Adventure Stories > Feature Articles > Northern Light

NORTHERN LIGHT

The article below, researched and written by Victor Paul Borg, was originally published in Beyond, the magazine of the American Express Platinum Card Members in Thailand, which is also distributed in first-class cabin of Thai Airways.

I made three friends in Hemu, a village situated at the furthest point from any sea, but I couldn’t drink as half as they do and I couldn’t tolerate the sun for a quarter of the time that they do. My friends’ were slightly odd: here are three men, who are muscled and boisterous and keep a knife in a sheath tucked to their belt, who run the comfiest and cleanest guesthouse in the village. I met them when I went to stay in their guesthouse. At first they were attentive and coyly curious, but after a few days they forgot that they were supposed to maintain a professional distance and service. Then they became irreverent and personal, always sniggering and revealing teeth mottled with dark stains, and I felt more at home that way. For it was good to see that tourism hadn’t changed the Tuwa’s legendary merriness. 

One afternoon the home-distilled milk whiskey came out, and I managed to guzzle a few cups before the rancid and milky burps started. My cheeks burned; I couldn’t take the Siberian sun at midday. “We like the sun because we get so little of it,” said Yang Xue Yi, the household chief, guffawing wildly. “We are black in the summer, but in the winter we become white like milk.”

I could imagine dull, wet-gray winters, and everything snowed over. Now it was summer, when the day is long and the light is marvellous. At dawn the horizon radiates a luminous white light, then the sun rises strong and dazzling and brings out the deep colours in the landscape, and finally the light becomes soft and warm in the evenings.

The light made me exuberant, perhaps as it had done to the Tuwa, an ethnic group whose ancestors had migrated down from northern Siberia 500 years ago. They had settled at the northernmost tip of western China in three villages so outlandish that they seem like a mirage, a trick of the light. Houses are constructed of rough-cut logs, with the seams plugged with moss and mud, and set in enclosures shared with their cattle and sheep and horses. 

At Hemu, set in a cusp of mountains and the quaintest of the three villages, the only stirrings are herders clop-clopping on their horses, kites gliding in the air in search of carrion, and calves browsing at the road verges. Hundreds of years of isolation had fostered the development of a unique language, and the virtual loss of Islamic beliefs, but now the outside world is starting to discover Hemu after it’s been enshrined in the newly designated Kanas National Park that, at 10,030 square kilometres, is almost as large as Lebanon. 

“When this place opened for tourism in 1998, no one had a TV,” told me one day Zhang Yongshu, a government official in Hemu. “Now almost everyone has a TV, and these people have already learned a lot about how to serve tourists.”

One of the largest national parks in the world, Kanas sprawls over the Altay Mountains, a chain of mountains that comes down from Russia, through Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and then bring a piece of Siberia to the northernmost tip of China’s Xinjaing province. The scenery is rugged and exotic. Alpine forests are interspersed with grasslands fragranced with wild flowers, and stitched with fast-flowing rivers of greenish translucent water and dozens of remote lakes. Eurasian birds dominate, including tits, thrushes, warblers, woodpeckers, owls, swans and a delightful variety of colourful ducks. Friendship Peak, the highest mountain in the region at 4,374-meters-high, straddles four countries, and so does the cultural mix – nomadic Mongol and Kazahk herders encamped in yurts, and of course the Tuwa inhabitants whose three villages are within the park. 

For the Tuwa, despite their flippancy and their drinking, exposure to TV and tourism has given them a lust for money. My three male friends complained that they are poor – even though they have never had it better – and the local eateries in Hemu, which serve huge portions of noodles with shards of re-hydrated beef, charged me two times more than the locals paid. National park status has also lured 57 developers who married local Tuwa to gain legitimacy to do local businesses. Several guesthouses were applying finishing touches during my visit; and altogether the number of buildings in Hemu has swollen by thirty percent in two years.

“These new developments have made the village denser,” told me Hongjiang Chen, the director of the Altay tourism department who’s in charge of Kanas. “The houses before were spaced out as a precaution against fires. Now we have a plan to demolish all the new buildings – only the original inhabitants will stay in Hemu – and the outsiders will be allowed to redevelop their guesthouses at a designated spot 2km out of the village. It’s similar to what we’ve done in Jiadengyu.”

I had gone to see Chen in his office at Altay city, the capital of Altay county, after I had explored Kanas. Chen is a tall and assertive Chinese-Kazakh man, and over two days we talked for seven hours and burned through two packets of cigarettes. He answered every obscure question I asked without ever consulting notes, and his impressive knowledge of Kanas is so complete that it’s as if the US$440 million that had been spent on management in the past five years, and the same amount devoted for the next five, was coming out of his pocket.

The arrangement at Jiadengyu that he mentioned is the most radical intervention that has been carried out to date. Originally, when the area opened for tourism in 1998, the focal attraction that emerged was Kanas Lake – a slender lake that’s 24km long by 1.9km wide – and a cluster of hotels had sprouted up around the southern shore of the lake. Then, four years ago, the government spent USD1 billion to knock down all the hotels and rebuilt them at Jiadengyu, a valley 35km to the south, in order to contain the environmental impact well away from the pristine lake. At Jiadengyu sewage is treated and rubbish is separated. Now visitors can only drive in their private vehicles or tour buses as far as Jiadengyu. Any further they have to take the park’s minibuses, which run on biofuels, and shuttle along the park’s single road that snakes along the Kanas River to Kanas Lake, and then stretches on to Hai Baba, the smallest of the three Tuwa villages.

Most tour groups put up their customers in Jiadengyu – where the hotels are constructed in a Swiss alpine style – but when I first arrived in Kanas, I opted for the more authentic setting of the village near Kanas Lake. The inhabitants at the village (which is simply called ‘Tuwa’) are permitted to take in lodgers in extensions of their family homes. Rooms are small and spartan – a trade-off I could live with to be based deep inside the park, within walking distance of some of the finest landscapes.  

Every morning I crawled out of bed before dawn, braving the frosty morning air, when the light is white and ethereal. On the first morning I walked along the 4.5-km-long boardwalk that skirts the lake’s shore, cutting through soggy and moody taiga forest, the stillness interrupted by woodpeckers poking tree trunks and the soft quaking of ducks. The lake’s water is glassy at this time, reflecting the heavenly white-azure purity of the sky. Another morning I skirted the Kanas River that flows south of the lake, where the mist swirls up from the valley. The chill had a brittle quality, and I watched the Mongol herders, encamped in grassy clearings adjacent to the river, emerging misty-eyed from their yurts, starting wood fires and heating water for strong brews of tea, and then saddling their horses and leading their herds up the slopes to the high pastures. 

One afternoon I trudged up the 3,000-plus-step to Heaven Peak, a summit that offers sweeping views of the lake and dense mountains tumbling to the north, including the massive glazier at Friendship Peak, which shimmered in the light. And on another day I struck out to the grassland called Dongxi Nieke, 5km away along a horse trail, where the jin lian flowers that bristle the ground release a strong intoxicating fragrance.   

Most exhilarating was the day-long trip to Black Lake. I was led by a Kazakh herder, and it took us three hours of bumping on horseback, first weaving through a forest of monumental birch trees, then cutting across a grassland which held a couple of Kazakh farmsteads, and finally topping out at a ridge where the wind buffeted us. Spread before us was a wide valley, with a misshapen body of opaque water at its bottom – hence the name, Black Lake – and a crown of summits with bleak brownish bodies and ribbons of snow. Orange buttercups peppered the marshland around the lake, and herds of semi-wild horses galloped or frolicked in the grass. It was pristine and pure and uplifting, and I could only imagine how much wilder the park’s core could be: the 1,700 square kilometer area beyond the valley that’s been set aside as untouched wilderness where no humans are permitted. 

The Black Lake is situated halfway between Kanas Lake and Hemu village, and we could have continued to Hemu along an old horse trail that connects the two. For adventurous tourists, it could be part of a 70km-long trek, from Jiadengyu to Hemu and on to Kanas Lake, cutting across high rugged mountains. And that’s only the beginning: get a special permit and go exploring deeper into the park. Or go travelling in the other parts of Altay county where, according to Chen, “you could spent ten years and still not see everything.” I spent two weeks – including a few days in the small, pleasant county capital – and only managed to see just a small part of Kanas National Park.

All over Kanas, semi-nomadic Mongol and Kazakh herders are scattered throughout the mountains. There are an estimated 5,000 herders and 300,000 animals that migrate to Kanas in the summers, moving back to the southern fringes of the mountains in the winters. Their encampments look exotic, timeless, and harmonious, but look close and you’ll begin to see a heavy environmental impact. Grasslands where the animals graze are reduced to tufted grasses and muddy puddles, while untouched grasslands have hip-high grasses profuse with flowers and birds, especially meadow pipits and skylarks, both calling on the wing in high-pitched trills.

Now the plan for Kanas is to coax the herders out of the national park altogether, something that’s being accomplished by nurturing grasslands – via an irrigation project – near the winter camps. That way the herders wouldn’t have a reason to migrate to Kanas any longer, and already the number of pastoralists in Kanas has been decreasing by 3-5 percent annually. “Then we move into the areas they vacate,” Chen explained, “and reconstruct the grasslands and forests – every year, we treat 8,000-10,000 square meters of grasslands and plant up to 50,000 trees.”

As a result of ecological management, including more aggressive patrolling for poaching, some key species are starting to make a comeback. Swans have now returned to Kanas Lake and other rare animals have also expanded their range – these include brown bears, snow leopards, snow owls, red deer, and pheasants. “However,” Chen pointed out, “key species are still decreasing overall. So we have some way to go before we actually manage to reverse the decline in species’ populations.”

The idea is that in the end only native Tuwa inhabitants would be left in the park, and they’ll give up herding for tourism. They are permitted to build extensions to their homes to take in lodgers, to open rustic restaurants and shops, and to take tourists horse-riding. Almost half of the Tuwa are already making money from tourism – whether employed by the park’s administration or servicing tourists – and the old now receive a pension from the government.

“We want the exteriors of all buildings here to remain rustic,” told me Zhang Yongshu, the official in Hemu, “and the interiors can be comfortable and modern hotel rooms. The key is to retain the traditional ambience here.”

I went to Hemu after I had explored the area around Kanas Lake, and I liked it best. It’s less commercial than the area around Kanas Lake, which receives more than half a million tourists annually (most visitors come with tour groups that don’t venture off the road, and hence even at Kanas Lake the landscapes are lonesome). Yet Hemu feels more remote and self-contained, like a place suspended in time. Even the arrival of outside developers who built 57 guesthouses hasn’t really impinged on its quaintness.

I had planned to stay in Hemu for two nights and ended up staying for six nights. I didn’t do much aside from rambling around the village and some day-hikes in the surrounding mountains, but that was the whole point, to slow down to the somnolent pace of the village and enjoy the Siberian light, which I found revitalising. And I had good company in my hosts – their chuckling and sniggering, smoking and eating was infectious – always ready to chat or drink. On my last day they invited me to stay an extra night to see a Mongolian dance show they were putting up that evening for a group of tourists staying overnight. I didn’t tell them that it was just the kind of thing I wanted to avoid, and it hastened my departure.

Yang was tetchy that day. It would be the first show they would put up, and he worried that the tourists might not like it and the tour agency wouldn’t send another group. I suggested he give them milk whiskey and nothing would go wrong. He said, “You might think we have an easy life, but in here” – he tapped his head with his index finger – “I’m always thinking about how to serve guests well.”

Article © Victor Paul Borg