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By Root 1311 0

our downward descent, gleeful, until we could see at the bottom of a rugged escarpment the village of Walnut Grove. Few places have elicited more ecstatic ramblings than this village near the terminus of the high trail at Tiger Leaping Gorge. So remote for so long, Walnut Grove was once the place to be in China to experience that remote, I’m-in-a-beautiful-setting-in-a-charming-Chinese-village-without-electricity-or-telephones-though-there-is-beer vibe. It’s what everyone yearns for in western China: authenticity mixed with beer. Today, however, Walnut Grove is essentially a truck stop. There is a low trail through Tiger Leaping Gorge, and whereas once it was a footpath, today it is a two-lane road, upon which tour buses and taxis and minibuses shuttle Chinese tourists to the very rock from which the tiger had made its leap. The road had finally reached Walnut Grove, transforming a hamlet of Naxis and backpackers into just another chintzy town of cement-block hotels and souvenir shops.

But while the road followed the low trail, it’s all relative at Tiger Leaping Gorge. We’d made arrangements with a minibus driver to take us back from Walnut Grove to Qiaotou, where we’d left our packs, and as we sped over this road, hundreds of feet above the Yangtze, I noted the lack of guardrails, and the enormous potholes, and the huge boulders that had tumbled from above, and the fact that that the driver, driving one-handed as he barked into a cell phone, was of the Fuck You school of driving, and I made a mental note that however I got into Tibet, where I hoped to go soon, it would not be by car because it would combine so much of what I feared in China: heights and driving. And I saw that this mountain was looking to dislodge this road from its slopes, wanted nothing to do with it, and I thought there might be hope yet for Walnut Grove. Perhaps one day it would again be a simple hamlet. Because the road was evaporating, disappearing, tossed down into the river by a spiteful mountain.

When we arrived back at Jane’s Guesthouse, it was too late to go anywhere else. One would think that as the village at the trailhead of the famed Tiger Leaping Gorge there would be some charm in Qiaotou. Or at least something to do. But this turned out to not be the case. It was drab and dull, though as we found a restaurant overlooking the river, we noticed all the trash floating in the water, heaps of it, a colorful antidote to all this natural beauty, a depressive actually. No one would approach us to serve us, however, and so we moved across the street to a simple restaurant where we pointed at the dishes of other patrons.

“It’s kind of a dump here,” Jack observed.

“Yes, it is. But you know what? Tomorrow we’ll be in Shangri-la.”

In 1933, James Hilton published the novel Lost Horizon, a story about four people who, after their plane had crashed somewhere high in the snowcapped mountains of the Himalayas, found themselves led by an enigmatic Chinese man to the mythical wonderland of Shangri-la, a peaceful paradise in “the valley of the blue moon.” Where was this Shangri-la? people wondered. Some said it was in Tibet, others in Sichuan Province, while still others claimed that Shangri-la is actually in Pakistan. Xuen Ke, the Naxi bandleader, believes Lijiang is the true Shangri-la. But the Chinese government said No. You’re all wrong. Shangri-la can be found in Zhongdian, a town located on the finger of Yunnan that thrusts up into Tibet. Indeed, the government was so confident in its assertion that in 2001 they officially changed the name of Zhongdian to Shangri-la, leading some to point out that Shangri-la was always, in fact, a fictional place.

Nevertheless, the vaunted Shangri-la—a place of beauty and harmony—sets a very high bar as a choice destination for travelers who just happen to be wandering through China. So we resolved to visit this Shangri-la before Jack left to return to Hong Kong and then home, if only because we were so eager to get out of Qiaotou, a place, we discovered, notable for its barking dogs—dogs that barked through