| Abstract: |
| Some things are bound to go wrong when three travelers
who join together on a trip each have different goals.
Apu, a 27-year-old Han Chinese with a degree in anthropology and a passion for hiking, wanted to cross the high,
snowy mountains of Baimaxueshan (“White Horse Snow
Mountain”) National Nature Reserve; at 349 000 hectares,
it’s the second-largest protected area in southwest China’s
Yunnan Province. Winter was coming and this would be his
last hike of the season. I was happy to climb over the mountains too, but what I really wanted to do was visit Yunnan’s
mid-elevation, old-growth, temperate deciduous forest and
compare it with stands that I had studied as an undergraduate years ago, in the wilds of Tennessee’s Great Smoky
Mountains. Our young companion Bounsing, fresh from
the tropical hills of northern Laos and living in Yunnan to
learn Mandarin, had never seen snow; he simply wanted
the thrill of touching frozen flakes of white crystal for the
first time. But because of the uncertainties of travel and politics in rural China, I was the only one of us who realized his
goal, and it took most of the trip to do so. |
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