Call of the wild

By Victor Paul Borg (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-28 10:02

Wild horses graze among flowers that dominate the grassland near the Black Lake. Photos by Victor Paul Borg

After three hours of bumping along on horseback, trotting through monumental pine forests and cutting across windswept grasslands, the scenery that greeted us when we finally reached the Black Lake was worth the sore buttocks.

The lake's water is bluish-dark and opaque (hence the name). It is nestled in a valley and surrounded by mountains of flower-filled slopes and summits patched with snow. Herds of semi-wild horses graze among the grass.

The Altay Mountains stretch from central Asia, through Mongolia and Kazakhstan, and then into Siberia and finally the northernmost tip of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

These rugged peaks are notable for their forests dominated by birch, fir, and poplar; grasslands peppered with flowers; and Eurasian birds, including thrushes, warblers, woodpeckers and owls. The bleak glacier of Friendship Peak, the highest mountain in the region, reaches an altitude of 4,374 m. Nomadic Mongol and Kazak herders encamped in yurts live along the range, as well as Tuwas, an ethnic group of just 1,500 people living in log houses in three villages.

Now all of this variety and splendor has been enshrined in the newly-designated Kanas National Park, the world's largest national park at 10,030 sq km. That's a vast area, much of it inaccessible and remote. More than a third of the park has been set aside as wilderness. Tourism will only be allowed in the 500-sq-km "buffer zone", centered around Kanas Lake. The lake's shore is close to the Tuwa villages.

A plan for tourism and environmental management of the park has been under consideration for several years. The government has spent 3 billion yuan ($438 million) on these efforts over the past five years. The same amount has been budgeted for the next five.

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