China's Mystic Waters
"Jiuzhaigou means "valley of nine villages," because it once harbored nine, but other numbers are more significant now. About 80 hotels are clustered cleanly at the mouth of a Y-shaped, 20-mile-long valley in the Min Mountains of central China, where 280 buses wait to shuttle this day's 18,000 or so visitors up the very pretty route, past a chain of flower-colored, ribbony lakes and fingery waterfalls, underneath escarpments chevroned with maple, spruce, or bamboo forests cut by the talus of old landslides. Boardwalks circuit the little lakes and reedy creeks, and the buses stop to let parties of trippers stroll at their own pace"."The geology in this part of the Tibetan Plateau is not granite, like the Sierras, but seabed, like our Rockies, so its limestones, dissolving, color the waters emerald or turquoise in a certain light or enhance the mirroring of an azure sky. Avalanches, in blocking the creeks, sculpted the lakes, but by legend, sky goddesses dropped their cosmetics into several, and mermaids swam in others. Calcium carbonate deposits on the bottom sometimes assumed fanciful shapes—sleeping dragons or whatnot".
"Along the bus route there's a Golden Bell Lake, Grass Lake, a Pearl Shoals Falls, Arrow Bamboo Falls, a Five Flower Lake and Five Colored Pond, a Sparkling Lake, Tiger Lake, Bonsai Lake, Swan Lake, Rhinoceros Lake, Double Dragon Lake, Reed Lake, Panda Lake, and Mirror Lake, which reflects, as the others do, the menagerie of the clouds, the birches, willows, and pines, the tinctures and hues of sunrise and sunset on rock faces and cliffs. Five shades of green, three of scree. Although the names sound promotional, Buddhist mysticism, and certainly the Bon religion that predated it and underlies it for many Tibetans, animated these lakes and rivers with spirits that the mineralized waters might fortuitously personify, whether mermaid or monster".
The 'hyper-real' order of the Chinese Panda
"The black-masked eyes of the pandas ubiquitously displayed on placards around the region look more tear-stained than cuddly like a nursery toy. A million of these must have been manufactured by now for every specimen that remains, uncute, in the wild"
"The intensely lovely little Jiuzhaigou complex of chromatic lakes in glacially awled mini-valleys is already nearly bereft of the tubby black-and-white pandas that once thrived here—an animal now trumpeted by the government as "our national treasure" but displaced wholesale by heedless logging and a die-off of bamboo during the last decades of the past century; more than one Tibetan described the decimation to me. Masticating bamboo shoots in a semireclining position, like a sea otter munching mollusks while lounging on its back, the panda has become an endearing emblem for conservationists worldwide and carries a heavy load in this supercharged robber-baron economy. Conservation would be a novel concept to anyone unacquainted with what is supposed to be preserved, such as wildness, wildlife, natural beauty. I noticed at the Beijing Zoo that the visitors seemed to have no feeling one way or another for the apparent thirst of the bears in their waterless pit or the metronomic jackals and wolves ticktocking in the heat. In the greenery of Chengdu's parks, the din of birdsong was so frenetic and dense as to imply an extreme scarcity of nesting spaces elsewhere. Only recently did the People's Republic bar the serving of delicacies like bears' paws at official government banquets, about the same time the Dalai Lama, in his Indian exile, urged his followers to end the wearing of tigers' or leopards' skins"
Transforming the spectacle of nature?
"Solitude is almost a vestigial pleasure, now that electronic entertainment can accompany us anywhere. Yet, if not from God, aren't we borrowing our planet from our children, as the saying goes, and if so, shouldn't we deliver it to them in habitable shape? Neither Marxism nor Buddhism would dispute that contention, except for the changing concept of what to think of as habitable. If we consider ourselves not just preeminent among but preemptive of any other form of life—if people simply do not care, apart from culinary calculations, when few unfarmed fish are left, or roadless ridgelines without windmills pinwheeling on them, or snowfields or meadowlarks—then the few who do care and who wish to relax from the pell-mell continuum may have to obtain surround-sound film clips of Ansel Adams–type wilderness imagery for their wall-scale computer screens. Video virtualizations corresponding to white noise may outsell these because, in fact, we're getting to prefer virtualizing so fast. But queues of citizens will still be trundled in, as at Jiuzhaigou, to tread the boardwalks and purchase tchotchkes from costumed hawkers at the end of the bus route. The harlequin pattern of crib and playroom pandas, like tiger camouflage, is with us to stay. Jungle-striped but captive-bred, the cats remain as de rigueur for zoos as pandas are going to be after the trees are gone, much like the replicated Tibetan monasteries with correct facades and paint schemes but no monks living inside."
Full article at: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/jiuzhaigou/hoagland-text/1
Perhaps paradise is not what it seems.....? Decide for yourself.
Here are some of my own photos from Jiu Zhai Gou, taken in July 2007
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