“I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excess of all kinds—even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.”
That’s a quote from the British novelist James Hilton’s wonderful little book Lost Horizon, which is set in a mystical Himalayan mountain village called Shangri-La. There, people live for hundreds of years because of the otherworldly water and air. In an attempt to capitalize on that name, China has renamed one of its Himalayan towns Shangri-La. That’s where I’ve been the past two weeks.
Personally, I haven’t felt anything mystical here aside from a serious shortage of air due to the elevation of the Tibetan plateau, at 3,200 meters above sea level. Formerly called Zhongdian, this town is in southwestern China’s Yunnan province on the fringe of the Himalayas. I’m hoping to fly next into Lhasa (elevation 3,650 meters), from where I’ll travel over several 5,200-meter-high passes en route to Mount Everest Base Camp (elevation 5,380 meters) and onward to Nepal.
This has been my first taste of Tibetan culture. And I love it, the yak tea and yak meat and yurt-like homes. The old Tibetan center of town is full of narrow cobblestone alleyways, airy pousadas with spacious courtyards, cozy restaurants and bars filled with the smell of wood-fired stoves and fireplaces.
That’s the more Shangri-La-esque part of Shangri-La. The less pleasant part is the main town, which is full of depressing Communist-style concrete buildings and exhaust-belching buses and dump trucks that barrel through the dirty boulevards. One bus nearly hit me on my bicycle while I was pedaling to a Tibetan village several miles outside the city — and that’s a recommended tourist activity!
I survived that bicycle ride to to the Tibetan village, where I found a cool old Buddhist temple atop a hill and was invited into a traditional Tibetan log-home, which is basically just a big square room covered by a thatched roof. Inside, an old woman served me homemade Yak butter tea, Yak cheese covered in sugar, and flat bread. Very filling. In exchange, along with 50 yuan, I gave her grandkids my pack of Oreos.
I was trying to travel overland by Jeep from Shangri-La to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. But that turned out to be too expensive: a week-long drive through harrowing mountain passes at a cost of $1,500 per person. Instead, I found an alternate travel package that offered a flight to Lhasa and weeklong tour of the capital city and surrounding area followed by a weeklong Jeep ride to Everest Base Camp and then to the border with Nepal.
While waiting for my flight, I took a trip east to the town of Baishutai, where a sodium-rich soil has created China’s largest terraces of crystallized sodium carbonate. Visiting the terraces is something of a must-do-before-you-die for anybody living here, according to the local Dongba Naxi culture.
Nearby Baishutai, we met an 82-year-old leader of the Dongba Naxi people who, since childhood, has sketched and painted traditional stories on homemade paper using the Naxi pictograph language (the world’s only living pictoral language, according to my guidebook). His books sell for thousands of dollars to American museums and art collectors, he said.
The old man reminded me of the wise old character of the High Lama from Lost Horizon who says at the end of the novel: “Here we shall stay with our books and our music and our meditations, conserving the frail elegancies of a dying age, and seeking such wisdom as men will need when their passions are all spent. We have a heritage to cherish and bequeath. Let us take what pleasure we may until the time comes.”
