Call of the wild

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

Horse races are the main competition and highlight of local ethnic groups' festivals.

Hemu is a peaceful place, the kind of spot where you can sit idly and contentedly in a chair and soak up the atmosphere: herders on horseback ambling through the dusty streets, cows sauntering about, kites wheeling in the air, and men sitting outdoors engaged in friendly banter.

"Before this place opened for tourism in 1998, the Tuwa were completely isolated," says Zhang Yongshu, an official with the Kanas administration in Hemu. "No one had a TV set in 1998, but now virtually everyone has a TV. So these people are changing fast - they have already learned a lot about tourism services."

Now many Tuwas are giving up the herding life and getting into tourism. Many families have built appendages or extensions to their houses as guesthouse rooms; others take tourists horse-riding in the surrounding mountains. Ambitious adventurers can go all the way to Kanas Lake or Jiadengyu.

The Tuwas are inquisitive and talkative, and they chided us for shying away from the searing sun. "We only get hot sun a few months every year so we make the best of it," says Yi Yangxue, owner of the guesthouse where we were staying. "Our skin is dark now, but we become white in the winter."

Their most distinctive feature is a unique language. Yet the language never developed a written form and now that the outside world has caught up with them, and tourists are flooding to Kanas, the Tuwa language might slowly die out. "Only Mongol, Kazak, and Mandarin are taught at school," explains Yi. "So we only speak Tuwa at home, but children increasingly speak a mixture of Mandarin and Tuwa."

Tourists are still relatively sparse in Hemu. Yet the village has readied new beds in anticipation of greater numbers.

"We will soon start working on a plan for Hemu," says Zhang, the government official. "Roads will be paved and overhead wiring removed and run underground. We want the exteriors of all buildings to stay as they are now, rustic and vernacular, but the interiors should be comfortable with modern hotel rooms."

Additionally, he says: "In the future cars will not be allowed to drive into the village - people will have to park outside, and then walk into the village."

As for the larger management plan recently approved by the central government, the idea is to cap the annual number of tourists in Kanas National Park at 1 million - 657,000 tourists visited in 2007.

Another plan is to reduce the number of grazing animals that belong to the nomadic Kazak and Mongol herders who migrate to the high pastures in the summers.

"Nature will get much better in Kanas," promises Chen Hongjiang, the Altay tourism chief.

(China Daily 08/28/2008 page19)

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