Word: yubeng
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This road, I've been told, leads to paradise. Everyone says my journey to the pristine village of Yubeng in the northwest corner of China's Yunnan province will take my breath away. I'm breathless alright. But for all the wrong reasons. My minivan is careening along a tiny ledge of compressed rubble, gouged out of a steeply pitched ravine, a few hundred meters above a tributary of the Mekong. I'm convinced I'm seconds away from becoming part of one of the small avalanches the van is leaving in its wake...
...what I've seen doesn't inspire confidence. When I finally arrive at the end of the road in the picturesque ethnic-Tibetan town of Xidan, where the trail to the isolated Yubeng Valley (and village) starts, I'm expecting tranquillity. Instead, there's a phalanx of bulldozers clawing at the hilly approach to the trailhead. "As you can see, we're opening up to tourism," says Ga Te, a young official from the local tourism bureau. "Soon we'll have a parking lot. For now, though, we'll have to settle for mules...
...winding trail climbs steeply over a foothill of the province's stunning Meili range, through forests of rhododendron and towering hemlock and past open views of the snow-capped peaks that have kept Yubeng in a state of fairy-tale seclusion. By the time we finally crest a prayer flag-festooned summit and drop into the valley below, it's late afternoon. Beneath us are the handful of dwellings that shelter Yubeng's 65 ethnic-Tibetan inhabitants; in the crook of a slim, glacial stream, a white, sagging stupa glows in the low sunlight. The locals feed and water their...
...Norton, an American lawyer and longtime environmentalist who co-heads TNC in Yunnan, believes the area around Yubeng can sustain both conservation and tourism. He informs me that at Yellowstone, one of the U.S.'s busiest national parks, 90% of some 3 million annual visitors stray no more than 100 meters from the road and most of the tourists stay in the park for less than an hour...
...time being local leaders have no plans to pave paradise?even if they are putting up a parking lot. Says Diqing County Chief Pu Luhua: "Yubeng is a tranquil place. And we mean to keep it that way. We know this approach will be more profitable in the long run." But for now, the challenges of doing so take my breath away...