Holidays in Heck (18 page)

Mai practiced tai chi, got a foot massage, flew kites from the top deck (losing one in a suspension bridge that has loomed lower since the Yangtze began to rise), and went to a cabaret show of traditional Chinese music and folk dance with Broadway improvements by former drama major Bob Shigo. I made the acquaintance of highly skilled chief bar steward Ricky Yang.

And I stared at the shore. The ordinary sights of the Yangtze are, in some ways, more extraordinary than the Three Gorges. The terracing on the hillsides could have been done for artistic effect. But it wasn't. The stones of the walls were carried and stacked, generation after generation, to make, in some places, no more than a flower box of level soil for crops. The overwhelming economic power that is modern China all grew from these narrow margins of substance. And the economic power is visible everywhere. A fishing village of six stone hovels, without a road in or any sign of plumbing, displayed five satellite dishes.

It came so close to not happening. I noticed that, in the highlands above the terraced farms, the forest hills of the Yangtze valley lacked something. Forests. I asked Michael about this.

“They were cut down to feed backyard blast furnaces during Mao's attempt to match U.S. steel production.” Michael, who had been born in 1977, after China began to become normal, gave a baffled shrug.

Sometimes, however, China's embrace of market economics manifests itself oddly. On a brief shore excursion, a government-employed guide told us that a street parade was an advertisement for a furniture store sale. Mai, reading the parade banners, said it was an announcement of the upcoming Communist Party May Day celebrations.

We stopped at a 3,000-year-old town that was being slowly inundated. Another government guide brought us ashore. She took us to a new town that had been constructed to house the residents of the drowning town. The buildings were made of concrete and topped with fiberglass panels imitating roof tiles. There was an industrial area to provide jobs for displaced farmers. Nothing was in it except stacks of waste paper. “The industry is recycling,” said the government guide.

We went ashore at Fengdu to visit Snowy Jade Cave, which occupies the whole interior of a small peak. Traveling through it is like an inside-out mountain hike. The cave was discovered in 1994, opened to the public in 2003, and appears in none of the guidebooks I've consulted. This is just as well. The cave contains millions of calcite crystals. There's a certain kind of American tourist who believes that crystals make something special happen, and I don't want to be near that tourist when every one of those special things starts to happen to her all at once.

The interior is, as the cave's name implies, white. The crystals are formed into Sun Valley mogul fields, peels of New England birch bark, backyard clothesline bedsheet billows, Dairy Queen swirls, diner mugs, urinals, and stalactites and
stalagmites ranging in shape from ash blond bang fringe to obscene personal vibrator. Obviously Snowy Jade Cave had been discovered too late to inspire China the way Three Gorges did. The names in the cave had a Chinese touch, however. One scenic area was called “Improve Your Life.”

On the day before our boat reached Chongqing, David gave a talk for the passengers titled “Modern China.” But what he told was the story of his family. During the Cultural Revolution his parents had made, between them, fifty yuan a month. There was rationing until 1990. When David was born, the most expensive item in his house was a radio.

After the “open door,” farmers were able to lease their land from the government in return for 15 to 20 percent of their harvest. David's father was a truck driver. He leased a truck from the government trucking company for 10 percent of his profits. Before Deng's reforms, all jobs had been assigned by the government, for life. “Everything was assured,” David said, not reassuringly.

David's father was scolded by his mother for leasing the truck. But in five years his father had made 80,000 yuan (about $10,000), which, in those days, was enough to buy a house. The largest banknote then in circulation was the ten-yuan bill. His father brought his profits home in a large sack. David's mother thought he'd stolen the money. They had the first refrigerator in their neighborhood.

David went away to boarding school. He came home to Chongqing after a year, and so much building had been done that he couldn't find his house.

His parents lost everything in the Asian market crash of 1989. “They moved to a small village,” David said, “and
worked all day and all night to start a tourist resort. Now they are prosperous again.”

David was educated as a chemical engineer. He was working as a guide while he waited for a visa to get his PhD in the United States. After September 11, 2001, visas became hard to obtain.

“China's economic and social progress has been very fast,” David said. “Just five years ago I was amazed by the cleanliness and order of Singapore.” He said that in the 1980s if a family had a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine, they were considered rich. In the 1990s it was a color TV, a refrigerator, and air-conditioning. Now it's a car, a computer, and a mobile phone.

David explained, “The Chinese constitution is somewhat similar to that in the United States. The highest authority is the Party.” He then offered to take questions.

Among the tourists was a British woman who looked as though she cut her own hair. “But who's been
hurt
by all this economic development?” she asked.

David was puzzled. At a loss for an answer, he said, “Even ten years ago we had spy machines in all four-star hotels.”

“If the old days were so terrible,” said the British woman, “why the long queue at Mao's tomb?”

I resisted the temptation to say, “They're making sure he's dead.”

“Some older people,” David said, “are nostalgic for the Mao era. They have the grudge in their hearts about the big differences of income. And about the insecurity. Old people say, ‘You cannot use the money of tomorrow.' ”

“What are the main problems facing China over the next ten years?” asked another, less irritating tourist.

“The income gap,” David said. “The next five-year plan has to increase the living standards of farmers, eliminate the agricultural tax, and provide incentives for people to stay in the countryside.”

“What about all those rich farmers on their private plots?” said the woman who cut her own hair.

“The outsides of the houses may be nice,” David said, “but the insides are empty.”

“And what about all these beggars we see?” said the woman.

“We used to arrest them,” David said. “But Western countries criticized China's human rights.”

“What will China's geopolitical role be in the future?” asked a third tourist, who looked smug about coming up with such a BBC interview of a question, albeit posed to a twenty-nine-year-old chemical engineer.

“In the long run, a very neutral role,” David said. “China tries to be as humble as possible. There is the Taiwan issue and the Tibet issue, both handled very well by the government. But all these issues are basically economic concerns. If China's economy climbs, all these problems will disappear.”

“I was thinking,” said the DIY haircut woman to a promenade deck full of people who wished she'd quit doing so, “that there are some world problems that need handling by China, such as global warming.”

“We want to have more friends,” David said.

“But what about global warming?” the woman said.

“We just want to be loved,” David said and looked at his watch and announced with relief that time was up.

Kyrgyzstan, July 2006

I
was standing in the stirrups, stretched over the horse's neck. The reins were clenched in my teeth. I was gripping the mane with my left hand and swinging a quirt with my right, whipping the horse up a steep, grassy mountainside. There were hundreds of feet to climb to the top and 1,000 feet to fall to the bottom. It had been raining all night. The grass was slick. Hooves churned. Forelegs milled in the air. Hind legs buckled. The horse was on the verge of flipping backward. And that was the least of my worries.

In the first place, I don't know how to ride. I can't ride a horse up a mountain. I can barely ride a horse at all. Until shortly before doing this impression of Sir Edmund Hillary as Roy Rogers my equestrian experience was limited to going
around in circles to calliope music on a pony with a pole through its middle.

In the second place, I was somewhere in Kyrgyzstan. Not only didn't I know what I was doing, I didn't know where I was doing it. And I wasn't in the Westernized, cosmopolitan part of Kyrgyzstan—such as it is—with hospitals and ambulances. I was in the part with no roads, electricity, or cell towers. A satellite phone was in my saddlebag, but I couldn't get a satellite connection. Even by the standards of outer space Kyrgyzstan is remote. If something happened to my horse it would be shot. For me, the medical treatment wouldn't be that sophisticated.

Furthermore, there were blond hairs all over my clothes and luggage. How would I explain this to my redheaded wife? I had a love affair in Kyrgyzstan. Not only that, but with a male. His legs are so beautiful. And he has four of them.

All this began—as such things tend to—over a couple of drinks. I was having them in London with the fellow who had taken me to the Exmoor stag hunt, Adrian Dangar, whose surname is only slightly misspelled. Adrian, besides writing about hunting for
The Field
, runs a small, bespoke travel agency called Wild and Exotic. I was telling him that I planned to go to Kyrgyzstan, one of the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia, to write about how, or if, democracy is developing in places with no democratic traditions. This seemed a safer way to investigate the question than going to Falluja. I was wrong.

“Funny you should mention Kyrgyzstan,” Adrian said. He told me that he was organizing a horse trek across the mountains there in the coming summer, with Alexandra Tolstoy and her husband Shamil Galimzyanov. Alexandra is the
great-great-great- (give or take a great-) niece of the author. Though English by birth, she speaks Russian and lives in Moscow. Shamil is a Tartar from Uzbekistan whose family has been training horses since horses were the diminutive things with toes that we see in the Natural History Museum evolution exhibit. Shamil knows the region. So does Alexandra. A few years earlier, she and three girlfriends from college had retraced the Silk Road on horses and camels for 5,000 miles from Merve, near the Iranian border, to where Mr. Tian and I had been bored by the terra-cotta warriors in Xi'an, China.

“We'll have a great trip,” said Adrian. “Come along. You'll see parts of Kyrgyzstan the Kyrgyz haven't seen.”

“But I can't ride,” I said.

Adrian has been riding since he was in utero. He's been Master of Hounds for several particularly neck-breaking fox-hunts. He's ridden across the Serengeti and over the Andes. “Nonsense,” said Adrian, “a horse trek is just backpacking on someone else's back.”

Back home in New Hampshire, I told Mrs. O., “I'm taking a horse trek across the mountains of Kyrgyzstan.”

“No you're not,” she said.

“Come on,” I said, “it's not like the mountains of Kyrgyzstan are such a dangerous place.”

“No,” she said.

“I've been to lots more dangerous places than that.”

“No.”

“I was a war correspondent for twenty years, for gosh sake.”

“You've
been
to a war,” Mrs. O. said. “You've never
been
on a horse.”

She relented, at last, on the condition that I take some months of riding lessons. This I dutifully did, from a dressage
instructor in an indoor ring atop horses named Elmer's and Mucilage. And that is how I ended up in a tent camp in the heights of Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan is a nation the size of South Dakota that's all but lost among the Tian Shan Mountains, the “Heavenly Mountains,” that divide China from the trans-Ural steppes. It is north of Kashmir and Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, past what even Alexander the Great considered worth conquering. The country is, or might as well be, the “Kafiristan” of Kipling's
The Man Who Would Be King
. (And, over the next two weeks, my horse would try to crown me with any number of tree branches overhanging our trail.)

A fellow named Djuman Kul, who looked like Genghis Khan and was wearing a felt hat as tall and amazing and elaborately embroidered as anything the Pope dons for Easter, was choosing my mount from a herd of wild Kyrgyz horses. They were wild enough, at least, that nobody had bothered to name them. I had been picturing something on the order of a shaggy little Mongolian pony that would let my feet drag reassuringly on the ground. But these horses were fifteen hands high. That is, they were five feet tall at the shoulder, and thin and bony-headed as fashion models but sinewy like a California governor left outdoors to eat grass all winter. And the horses were stallions, with Floyd Landis levels of testosterone. Like Floyd and Tour de France officials, they were kicking and biting each other.