Word: yunnan
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...know," says Mony, breaking the reverie, "that the very roads that made the Angkor empire great led to its downfall?" These ancient superhighways, he explains, allowed Khmer Kings to control tributary states as far away as China's Yunnan province. But when the empire weakened, invaders used those same highways to march to the capital...
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...
...Will tourism help protect China's natural wonders or destroy the places that visitors are bused in to admire? Northwest Yunnan, which has made its first forays into ecotourism, is a perfect place to find out. Through it run branches of four of Asia's major rivers?the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween and the Irrawaddy. Between their banks soar some of the fastest-growing mountain ranges on earth, which in turn harbor the world's most biologically diverse temperate forests. Since 1998, when a large-scale ban on commercial logging axed 80% of Yunnan's income, its local governments...
...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...
...Yunnan's most highly trafficked areas have not achieved this balance, but a number of small-scale projects are making worthy efforts. Near Lijiang, TNC-trained locals offer bird-watching tours at the lake they once fished. In Wenhai, TNC helped build an "ecolodge" for hikers, which boasts "biogas" (methane) stoves and solar-heated water...