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White Pearl's Adventures in China |
The Doctors' Tour |
Update from doctors Marc and Jennifer:
How to travel in Yunnan was a dilemma: we did not have any contacts there, but we knew we did not want luxury or tourist traps but a taste of real, rural Yunnan. So we did what anybody else would do at the beginning of the twenty-first century: we went to Google.com and typed in "Yunnan" and "Ecotourism". Google spit out only one response: White Pearl. As it turns out, White Pearl, an attorney and riverrunner has the only eco-tour project in China registered with the United Nations whose goal is to prove the Case for Preservation of the Nujiang as a Recreational River Corridor run by its resident Minority Nationalities – Drung, Nu, and Lisu governments. The pictures on the White Pearl website suggested that previous travelers
had a tremendous time rafting, kayaking down the Nu River, cycling down
the road and doing scenic road tours. We emailed and received a warm
response to our inquiries. White Pearl assigned one of her own English
students whom she had trained and paid well to act as our eco-tour guide
and to introduce us to the appropriate Nujiang leaders who wanted White
Pearl to bring more doctors in if our tour was successful. Because we
gave her only two weeks notice of our tour, unfortunately the guide
had to be Chinese, instead of a member of the Lisu, Nu, and Drung and
Nujiang Fuzhou and Weifan are two rapidly growing cities in the industrialized provinces of eastern China. We realized almost immediately that our images of Communist China were seriously wrong. The large cities of eastern China are like all big cities, with traffic, congestion, smog, rampant industrialism and commercialism. We were amazed to find rampant consumerism; shoe stores offered a hundred or more different styles, for example. Along with a very western lifestyle we also found that the Chinese living on the eastern coast were starting to experience epidemics of heart disease, not very much different from what we know in the US. But it should have come as no surprise; we witnessed bicyclists crowded out by motor vehicles and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets on every other corner. After our successful visits to the very modern hospitals in Fuzhou and Weifan, we were ready to journey to someplace rather different. We hoped to see the old China, and the remains of the barefoot doctors. We also wanted to enjoy the natural beauty of the land and promote values of conservation. We arrived in Kunming and were welcomed warmly by our Project guide, his wife, and our driver. In Kunming we visited the botanical gardens, where we enjoyed in one place many of the plant species native to the province. We learned much about Chinese conservation efforts, and that the Nujiang Project was the only realistic conservation project for the area we were going to. Everywhere such as the Kunming airport we saw photos and ads for Lijiang and Dali, but nothing on Nujiang. We then flew to Baoshan, a portal city to the western part of Yunnan. Baoshan is a small but growing city that appears to be prospering as a result of the development of the Burma Road into a major freeway from Kunming to Myanmar. We saw construction all over the place and it felt like a boomtown undergoing rapid change. From Baoshan we took off via Stevens Road (see more on the Nujiang Project website about this road) to the Goaligongshan Natural Reserve. There we hiked through moist tropical forest and then, at higher altitude, boreal forest. We saw many birds, a bamboo snake and lots of butterflies, and stopped at three different waterfalls and hot springs. There was a magnificent rainbow in the sky as we returned back to the lodge. We were heartened to see such a rich ecosystem now under government protection.
As part of our eco-tour fee, White Pearl asked that our donation pay for medicines to the desperately poor local tribes that live on the peaks of the mountains that fringe the Nujiang. As physicians, we felt a donation of antibiotics would be the most appropriate gift. White Pearl tours also distribute 100’s of "favors" to the people and this tour appropriately she chose toothbrushes for hundreds of children. During each day of our journey along the Nujiang, we traveled from one community to the next, up very steep roads, to distribute medicine and toothbrushes and to meet the barefoot doctors and their patients.
In 1996 when White Pearl’s Project began, all of the stores and restaurants built on the edge of the road belonged to Lisu, Nu, and other local governments and individuals. But Chinese have immigrated into the region and are being allowed to buy up these. The two-lane highway has clearly already had an impact on life along the Nujiang. But the road that brings "development" to the region, along with immigrants, small industry, traffic and pollutants is also clearly the key to these local people’s future prosperity as a "Mini-Bhutan" tourist destination. We agree that White Pearl’s Project goals of facilitating this development as a Recreational Tourist River Corridor is the only alternative to the proposed dams. But the impact of the two-lane highway along the edge of the river
has been modest compared to future impact of a modern superhighway that
we saw being built in western Yunnnan. This four-lane American-style
interstate will link Shanghai in the east with Myanmar (Burma) and the
rest of Southeast Asia. Amazingly, we saw no heavy equipment used in
its construction. Rather, thousands of men and women, along with burros,
horses, wheel The highway will no doubt bring everything to western Yunnan province. In some ways, the highway will be a great development, facilitating the transport of food and medicine to the region, amongst other desirable goods. It will bring jobs and an improved standard of living for many. But the highway will also bring environmental despoliation, disease and an influx of Han Chinese that may further displace the tribal peoples and bring an end to their way of life. If you look at the photos accompanying this essay, you will have a sense of the grandeur of the landscape and the desperate poverty of the ethnic minorities that live on the mountaintops. The people we met were so grateful for the medicine we brought and for the toothbrushes – but they were also pleased that we had taken an interest in them, in their far corner of the world that may soon be profoundly changed. |