When Jenny offered us to accompany her to Wenhai, we didn't hesitate a moment. Li and myself had been waiting for a opportunity to visit that remote village, 3500 meters high, perched under the snow-capped Jade Dragon mountain. Wenhai had been inaccessible by car until last year, but the unfinished road is barely practicable and only sturdy vehicles can drive on it. The old way to get to the village is on foot or by horse through a network of paths in the mountain. This is the way we set out to go.
Wenhai was only 10km far from our departure point, but there was a 1000 meter climb which would take a couple of hours to accomplish. Little did we know that many adventures were lurking ahead. The first encounter was with our guides, four men of different ages, but all sturdy. We were four as well, Li's mother was joining the party. And then there were four horses. Everybody met briefly with each other, and off we went. For a while, I couldn't stop staring at the knife of one of the guides, truly huge and scary . A beautiful moment was when we arrived at Hongshan village. Men of the villages were washing a pig freshly slaughtered. We arrived from such an angle that the scenery looked like a painting by the Flemish masters: a perfect composition.
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The guides drank water from a stream running nearby, stating it was good for the health. Half an hour later, the climb turned serious, the horses started to show us their stamina. They were local Yunnan horses, famed for the tea horse route in which they had proven heroic virtues for centuries. Remindful of the pony, they are not big, but their bodies are stout with solid limbs. They can travel 30 km to 40 km per day with a load of 100 kg, which turns them into a very precious commodity in the mountainous province. Marco Polo stated in "Il Milione": "The best horses here are bred in this province."
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We passed a hunter with a long rifle and two bony dogs, and then nothing. At those heights, everything was still and left to its own majestic beauty. Meadows, bushes and grassland intertwined in a rocky relief. We stopped by a stream to pause a while. A herder with long hair was waiting for someone or something. We shared oranges and cookies.
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Finally, we were closing in on the valley, with the lake stretching in the distance. The colors were spanning a whole range of beiges. Our horses were frantic on that highland, wanting to gallop, fighting with each other for the lead, and giving us quite a scare. A bunch of wild horses were grazing,and for a moment it looked like there would be a fight between them and our horses. The lake had receded for it was winter, being the dry season. A steady and naughty wind reminded us how rough the place really was.
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Jenny showed us her guesthouse under construction. She is an entrepreneur who will enter history as the first private developer of Wenhai. Jenny and her husband already run a guest-house in a small village called Shuhe, which is well connected and receives a great numbers of tourists. Looking to expand their business, Jenny and husband chose to build a refuge, away from the hustle and bustle of Shuhe. And that's how Wenhai came in the picture.
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All the constructions in the village are made with natural bricks (straw and earth). We followed our guide into a courtyard where we saw the typical Naxi farm setup. Next to a pile of wood, I noticed a fat cat slumbering in the sun. Our guide negotiated with the housewife a meal for eight people. In the meantime, we took a stroll in the village. Wenhai is a Naxi-ethnic village that strives on a subsistence economy. The main activities revolve around production of charcoal, pig raising and small plot farming.
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The village is haven for pigs. They come in many sizes and colors, and they roam free. There are huge resources of wood in the surrounding mountains, and the villagers have been making charcoal for centuries, the production being often sold in the town of Lijiang. With the worldwide concerns around the depletion of fossil energy resources, authorities together with an international NGO have piloted an eco-lodge project, hoping to shift some of the focus away from the wood cutting and onto tourism. The project proved to be an utter failure. I am not versed in the details of what went wrong, but it seems that communication between the villagers and the project leaders hasn't been optimal. The eco-lodge stands on its feet, but it receives close to no visitors, as Wenhai itself is really a backwater region. Even the locals couldn't give us instructions on how to get to the lodge. This is another example of how eco-tourism is often nonsensically being sold as the solution to the world's problems.
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Lunch was ready. Rice with potato and pork fat cooked on the stove. I noticed that the cat had been put on a leash. It seemed that our guide had bought it. the cat of the house, a fat cat. I asked what he was going to do with it. He said he'd eat it. It is good for his knee, he explained, massaging it with a painful grin. In Chinese traditional medicine, the theory of systematic correspondences, rooted as much in ancient animist beliefs as in observation of natural phenomena, lays out relations between elements found across living organisms (human, animal, plant), not unlike the Greek Paracelse's own formulation of those principles. In brief, similarity is valued as a therapeutic al method, not antagonism (like in vaccination). In that perspective, cooking the joints of a tiger, famous for its agility, should benefit humans for that same elastic property in, say, rheumatic disorders. Tigers are hard to get by these days, but the cat is part of the family of the felines, so eating the domestic animal is infused with the same belief of potentially curing a sour joint. The cat in question didn't like the idea at all, judging by the growls of unease coming from the potato bag in which he was carried , while we were riding horses direction home.
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Then the accident happened. Li's mother fell from the horse. She looked all right, but she had received a blow on her head, and she was holding her leg in pain. We tried to call a driver to pick us up, but there was no reply at the other end. It was getting dark. Two more hours of descent were ahead of us. Despite Li's mother assurance that she was fine, Li, pale and anxious, was now getting upset and worried about hidden consequences of head injury, such as internal bleeding. We had no choice but to go on. Miraculously, half an hour later, we received a call from the driver. He was on his way. We turned around with our horses and met the driver on a dirt track. We drove with him straight to the hospital. After a battery of tests, including a brain scan, we could all breath at ease. Li's mother was just fine. On our way home, I asked her to teach me how to fall, but all I got from her in return was a loud resounding laugh in the empty night.
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