The following is an excerpt from Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of WildChina’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

So often it is the elders who remember tales through their time spent recounting orally the comings and goings of the past

Breakfast often brings realizations – some stimulated by the first thoughts of the day and others brought to life from without. Tucking into bowl after bowl of milk tea this morning comes with a nugget of information imparted almost casually, which reminds me very clearly of what is key to this journey. It has to do with salt.

Muscle pain is thrown aside as this new tad of information settles in. We are nine people tucked into a square room no more than three metres square. Two beds, a wood stove, a makeshift altar and Michael and I trying unsuccessfully to shove our legs and filthy boots somewhere where we aren’t tripping people up.

Our breakfast room where information is imparted over countless cups of tea

My question comes amidst a full mouth of tea and tsampa (barley powder) and there are subsequent sprays of powdered barley as I bark out my query about salt.

“Was salt transported here by caravan”?
A middle-aged man with tawny eyes and large hands issues the answer and it is straightforward.
“Of course. Salt was always being moved around and there used to be a tsaka (place of salt) close to here”, he continues, “Traders often used these pilgrimage routes as trade routes”.

Mornings started with tea followed by collecting our various animals

Like many good-byes within the Himalayas, our own from this little home is disjointed, sudden and without any pomp. Gamzon, our guide is perky from her time with family and clearly energized. Terrier is his usual self, though slightly impatient to get on with it. I share his neurotic need to press on and get out of this warm valley, which is slowly strangling me. In the village we have picked up yet more noodles and some strange lumps of glutinous rice candy for the road.

We cut south down a valley that will take us to a divide with one route heading directly south and another cutting back west and then north. We will take the later cut-back, which will take us around the bulk of Amne Machin and hopefully to my old friend the wind.

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The following is an excerpt from Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of WildChina’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

We awake with a shudder to mountain cold and the realization that something has changed overnight regarding our ‘team’. Clear air with a hint of blue in the sky as dawn gives way to day waits…. while by the fire a strange figure coaxes more heat from the coals. Our canine friend is stretching out his little limbs to rid them of cold. The larger mastiffs have all disappeared – home I guess. It is the figure near the fire that holds me as I emerge from our tent. Where is our guide Neema?

The figure, however, is clearly not that of our guide Neema, but rather his wife whom we had met upon our arrival to Xiadawu. An ‘exchange of bodies’ has taken place in the night. Little Neema has left in the dead of night and in return his sturdy, bullet-proof wife and her pink turban have arrived.

Our new guide Gamzon atop a horse pauses near Darde Lhatso pass

She explains in a soft voice with the requisite hand signs that Neema the previous day had succumbed to chills, headaches and fever as the cold had been too much for him and as the day and night wore on. He had found enough phone coverage to convey the need for a substitution, so here we were. As she speaks there is the slightest smile around her eyes of apology, as though she has long been aware of his susceptibility to the cold. Looking at her wrapped in her wools with one arm free I suspect that she suffers no such issues.

Michael and I react with shrugs and a bit of disbelief that Neema’s constitution could not hold up. The deep cold that we have encountered thus far, while not extreme, is unseasonal and the fresh snow hints that winter is not yet done with its sermon. Perhaps it is better that this happen now rather than later on.

Moving on from camp each individual body of our group spreads out in a staggered line as we ascend from over four thousand metres ever higher. The snow is deep and heavy and the light in the sky seems content to hang behind a body of low lying cloud. Snow from the sky feels imminent and I am thankful for the litre of bitter tea that now streams through my body warming limbs and insides.

Our caravan making its way east using the valley as an informal route

No bodies appear on the horizon, no migrating nomads and no mythic trade caravans, we are utterly and happily alone. It is too early in the season and there is a feeling that our little group is at one with the elements. As time passes I note with a satisfaction that our present guide, Gamzon, is managing the yak with a gentle precision that her husband lacked. The animals respond to her competence and sanity with more kinship than they did to Neema’s slightly jittery personality. This coupled with the fact that she strapped our tent and gear to the yak’s backs in half the time it took Neema suggests to me that this has been good fortune to have her taking over.

Winds whip up, ice pellets drive into us and the sun plays peek-aboo as we ascend the 4,600 metre Darde Lhatso pass.

Our faithful yak atop Darde Lhatso pass, pause as if to pay homage for their (and our) safe passage.

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For the full post, please visit http://www.tea-and-mountain-journals.com/

Images: Jeff Fuchs

The following is an excerpt from Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of WildChina’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

The following is an excerpt from an article in The Wall Street Journal by Mitch Moxley, a Canadian journalist with national and international reporting experience. He’s written on politics, travel, business and other topics from China, Mongolia, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. He is currently based in Beijing, China.

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The ride from Chengdu to Danba Valley is one to be endured, not enjoyed. The journey is by a smoke-filled bus with tiny seats that barrels deep into the mountains of western Sichuan province, shaking and rattling on a single-lane road that is often strewn with fallen rocks. A hair-raising view out the window is of the Dadu River below.

This is the route to one of China’s most enduring architectural mysteries. Ten hours and 400 kilometers into the journey, the valley opens to reveal green mountains topped with snowy peaks. On a ridge above stand a half-dozen rock towers, like ancient smokestacks.

Across the remote, earthquake-prone regions of western Sichuan and Tibet, there are hundreds of these structures. They are built of cut stone, brick and timber, date back as far as 1,700 years and stand up to 50 meters tall. No one is sure of their purpose, though theories abound: They were watchtowers, way stations, status symbols. Some say they have religious meaning.

Striving to save the towers from the forces of neglect, earthquake and a planned hydropower dam are a small number of preservationists, including Frédérique Darragon, a 61-year-old global adventurer—sailor, dancer, trekker, polo player— turned amateur archaeologist by her love for these mysterious structures.

The daughter of a wealthy Parisian inventor and machine maker who died when she was 4 years old, Ms. Darragon spent childhood summers riding horses in England and winter breaks skiing in the Alps. She worked on a kibbutz in Israel and in 1971 sailed across the Atlantic in the first race from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro. She returned to Paris, graduated from university there and then did some work as a model—”Not high fashion,” she says, “just for extra money”—played polo in Paris and Buenos Aires and became a lauded samba dancer in Rio.

During the early ’90s, Ms. Darragon spent several months a year traveling alone through China, often by foot in areas that are still rarely visited by Westerners. It once came close to killing her: In 1993, while searching for endangered snow leopards in Tibet, she suffered a stroke when a fire she built in a cave consumed too much of its oxygen supply. She lay for three days before being rescued by Tibetan shepherds.

Three years later, Ms. Darragon saw her first towers, while traveling near Danba. A year after that she saw similar towers in Tibet—800 kilometers away—and was hooked. “When I learned that neither Westerners nor Chinese had researched them and that practically nothing was known about them, I could not resist trying to crack their mystery,” Ms. Darragon says of her long affair with the ancient towers.

The Danba Valley, home to ethnic Tibetan and Qiang villages, is one of the best—and most accessible—places to explore the towers. Five kilometers from Danba city (danba means “town of rocks”) a series of sprawling villages collectively called Suopo has about 80, some in ruins but many still standing, and some of them more than 30 meters high.

Until recently, nobody knew the towers’ age with any real degree of certainty. There are references in texts from the Han Dynasty, which lasted for about 400 years starting in 206 B.C., but the peoples who historically populated the tribal corridor of Sichuan and Tibet lacked a written language, so there was no documentary evidence of the towers’ origin. Chinese archeologists had taken scant interest in the riddle.

James Wasserman for The Wall Street JournalChiles hang outside a window in Danba County.

It was a linguist who wrote one of the first papers on the subject, in 1989. Sun Hongkai, now retired from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had first seen the towers during a 1956 visit to Sichuan to investigate the Qiang language. “People in the area did not pay attention to the towers,” Mr. Sun says. “Many were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. People used the stones for building materials.”

In the 15 years since Ms. Darragon was drawn to the mystery, she has devoted much of her life to cataloging, dating and fighting to preserve hundreds of the enigmatic stone skyscrapers.

In 2001, with funding from U.S. media mogul Ted Turner, a fellow sailing enthusiast she’s known for decades, she created the nonprofit Unicorn Foundation, dedicated to education and humanitarian projects.

“I’m very proud of Frederique and the work she’s done in China,” Mr. Turner says. “Her amazing discoveries are astounding, and her commitment and dedication to the preservation of some of China’s great artifacts and structures will always be admired and respected.”

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To read the full article, click here. To inquire about journeys to see these towers in Sichuan, please e-mail info@wildchina.com.

The following is an excerpt from Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of WildChina’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

Amye Maqen (Amne Machin, Anye Machin) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amne_Machin>, the stout, the muscular, and for much of time, the utterly hidden from the outside world…our first glimpse of it is of a snow capped wonder that appears far closer than it is. There seem to be as many ways of spelling it as their are potential descriptives. Neither wind blown sand nor a haze can obscure its brilliant bulk. It seems to hang from the sky as we come in from the northwest towards the makeshift town at its base, Xiadawu (or in the more flavoured local Tibetan ‘Da’wurr’ – ‘Place that is difficult for horses’). In Joseph Rock’s accounts of the mountain and bandit ridden regions back in 1930 he estimated the broad peaks of Amne Machin to be 30,000 feet, a guess that was later proven to be 3,000 metres off.

The Amne Machin range itself is an eastern extension of the greater Kunlun Mountain range, one of Asia’s longest most legend laden mountain chains. Located in the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture it is here that the Yellow River (so named because of wind-blown loess that is carried in from Central Asia) rises before winding eastward. At its rounded and almost friendly white peaks it achieves just over 6,200 metres.

Mountains cannot be compared to other of their kind in my eyes. Mountains are landscapes, heaps of stone and snow unto themselves and each has their own thin-aired identity. Sacred to the Golog (Golok) nomads, Amne Machin is almost directly due east of our pristine salt lake near Mado (Mardo) that we’ve most recently left. It also lies on the route that nomads from southwest took to access their precious salt. Few nomadic caravans would pass up the chance to visit and circumambulate the sacred Amne Machin range while undertaking a perilous journey to source salt. Ever practical, the Tibetan traders saw the value of doing both trade for a revered commodity and a little cleansing of past ills.

This mountain that has long played a role in local nomad’s worship of the divine, has withstood weathering seasons and has become more iconic in the eyes of men over time. The fact that it lies as a northwest-southeast diagonal throughway for traders only increases the curiosity for Michael and I. How much is left in memory and physicality of the salt route legacy? How much of any trade route – seldom acknowledged, documented or discussed – will survive? It is in this way that these journeys and explorations are truly ‘exploratory’ with nothing being guaranteed.

The town of Xiadawu, sits in a small cupped valley and is a dusty mess of pool tables, remarkably shabby huts and a main square of errant apathetic dogs that have forgotten their roles. Xiadawu’s decrepit appearance serves as an entry to something far greater than itself, Amne Machin, which erupts to the east. Flowing west out of the mountains past the town, the swerving breadth of the Nam Chu (Nam River) wanders through, over and around valleys in a never-ending search.

Namchu (Nam River)

Our host, Tsering, is to be found out of town – it is he who will arrange our kora/ circumambulation around the great mountain. The ‘kora’ or counterclockwise circumambulation literally refers to a pilgrimage. For many eastern religions this act is believed to be a physical way to cleanse or clear away one’s past sins.

If in fact this is the case it may well take a few more than one rotation for Michael and I to wipe our collective slates clean.

Around us the landscape ripples with Spring’s pending arrival – ridges verging on going from ochre to green. Still though, the high peaks remind in a glance that up here at over 4,000 metres winter isn’t really ever truly ‘over’.

Our host Tsering tells us that, yes, the salt traders came through here as part of their annual travels – more specifically nomadic traders, who, coming from further east, would add the kora of the mountain to their travels to the salt lakes. A kind of double-pronged travel plan: salt for need and profit, kora for life-cleansing benefits.

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From Xinhua

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China celebrated its first National Tourism day yesterday, May 19, 2011, with various activities and popular tourist sites across China offering free or half-price admissions.

The chosen date is significant because on the same day 398 years ago, Xu Xiake, the “Saint of Travel” in the Ming Dynasty, began documenting his 30-year trip across China in his famous travel book Travel Notes of Xu Xiake.

Xu Xiake

The theme of the holiday was 读万卷书, 行万里路 (Du wan juan shi, xing wan li lu). “Gain knowledge from thousands of books and accumulate experience by traveling thousands of miles”. In this light and with this holiday, China officials hope to raise more awareness of the importance of travel industry to the country’s economy.

In 2010, domestic trips totaled 2.1 billion and inbound trips grew healthily to 134 million, according to the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA). With these staggering numbers, it seems that the key challenge will be to develop tourism in a sustainable way. According to Wei Jie, a professor from Tsinghua University, tourism is among the least energy-consuming and polluting industries…transferring China’s economy from high resource-consuming to environmental-friendly.

WildChina hopes to work along this mission by continuing to help travelers travel responsibly.  For guidelines for responsible travel, please read other blog posts here.

Image: Google

Over the past few days, there has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding The Forbidden City in Beijing.

Home to emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasty for over 500 years, the over 800 buildings and 9,000 chambers of the Forbidden City sits in the center of the city in iconic, imperial grandeur.

On Sunday, May 8, 2011, gold purses were stolen from an exhibition in the Palace Museum.  Since then, the Chinese officials have caught the thief, but typos in banners displayed by the security department have caused an upheaval of ridicule online.

Additionally, there have been rumors and controversy surrounding the opening of a “lucrative private club” in the Jianfu Palace of the Forbidden City.

Visitors may still visit the grounds, but as these issues are sorted, private access locations inside the Forbidden City will be closed to visitors.

WildChina will continue to provide updates as this develops.

Image: Sina Weibo via The New York Times

Submit your photos to WildChina for a chance to win a cash prize!

In preparation for the fall photo expedition with Sean Gallagher along the Silk Road in Xinjiang, we would like to introduce the WildChina Photo Contest. Each month, a category of photos will be announced, and participants can submit their photos to photos@wildchina.com.

In the month of May, the category is People & Portraits – Unique captures of China’s diverse people.

See below for contest details:

Who can enter?

Anyone over the age of 18. Employees or contractors of WildChina and professional photographers engaged by WildChina are excluded.

What are the details?

Participants can submit as many photos as they’d like each month.  Only photos taken in China are eligible, and we can only accept digital photos received as an e-mail attachment at photos@wildchina.com.  Each entry should be sent as a .JPEG between 1 MB and 5 MB in size.  We regret that any photos not sent in the correct format and size cannot be accepted. In addition, any photos that have been edited or altered will not be accepted.

What should I include with my submission?

Please include the following information with each photo: your name, month and year of when the photo was taken, and a brief description of the photo.

Reward

After the stated deadline, the top ten photos will be selected by expert photographer Sean Gallagher and then uploaded to WildChina’s Facebook page as well as WildChina’s Flickr account.  Thereafter, viewers will have the opportunity to “Like” their favorite images.   At the end of the voting period, the number of “Likes” will be tallied and the winner all receive a USD 100 cash prize.  Prize can also be applied as credit to any WildChina journey of your choice but nothing else.  If the winner is interested in planning a WildChina journey, he or she should simply indicate this via e-mail upon receiving the prize.

WildChina will contact winners via e-mail.  Prizes will be issued by check and mailed to the location provided by the winner within 30 days of received details.

Each participant retains ownership of all copyrights and other property rights in and to all images submitted by him or her for consideration in the WildChina Photo Contest.

Each participant agrees to allow WildChina to place submitted photos on WildChina’s Facebook, Flickr, WildChina blog, and eNewsletters.  Images provided by the participant will not be used by WildChina in any other capacity without further written permission from the participant. Each participant consents to his or her name and/or likeness of the name being used to credit the source of the image. Each participant warrants that submission of a photograph to WildChina and WildChina’s use thereof, does not infringe the rights of any third party.

WildChina does not accept responsibility for the loss or damage of submitted work. By submitting photos to photos@wildchina.com, participants of the WildChina Photo Contest agree to all provisions listed above.

Timeline for the May 2011 WildChina Photo Contest will proceed as follows:

• June 1, 2011 – Deadline for submissions
• June 2, 2011 – Top ten submissions will be selected by photographer Sean Gallagher and uploaded to WildChina’s Facebook & Flickr accounts. Viewers will then be able to “Like” their favorite images. Viewers may vote for more than one image.
• June 10, 2011 – Voting period ends.
• June 15, 2011 – Winner announced!

Image: Sean Gallagher

介绍： 碧山要招聘了！

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我们期待您的回应。

The following is an excerpt from Jeff Fuchs’ Tea and Mountain Journals, a blog by explorer, photographer and writer Jeff Fuchs.  Jeff is the 2011 recipient of WildChina’s Explorer Grant.  He and friend Michael Kleinwort are currently traveling through unknown portions of the Tsalam route in Qinghai.

Below is an update from their journey…

Jeff Fuchs coddles white gold

Tsam Tso - Salt Lake, at last

The Watcher

What we see is a shallow lake that is disappearing – we have been told that in the past ten years the water levels have declined dramatically. Quite what made the salt ‘better’ than other is a mystery but this salt was collected by traders from northwestern Sichuan making the two week journey, up to northern Qinghai and even to Lhasa in roughly a month.

A path to the north – a mere wisp – is what is left of the route which yak used to take their precious mineral cargoes to all points. One single nomadic tent remains. The family has been in the valley for generations and is the only remaining nomadic clan in view.

Nomads....gone modern with a much needed solar panel

The family tells us how the lake itself will dry up in time. Thick salt coats the shallow lakes but is unused except by the odd bird that fancies a saline treat. Nomads left the valley when the famed salt dried up. When I ask what made the salt so special that traders traveled through such landscapes to access, the response was vague and simple – “because it was special salt”.

Silence pervades and the wind itself seems to be mindful that this is a valley of quiet – my mind wanders backward in time to when bodies came and went buying and trading for the salt. Traders from Sichuan would often bring special wood, sap and resin heavy pine for trade for salt – bartering has a deep and long running pedigree in these parts.

Some things don't change...at least not entirely

Two structures – salt storage facilities lie forlorn and dilapidated – lie just off of the shallows and saltpans.

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For the full post, please visit http://www.tea-and-mountain-journals.com/

Image: Jeff Fuchs