The Connected Traveler Technology Showcase

So I sit on the balcony of my hotel, sipping butter tea, overlooking this new, Chinese Shangri-la: fields of barley, grazing yaks and dzos (yak/cow hybrids), white stupas with fluttering prayer flags and, if I crane my neck a bit, oh dear, a parking lot with tourist vans.

In 1997, Zhongdian County in northern Yunnan Province renamed itself Xiang Ge Li La (sound it out) hanging its claim on the Hilton book. Hilton never came here but he may have been inspired by National Geographic accounts of Joseph Rock, a flamboyant biologist who worked nearby in the ‘20s. This branding exercise has put the most culturally and biologically-diverse place in China on the tourist map, for both enjoying and, if not treated right, trampling to death. 

This Shangri-la is Tibet-Lite.  It is at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, not on it, which has some distinct advantages: instead of howling winds and hardscrabble, it has temperate weather, rivers, lakes, wildlife, fall foliage and wildflowers in the spring. It is near the top of the trade route that extends through Southeast Asia and is still a place where tribes gather. I went to the local market and found not only Tibetans and Han Chinese but Yi, Naxi and Lisu, No problem telling them apart. This is one of the few places left in the world where people still wear tribal dress daily, not just drag it out for weddings and tourist shows: Yi women don black flying-nun hats the size of kites, Tibetans sport knit headdresses of green, yellow and a not-of-this-world fluorescent pink. The color of the costume signifies motherhood, grandmotherhood or whether one is “available.” And every evening ever since the government loosened its rules about people gathering in groups, hundreds of people, young and old, available or not, all of these ethnic tribes, have turned out in the village square to engage to line dance, sway arm in arm together.

This Shangri-la has a pint-sized Potala, a small working palace that looks sort of like the famous one in Llasa. Its delicacy symbolizes what worries me about this place. Bus zones are being built in anticipation of a Red Army of Chinese tourists eager to spend their yuan on the once-forbidden pleasure of travel. I doubt that this little palace will accommodate more than 100 tourists at a time. Across the valley, an Old Town area is being restored perhaps a bit too perfectly. Already every other shop is selling the same souvenirs, some imported from outside the region. Shangri-la is no longer remote. My cellphone works better in here than it does in San Francisco.
I took a couple of excursions into the nearby mountains on newly-paved roads, above tiny villages in Ojai-like valleys, under towers of rock and snow with names like Jade Crowned Peak. Spectacular, for sure. But, at the end of one 45-minute drive I was dropped at a staging area where I boarded a bus that took me to about two miles to a path leading to a lake. “Nice lake,” was my impression, like Colorado. Another natural attraction morphs into a cliché tourist spot. Drive there, take a picture with a yak, and go back. In all honesty, these controls will be needed when the masses arrive…as they will.  I just don’t want to be there when that happens.