I followed these flavors north, stopping at a roadhouse for dried yak meat stir-fried with local vegetables I’d never seen before. The car crossed wall after wall of mountains and rimmed a gorge where the Yangtze, mighty with Himalayan snowmelt, thundered through narrow rock. Yet I noticed no terrain was too indomitable for China’s cellphone towers. These form the electronic caravan trail of today. Even in the most remote gorges my driver was fielding dinner invitations.
At 11,000 feet, the land opened to a high, arid plateau marked by wooden Tibetan farmhouses with their tufted racks of drying barley. Ahead I could see Zhongdian, recently renamed Shangri-La by the government to draw tourists. I was prepared for an edgy reaction—does anybody really believe James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon was inspired by this dusty trade-route outpost, as the Chinese authorities now claim?—but Zhongdian enchanted me. It was relaxed and genuinely friendly, with a frontier feel that at moments almost evoked the American West. Tibetan cowboys clattered down cobbled lanes on horseback, the 17th-century Songzanlin Monastery had a holy majesty, and the unrestored Old Town was just starting to sprout art studios and restaurants.
After I checked into my Tibetan-style hotel, a young woman named Droma stopped by to reconfirm my plane ticket back to Kunming. We started to talk and, in one of life’s unexpected gifts, kept talking for two days. There is a commonality in the lives of all women, everywhere, and few things are better than sharing it. As she told me of her life I slowly came to see that Droma herself was part of the caravan trail—or as the Tibetans call it, the gyalam, the “broad road.” She left her village, learned Chinese, then English; now she’s beginning French. She seeks the world, and it lies down that road.
At Songzanlin, we walked quietly among 700 monks in bright robes and the occasional, jolting pair of Western athletic shoes. Inside the prayer halls, yak-butter lamps flickered beneath serene Buddhas. Chanted prayers rose with smoke from sand vats of incense. Here was another force that had come by the road, the most powerful one yet: religion. In a whisper, Droma dissected the murals, then we climbed to the roof and spun the prayer cylinders. I have never felt so close to the sky.
By now I was obsessed with thoughts of how and when I could return—a sure sign I was falling for Yunnan. Yet I still didn’t grasp the full power of the caravan trail and its food—at least not until that night, when Droma took me to Arro Khampa! This restaurant at the top of a cobbled lane in the Old Town is run by three local Tibetans who went to India and returned, globalized. They see their restaurant as a culinary tribute to the gyalam, which changed their lives and the lives of their forefathers. An adventurous menu distills the three main Tibetan styles (Khampa, Lhasa, and Amdo) and reaches out along the road to the cuisines of China, India, and beyond. One chef is Nepalese. The lodgepole room with its warm fire is welcoming, the sound track is hip and multinational, and the yak-meat stir-fries are superb.
The next morning was hard. Would I ever have yak meat again? Or shaguo, or bean jelly? What about Droma? There was a knock on the door. Droma! “But it’s 7 a.m.”
“I woke the shopkeeper.” She held out a package, her warmth infectious. I took it, smiling with her. Before I even unwrapped the newspaper, as soon as I held it, I knew. I opened it. She had brought me a shaguo.
Pinterest
