The black sport-utility vehicle stopped about 300 feet behind us at a bend in the road. Its occupants were hidden behind its tinted windows. Inside, we assumed, were police officers assigned to follow our group of five foreign men and a local driver up the narrow mountain road. A metal bar across the road had brought us to a halt. It was a police checkpoint, and a man posted at a booth said no outsiders were allowed farther.
We told him our trekking guide was waiting for us in the village of Mafengcun. The walk we had planned for a long holiday weekend in this Tibetan area of western China started there. Our driver got out and talked to an officer in charge, someone he knew. The officer ordered the man in the booth to open the gate.
We looked behind us as we began climbing higher into the mountains. There was no sign of the black car.
The police had been tracking me and my friends since our arrivals by airplane the previous day at the nearby town of Songpan. Two policemen had watched us from across the street as we ate dinner at a noodle restaurant, and they then sat in the lobby of our hotel after we had returned to the lodge to sleep. One person in our group of five, Craig, was an American diplomat; two others, including me, were registered journalists. We were traveling in the Tibetan region known as Amdo, and near our trekking route were towns in which Tibetans had recently set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule.
We knew we were bound to get on the radar of the local police. But we had underestimated how closely they would follow us. Now our hope was that Kiboya, the Tibetan trekking and mountaineering guide in Mafengcun whom we had hired over the telephone, would be able to work things out with the authorities.
Such are the travails of going on the road with a diplomat in the Tibetan hinterlands, an area that has had Chinese officials on edge. An average foreigner traveling here might draw some attention from security officers, but not the kind of scrutiny devoted to our group. I had known Craig for years, starting with his previous incarnation as a foreign correspondent based in Beijing, and we had long talked about doing a backpacking trip in China. Now we had a holiday weekend. Craig was posted to the United States Consulate in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, so it made sense to head into the mountains of that province, which has some of the wildest scenery in the entire country.
We decided to approach on foot the Huanglong nature preserve, which, along with the neighboring Jiuzhaigou preserve, was one of the most popular outdoor vacation spots in China. Both are Unesco World Heritage sites, and tourists flock there to see turquoise lakes in alpine forests. The parks exist a world apart from China’s crowded, polluted east coast cities. From January 2013 to October 2013, Songpan County, which includes the Huanglong preserve, had 3.22 million visitors, according to a website run by China Travel News Agency, an official organization. Jiuzhaigou County had 4.76 million visitors last year.
Unfortunately, a large portion of those visitors descend on the area during holiday weekends. We knew there would be no avoiding the tourists in the preserves. But there was empty wilderness surrounding the parks. So we planned a walking route into Huanglong through the back door, along a wild valley outside its southwestern border.
A 14,400-foot pass separated that valley from the one with Huanglong and its sparkling mineral pools. Using online satellite maps, we plotted a course starting from Mafengcun up to the pass. The five of us would all be struggling during the high-altitude walk — we were, after all, coming from Beijing and Chengdu, among the world’s most polluted cities. So we allotted three days to get from the trailhead to the Huanglong preserve.
We flew separately into Songpan, a Wild West town with a mix of ethnic Tibetans; Hui, who are Muslims; and Han, the dominant group in China. It had been 14 years since I had first visited Songpan. On the road from the airport, I saw a sign advertising a Tibetan mastiff show. Songpan itself seemed more prosperous now — polished two-story wooden buildings stood in the town center, and construction work had been done on the gray walls surrounding the town. I walked with my friend Gilles through the north gate to visit the street markets in the center. Tibetan men with cowboy hats sauntered past, as did Tibetan women wearing turquoise necklaces and silver belts with red stones. Hui-owned restaurants sold noodles and pastries.
It was at one of those noodle shops where we met Craig and the other travelers, Simon and Brian, for dinner that night. Craig pointed out two young men in a police car across the street. He said he had been followed from the airport. As we left the restaurant, the two policemen walked up to us. “Where do you plan to go now?” one asked. Back to the hotel to sleep, we said. They looked relieved. Later, in the hotel, Craig went down to the lobby and saw the two men drinking tea there.
The ethnic tensions in the region manifested themselves in subtle ways. Craig went out the next morning to buy kerosene for his camping stove, but found that no one was selling it. “People are doing bad things with gasoline,” Dong Zhuo, a manager at our Hui-run hotel, had told me the day before. Because of the Tibetan self-immolations, the authorities had limited the purchase of gasoline to drivers refueling at gas stations. We ended up buying a butane gas stove from a gear shop.
The two policemen were hanging around our hotel when we set off with a driver before 10 a.m. One wrote down the license plate number. The drive to Mafengcun took less than two hours, but felt much longer. We came across a line of three policemen in black uniforms standing in the road. They checked two of our passports — we were careful not to give them Craig’s diplomatic passport or the two with the journalist visas — and they waved us through. Soon afterward, we saw the black car tailing us. And then we came to the checkpoint where our driver spoke to the head officer.
That was the final obstacle before we pulled into Mafengcun, at the end of a dirt road. It was surrounded by green pastures and grazing horses. We met our Tibetan guide, Kiboya, at his home, and ate a lunch of cheese and salami. A local policeman wearing sunglasses and carrying a notebook walked up to us with two other men. “Is what you’re doing dangerous?” he asked. Kiboya pulled him aside to talk.
It was nearly 2 p.m. when we got on the trail, four hours after driving out of Songpan. The late start was better than none at all. Kiboya and a horseman led three horses carrying our packs. Leaving the village, we passed a small, white-walled monastery with a row of prayer wheels outside. Once higher up, we looked back and saw bright prayer flags strung around the building. Just as varied in color were the valley walls, where trees had begun turning with the onset of autumn.
“People don’t live in this valley, but we might come across herders,” Kiboya said. The herders brought their yaks to higher altitudes to graze. Kiboya said we might be the first foreigners to walk through the valley — he had not heard of anyone taking this path to enter Huanglong. Most foreigners who came to the area took another route outside Mafengcun to climb the nearby snow mountain of Xuebaoshan, whose 18,000-foot peak was on this day shrouded in clouds.
Early into our walk, we met a Tibetan woman with red strings tied into her hair. She was leading a white horse down the valley, toward the village. She chatted with Kiboya and the horseman. I wondered what other herders we might see up here, and whether we had really left the police behind.
We made camp at 5 p.m. outside an empty herder’s hut, setting up our tents in a drizzle. Yaks grazed in the surrounding hills. My watch’s altimeter told us we were at 3,770 meters — 12,369 feet. We had climbed a mere 470 meters, but it was enough to leave us panting.
During dinner, Kiboya and the horseman started a campfire. Our guide was a man of few words, but he told us that he, at age 49, was the father of three adult sons and had worked for many years as a guide to support his family. He had led groups from different countries, and I recalled seeing the banner of a South Korean mountaineering club hanging on a wall of the building where we had met him. He had no doubt told the police about our route and given them a guarantee that we would follow it and end the trip in one piece.
The next day, we continued our uphill walk and made camp after crossing a lunar landscape that reminded me of Afghanistan and Ladakh, in northern India. We had decided to stop after three hours, at the foot of the one-hour climb to the pass into the Huanglong valley. Tomorrow we would cross that pass and inch our way down a steep scree slope to the Huanglong preserve; the paths down the slope were so narrow and the footing so uncertain that the horseman would turn back with his animals at the pass, and we would carry our own packs down, with Kiboya in the lead. In total, we would walk nine hours and drop almost 4,000 feet from the pass to the park entrance. The hardest part, though, would be dealing with the mobs in the preserve as we wound our way toward the entrance — thousands of other people from cities across China, with their cameras and walking sticks and rainproof jackets.
Not only would we have to negotiate the holiday crowds, but the police would pick us up again somewhere in the preserves. We would be back in a context familiar from our urban existence in China: watching other people, and being watched.
But for now, at our second campsite, we had no company other than the peaks and a rushing stream and a phalanx of clouds. A rainstorm came and went. We climbed up into the hills overlooking our campsite. On the mountaintops above, we could see a dusting of snow that had not been there when we first arrived.
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