January 20 - Jade Dragon Snow Mountain

Rising rather early, our guesthouse owners drove us to the Naxi village at the base of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (keep in mind that the name flows much better in Chinese). On the way, we stopped by a open-faced restaurant for a bite to eat. I don't know a better word for it, because it looked like an American style garage with no menu, just locals sitting on makeshift stools warming their hands by a pile of burning embers. A typical Yunnan breakfast is a steaming bowl of rice noodles with cabbage, an egg or two, and maybe some steamed bread.

From there we headed to the Naxi village, a cobbled-street hamlet with crumbling terracotta roofed houses and the occasional random animals wandering about. We arranged to have two guides take us on horseback up and back down the mountainside, which took just about all day from sunrise to sunset. We never saw it, but apparently there is a cable car for the less adventurous (and even lazier, if you're scoffing at having a horse do all the work).

My guide and I didn't know a single word of each other's language, but he spoke Mandarin Chinese, as most Naxi people do, along with their own language, so Wangyang once again bailed me out. I learned that while it doesn't pay to be a male horse, who get to lug the tourists around, it's certainly advantageous to be a Naxi guy. In their society, the division of labor is by no means divided - the women do it all! I was at last getting acquainted with my first matriarchal society, one of many exemplified in any introductory anthropology textbook.

As we worked our way up the hill, weaving back and forth on dusty trails, we stopped at several camps along the way. One of them served a new favorite local cuisine of mine - yak on a stick! It was a thin slice skewered and grilled, then garnished with cumin and salt.

Around 4pm we reached the final camp near the peak, where the horses took a long overdue rest. Keep in mind, we had to walk the rougher trails, and at 4000m above sea level, you lose your breath pretty quickly. I thought it was funny that all the Naxi locals at the top take naps in the sunlight. Many of them, including my guide, look much older than their age because of their nonstop exposure to sunlight. Nevertheless, several of them swore that there has never been a case of cancer in their community. Add that to my list of research projects.

We never actually reached the peak, as we weren't acclimated to the altitude and it would've taken another hour or two at our pace. Wangyang and I hobbled up the hill (now a 45 degree slope) about a meter a minute (it was that hard to breathe). We set a goal of a ledge in the near distance and eventually made it, wheezing and exhausted.

In an effort to keep us moving on the way up, Yang says "c'mon, we're communists, we're tough.
me: "communists are stubborn."
me, later: "communists defy humanity!"
WY: "communists deny humanity!"
This was only the beginning...

From the ledge (maybe 4500m), we could see hundreds of kilometers in the direction of the Naxi valley to the south and even Lijiang in the horizon. Around 5:00pm, the sun was setting over the surrounding cliffsides and our day's source of warmth was about to disappear, so we hurried back down to the base and saddled up for a long ride home.

Photos from the mountain