Forget 'Three Gorges'_world

Forget 'Three Gorges'

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For the adventure traveler in China, there\'s really only one gorge to see. Forget the three gorges. The boats have rats, the river\'s a filthy soup floating with plastic and fecal debris, and the passage through the hills, even if you can see them for the clouds and air pollution, is way over rated. The strangely named Tiger Leaping Gorge is so crowded that you might just as well be strolling down Jeifang Lu somewhere. There\'s no doubt that the beer\'s cold and the spaghetti ain\'t too bad, but is that really what you came to China for? If you want to compare notes on college life, stick to the beaten path and the common tourist travel-ers. If you want adventure, walk the gorge between Zhongdian and Lugu Lake in China\'s southwest Yunnan Province.

The bus from Yunnan\'s Tibetan town of Zhongdian gets me into the end of the line village of Luoji late in the afternoon. I think I know where I want to go, to Yongning, near Lugu Lake, but I have no idea how to get there. So in my 10 volt Chinese, I ask the woman who\'s running the tiny restaurant near where the bus wheezed to a stop.

After a shrug and a moment\'s huddle with the guy rinsing the rice, she hesitatingly points with her chin at a menacing hulk of a man sitting at a little table. He\'s one of those block people, square head, broad thick shoulders, legs like logs, a long pony tail and an ominous face, weathered dark and lined.

"Ask him," she tells me in a low voice. Against my better judgment and in my two cylinder Chinese, I tell the guy that I want a guide and a mule to take me over the mountain and across the river by way of Sanjiangkou. I want to get as close as I can to Lugu Lake.

He grunts, glowers, and gestures for me to follow him.

I leave my bags with the woman at the restaurant, we\'re out of the tiny village in a moment, and I\'m let-ting some tough guy lead me down a steep, scree path to...where? I\'m feeling more and more uneasy about him.

Until we reach the elementary school\'s outdoor basketball court and all the children gather around him, my fixer for the moment. He\'s Teacher Li and they hug him and reach out for his hands. His gym class is clearly popular with the kids. He beams when he sees them. After a cup of tea and a sweet, juicy pear, a radiant Teacher Li shows me the paintings he\'s done. Most of them are geometric and Tibetan looking in keeping with his cultural background, but there\'s a glowing copy he\'s made of Van Gogh\'s Sunflowers. He pulls out a huge sheet of paper to draw me a map.

"It\'s really easy," he tells me. "Teacher Wang and I did it not long ago. From here to Baguan vil-lage is about nine hours walk the first day. You\'ll start seeing the gorge half way there."

The what?

I\'m pretty sure I keep saying, "I want a guide, shangdao, and a mule, luozi, to get me to Yongning near the lake," but my Chinese is pretty low octane, so who knows.

"Really. It\'s easy," Li says. "Just stay on the path. Here, here\'s a map."

An artist\'s map. Cloud shrouded mountains, zigzag paths, lovely streams disappearing in mist and woods, and a deep canyon, a gorge, a gorge. Not the sort of cartogra-phy I want to get me safely over a route that I\'ve never seen.

"A mule, I want a luozi, and a shangdao. Can you get me a guide?" Reluctantly, Teacher Li trudges with my chicken shit ass back up to the restaurant. We ask in the tiny general store. Nope. The post of-fice. Nope. Duck our heads into a couple of houses, no one. Finally at the upper limit of the village, near a welder\'s shop, Li\'s standing around smoking and kicking dust on lungers, when a rusty, roofless 4 by 4 rolls up with eight young men laughing that young man laugh as they\'re drinking beer from those big green liter bottles. The driver has an intense and brooding look, mad at something maybe, just sits there. The six guys in the back push and shove each other out of the back with that boy bravado and noise, and with the grace of a clown show.

Teacher Li barely looks up. "Wanna take this foreigner through the gorge to Labo? He wants a mule." The gorge again and Labo\'s where I can get the bus to Yongning and on to Lugu Lake. The guy sitting where the front seat should be looks like a pirate. He has curly hair, a silver earring, and keeps peeling skin off his thumb with a big knife from the scabbard strapped to his left side.

The six in the chorus laugh that "are you kidding" laugh, but the driver shrugs and looks at the pi-rate. They both grin a grin I don\'t like and say, "Sure." I don\'t actu-ally see any chops being licked, but I\'m certain I sense it. Yikes! Do I really want to do this?

Teacher Li and I walk back to the restaurant for my bags. There we sort out the details. A guide and a mule, actually the driver, his name\'s Huo Zhr Ping, and the pi-rate from the front seat will both go, but I only pay Huo. It\'s gonna be 150 RMB a day. "Why so much?"

"Well, he\'s gotta walk back too, you know. You pay him for both ways."

I\'m rich. Less than US$20 a day. The traveler ethic says I ought to bargain, but the price is fair. We agree.

"He lives in Muxinto, up on the mountains. He\'ll drive you up. That\'ll save you some time and you\'ll leave from there tomorrow morning. You\'ll be fine," Teacher Li reassures me. Why did he have to say that?

I squeeze in between the swillers in the back seat. Somebody throws an empty beer bottle out even before we leave the village. I should have said goodbye to Li. I should have said goodbye to someone. I wonder where they put my bags.

As we bump the ten kilometers up the rutted mountain track, one by one, the rowdies jump out even though Huo doesn\'t alter the 4 by 4\'s slow, steady pace. When we reach Muxinto, only Driver Huo and the pirate are left.

It\'s a typical Naxi village with a dozen or so dark wood dwellings, pigs and chickens and draft animals at ground level under each, with a veranda, common room, and two side rooms above. The pirate heads off in one direction while Huo and I walk through a muddy lane to a house at the top of the village. We climb the stairs and there\'s the smoky room with grandpa, mother, young wife and baby. This dour driver brightens up, lifts the little one, and straps it on his back, all the

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