pointed out that there is no such country as Tajerkistan.

I first met W four years ago when he had just come to China, a good looking lad but diffident. He spoke no Chinese and wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Now, I was annoyed to discover, he speaks better Chinese than me, owns a beautiful old Tibetan house, runs an art gallery, has a business renovating houses and another selling furniture and is a successful photojournalist – while remaining younger and better looking.

He had just got back from a photoshoot at Pu’er, where the famous tea comes from. The business is taken every bit as seriously as vintage wines in the west. Tea that is dried naturally is worth more, as is tea from certain areas at certain years. Pu’er is half fermented, and improves with age. Will had visited a tea bank. Investors would buy a brick of tea and put it in the tea bank and after a year it doubles in value. With such a high rate of return, many in the area have given up on real banks and started putting their money in tea.

Ah Dong is a Tibetan guide and driver who learnt English in India. He had walked for forty days across the mountains to Dharamasala in India, where the Tibetan government in exile is based. He had studied for four years then walked back into Tibet. It’s a common story, Tibetans who want an education sneak off to India rather than studying at a Chinese college. Most of the male members of his family had been killed as insurgents by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. But he said that had learnt during his Buddhist education in India that the Chinese were to be pitied not hated, as they did not know what they were doing.

There were a few more Tibetans there and after a couple of hours they were all singing and dancing. The dancing was hardly sophisticated, they put a chair in the middle of the room and then did something not that different from the oaky kokey round it. But their singing was amazing. I’m not very musical but I cannot hear those wistful, wailing Tibetan songs without it sending a shiver down my spine. It’s just what they’re used to doing and they weren’t trying to draw attention to themselves, it was simple joie de vivre. I was the only one who stopped talking to listen cause everyone else hears it all the time. Adrian said you never need a stereo at a Zhongdian party, you just wait till the Tibetans have had a few drinks.

I went to Zhongdian, a Tibetan town six hours north of Dali and a good thousand metres higher, to see A.

A new arrival in Zhongdian would be forgiven for thinking that someone had taken a beautiful old town of cobbled alleyeways and traditional timbered Tibetan buildings, and grafted onto it an ugly concrete sprawl of boulevards lined with cheap concrete.

But no – actually the concrete came first. When I came here five years ago the ‘old town’ was a slum of muddy trails and shacks. Mountains, crisp and unobtainable, lay in most directions but the town was gnarly. There were a couple of tourist cafes but there wasn’t much to eat, or buy in the dusty shops. The thing I remember most about it is the schlock horror of the Tibetan butchers, with yak viscera, spinal cords and heads sitting in a storm of flies.

What happened in the interim was, some Chinese marketing genius read Lost Horizon by James Hilton. It’s a novel from the 1930s, in which a gang of colonials have stiff upper lipped adventures in a Tibetan haven called Shangri-La. He invented the term, it is perhaps a corruption of the Tibetan Shangbala.

On basically no evidence whatsoever, this person decided that the secret Buddhist paradise described in the novel – the monastery of Shangri-La in the Valley of the Blue Moon – was, in fact, Zhongdian. It’s much more likely that Hilton was writing about Kailash, a holy mountain a thousand miles away.

Never mind. They changed the name of the town to Shang-ge-li-la, and they built the ‘old town’ pretty much from scratch. And I do mean town – it is an enormous project, there are dozens of cobbled alleyways and the hulking buildings are properly Tibetan, with huge wooden pillars, intricate detailing on the window screens and balconies and thick stone walls.

And each of these brooding mini-fortresses is now a bar, a restaurant, a shop selling combs made from yak bones, a traditional medicine pharmacy stocking caterpillar fungus and dried ants, and so on. They took the old temple and moved it a few hundred metres and built a new, much flashier temple, and nearby is the world’s largest prayer wheel, a gold cone about ten metres high which takes several men to turn it.

It has sort of worked. There are plenty of Chinese tourists here. And there is lots for them to do, with old growth forests and mountains all around, a few monasteries and hot springs, and a glacier up the road. The monastery just outside town must now be one of the richest in China.

In the ‘new town’ the butchers have cleaned up and there are even flashy supermarkets now. But plenty of people are worried about the social and environmental impact of mass tourism on such a scale in a fragile ecosystem.

In one supermarket I saw a good ‘new China’ image: a grisly nomad guy with gold teeth and matted hair, in riding boots and fur hat and fur trimmed yak skin cloak, striding down an aisle of shampoos.

One thing in the supermarket gives cause for optimism that someone, at least, is not just thinking about the fast buck potential. My purchases were put in a bag made of paper – Because plastic bags are non biodegradable and despoil the landscape, they are banned in Shangri-la. What a brilliant idea.