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| The Three Pagodas, Dali’s most prominent monument, can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty, 1,200 years ago |
Ingenuity revealed itself in a most guileful manner as our China Eastern flight from Calcutta touched down at Kunming airport in the wee hours of a balmy summer morning. Walking out of immigration, we were met by a poker-faced Chinese man, dressed nattily in a dark suit adorned with a metal badge that seemed to indicate a mid-level position in government. With the imperious swagger of a customs officer, he approached us as we stood in the arrival lounge waiting for our travel agent to show up, and flagged us aside with an officious gesture of the hand.
‘Good morning gentlemen, may I see your passports?’ he said in a polite but firm tone, making us feel like amateur drug dealers.
We promptly obliged. ‘And may I know where all you would be travelling during your stay in China?’ he continued while examining our visas, his piercing gaze still half-locked on us.
It’s would be a long haul, we explained. For the next three weeks, we would be on a cultural expedition, retracing the ancient Tea & Horse Road through Yunnan and Tibet, thereby travelling through nearly 4,000km of Chinese terrain. And yes, we did have special permits for visiting Tibet, we added, hoping to stem the next obvious question.
‘Ah, okay,’ the man nodded, handing back our passports. Then suddenly, his manner changed dramatically from the bureaucratic to the entrepreneurial. ‘So maybe you’d like some good deals on hotels,’ he suggested, sounding more genial.
At that very moment, we saw the glass doors of the terminal swing open, as a young woman dressed in smart casuals rushed in with a sorry-I’m-late expression on her face and a placard bearing our names. To our utter surprise, the ‘official’ – seeing her approach us – promptly did a vanishing act, blending into the crowd as quickly as he had emerged from it.
‘Oh these touts, they’ll go to any lengths for a commission,’ the woman grinned as she walked up to us. ‘Anyway, I hope you had a nice flight. Welcome to China.’
We hadn’t even started our journey, and one thing was already clear. This trip was going to throw up surprises for us at every corner.
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| The ancient town of Dali offers an insight into the unique traditions of the Bai tribe |
But we’re weren’t complaining. Ever since we were commissioned by the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (MAKAIAS), a Calcutta-based institute, to travel this route, I and my fellow travellers– retired bureaucrat Phalguni Matilal and filmmaker Ranajit Ray – had known in the bottom of our hearts that this would be no ordinary journey.
The Tea & Horse Road consisted of mule tracks hewn, more than a thousand years ago into the sheer cliff faces of the Hengduan mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. Tea, was brought along this trade route, from Yunnan to India via Tibet. As recently as World War II — which heralded its demise — the route was used by Chinese merchants who would ride with precious consignments of the premium brew to Kalimpong, where the merchandise was resold to agents from Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and sundry Indian principalities.
Of course, all that is now history. But redundancy (and the trail’s subsequent transformation into an all-weather highway) has in no way undermined the sublimely beautiful landscape that the route passes through, or for that matter the immense cultural richness that thrives along its course. And with Nina showing us the way, it is this amazing socio-cultural diversity that we had aimed experience, at its very finest.
We spent the first day in Kunming. Whiling away most of our evening around the Golden Horse Memorial Archways, the city’s top tourist draw, we soaked up this up-and-coming
metropolis, where flash western urbanity roamed the high streets and artistic heritage is carefully preserved behind glass panels in cavernous museums.
The next day, we set out to faithfully retrace our route, and headed towards the tiny provincial town of Puer, about 450km south of Kunming. Puer was once the starting point of the Tea & Horse Road and it’s still one of southern China’s leading tea production centres. During our short stay, we got a rare opportunity to explore the town’s wholesale markets, where tea is still packaged and auctioned in keeping with the age-old tradition.
Nina explained that Puer tea, packaged in the form of compressed bricks, still fetches very high prices in the markets due to its premium quality. The green tea produced in the area is apparently revered for its therapeutic traits, she informed us so we all picked up a tiny portion each to carry back to our Calcutta homes.
Leaving Puer early the next day, we began our climb along the spine of Yunnan, venturing slowly towards the mountains that eventually lead up to the Tibetan Plateau. Two days and 750km later, we reached Dali, a town with a checkered cultural history that dates back to the 8th century. The idea was to break journey for a day, so having checked into our upscale hotel resplendent in ethnic décor, we promptly set out to explore the city’s ancient quarters.
Dali is visited by several thousand travellers every year and it gave us a great opportunity to experience the traditional culture of the Bai tribe, of the region. We visited ethnic Bai villages, acquainting ourselves with the traditional way of life. We also gorged on the scrumptious local cuisine and several aromatic infusions prepared with tea.
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| The Golden Horse Memorial archways are among Kunming’s major tourist attractions; (below) the tea gardens of Puer are among the best in southern China |
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We also made a quick trip to the Three Pagodas, Dali's most prominent cluster of monuments that trace their origins back to the days of the Tang Dynasty, some 1,200 years ago.
We had such an engrossing time in Dali that we suddenly wanted to stay an extra day. Could we stay another day here, we sheepishly inquired.
‘Sorry, but travellers in China are not allowed to deviate from their predetermined itineraries,’ Nina informed us curtly. Red tape, we realised, had just made its first appearance on our epic journey that was about to unfold over the next three weeks.
So heaving a sigh, we boarded our minivan and rolled out of Dali, heading due north towards the Hengduan Mountains looming over the distant horizon. We’ll be back someday, we tell ourselves, hoping that it would be sooner than later.
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| The lush countryside of Zhongdian is dotted with beautiful Buddhist chortens |
We wended our way to Lijiang, a tourist hamlet high in the mountains of Upper Yunnan, which was about a three-hour drive from Dali. And there, I found myself sitting in a street-side restaurant one afternoon reflecting — over a cup of refreshing jasmine tea and assorted grilled meat skewers —about the Chinese penchant for patterned social uniformity.
Lijiang is steeped in vintage charm and has a layered history that goes back nearly eight centuries to the years of the Song Dynasty. You can see the local Naxi tribals sporting ethnic attire. In the distance, you frequently hear strains of folk music and the air is heavy with the aroma of traditional yak meat delicacies. There are elegant stone houses with sculpted wooden doors and tiled pagoda-like roofs lining its cobbled streets.
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| Treat yourself to grilled meat skewers at a quaint wayside eatery in the mountain hamlet of Lijiang |
Beneath this picturesque and prim town-scape, however, lies a slightly more unsettling story, that we discovered after chance conversations. Lijiang was – until recently – just a scruffy, ordinary, unplanned Chinese settlement, far off the region’s tourist map, until a killer earthquake razed it to the ground in 1996.
The conspiracy theory is that the local administration conveniently resettled its original residents in a pigeonholed housing project and refashioned Lijiang into a manicured tourist village. Bowed over by flowing willow trees and washed by sparkling streams, Lijiang now sees nearly 12 million tourists walk its cobbled stone streets every year, spending wads of currency.
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| The mighty Yangtse cutting through the lunar terrain of the Hengduan mountains makes for a surreal sight |
It’s a fairly disquieting story to my ears. But as a foreign traveller, there’s precious little I could do apart from sympathising. So as dusk descends over the horizon and Lijiang lights up in the dramatic glow of countless accent bulbs, I down my jasmine tea in a gulp and proceeded to my hotel room, bracing for the long journey ahead.
Next morning, we drove out of Lijiang and began our steady ascent up the rugged slopes of the Hengduan Mountains, a formidable range that eventually leads on to the Tibetan Plateau. Navigating along the banks of a turbid Yangtse – the longest river in the continent – we left the tree line behind and slowly inched up through a rugged lunar terrain, admiring the surreal landscape as we bumped along a treacherous road.
By the end of the day, after a tiring 300-km drive, we reached Zhongdian county, in the upper reaches of the Hengduan ranges. Zhongdian is a town with a large Tibetan population, and has distinctive Tibetan Buddhist touches -- monasteries, chortens (stupas) and prayer wheels across its residential areas.
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| In Lijian, even the chief of the Naxi tribe wouldn’t mind posing for a snap in his dramatic attire |
Walking through the city’s old quarters, we overheard more Tibetan words than Mandarin, and saw machine-made Chinese trinkets in souvenir shops give way to handcrafted Tibetan artefacts. And we often came across groups of Buddhist monks going about their daily business, dressed in all-familiar maroon and yellow.
The altitude, meanwhile, started getting to us. At a height of about 12,000 ft, it’s tough to acclimatise, and life seems to slip into slow motion for a while. We checked into a comfortable hotel, draped in Tibetan upholstery, and promptly made ourselves a tall serving of green tea, the ultimate panacea for high-altitude dehydration.
It took us a night to catch our breaths back, following which we embarked on a journey across the 14,000-ft Pema Pass to the mountain outpost of Deqin, which served as an important transit town during the heyday of the tea trade. The weather played spoilsport all along the way, however, so with a snowstorm on its way, we beat a hasty retreat to Zhongdian the following day.
Back in Zhongdian, we were faced with a curious roadblock. The border between Yunnan and Tibet, as we knew it, had been closed by the Chinese government owing to security concerns a few years ago. Since our original plan was to travel onward from Yunnan into Tibet by road, we were hoping against hope that the border would miraculously open by the time we got there. Upon arriving in town, however, our travel agents smugly informed us that the border was still closed.
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| Our route from Kunming to Everest Base Camp |
The only option was to go with Plan B, which involved flying from Zhongdian to Lhasa, and then travel back in the opposite direction from the Tibetan capital to cover as much of the bypassed terrain as possible. We resigned ourselves to taking the aerial route, and prayed that it wouldn’t drastically take away from the appeal of the journey.
Are the Chinese always so unrelenting? We asked Phuntsok, our local Tibetan conduit over dinner in our Zhongdian hotel.
‘Well, at least you will get a spectacular view of the Tibetan Plateau from up above,’ he smiled, artfully dodging our question and pouring us fresh cups of green tea to go with our servings of stewed broccoli and kung-pao chicken.
When all else fails, look at the bright side, I heard a voice whisper in my head.
TRAVEL LOG
Duration: The journey from Kunming to Dali via Puer takes four days, including sightseeing along the way. The Hengduan Ranges from
Lijiang to Zhongdian can be crossed in a day while a sortie to Deqin from Zhongdian can be done overnight.
Accomodation: The most common options would be tourist grade luxury hotels or well-apponited, comfortable guest houses.
Cuisine: While in the Kunming, Dali and Puer you can sample traditional Yunnan cuisine, between Lijiang and Zhongdian you can treat your tastebuds to a happy fusion of Chinese and Tibetan, comprising dumplings, stewed pork, Tibetan bread and green tea.
