In China: no map, no problem

They were to map an area of a park when some unexpected friends showed up.

By Eric Wagner

from the April 30, 2007 edition

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We first heard the Tibetan herders early in the afternoon, their cries carrying down the hillside: "Hooeeeeee! Hooeeeeee!"

We were on the second day of a four-day backcountry trek through the Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve, one of China's largest national parks.

Gus, Kimberly, and I were part of a cadre of American students who had come to work with park staff for a couple of weeks. As ecologists, our project was to map a proposed ecotourism trail in the park's northeastern region. This meant we had to walk the trail, which would take us into some of the park's wilder spaces.

We didn't expect to come across anyone. Chinese officials had told us that we were heading into unpopulated terrain. The Tibetans who used to farm and herd yaks there had been resettled, as had most of the Tibetans who had lived in the park. (Jiuzhaigou, by the way, means "Valley of Nine Villages." Those villages still exist, but now they're more like theme parks, tourist commodities.)

Apparently, though, not everyone had gotten the memo, because it wasn't long before we saw fresh yak manure, the odd soda bottle, and, of course, the Tibetans, calling to one another across the hills.

We could see 10 of them on an exposed slope far above us and then we walked around a bend to find two men digging under one of the short, scrubby rhododendrons common to the area. We didn't stare and neither did they, but our feigned lack of attention belied a keen interest in one another.

We nodded silent greetings and continued up to a ridge, reaching it by late afternoon. According to our map, we would follow it along the park boundary until it dropped to the road from which we'd started the previous day. But our map was little more than a line across some colorful polygons. These were the indistinctions we sought to specify. Through our work, we would give greater precision and authority to these dots and lines.

But first we needed a rest. We sat down and looked at the peaks of the Minxian range, which spread across the Tibetan plateau. We were trying to guess how far we could see – 50 miles? 100? – when the two Tibetans appeared. The younger one, who couldn't have been more than 15, waved and said, "Hello!"

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