Crashing the party

By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-06 09:34

Just down the road, an open-air restaurant wrapped around an elephant show ring. The park claims it became the country's first place for performing pachyderms in 1996.

Visitors munched on roast chicken and pineapple rice while watching the creatures dance to techno, walk balancing beams and defeat more than a dozen volunteers at tug-of-war.

My mother has something of a fear of elephants and watching their more dramatic performance the night before hadn't helped. So she and my aunt paid 200 yuan ($29.2) for a half-hour ride through the rainforest. Mom described it as "riding in the back of a pickup truck on a dirt road down a steep mountainside". She loved every second of it.

As sunset approached, we hopped the cable car back to the road near our tree houses. Upon disembarking, a police officer informed us the elephants were back, roaming the forest between our rooms and us. He ordered the crowd to wait and be ready to run for it. I furrowed my brow at the walking cast on my mom's fractured leg.

When he said "Go!" we tore toward the bridge and were almost there when a conservation officer appeared, dashing full speed in the opposite direction. "Go back!" he shouted.

In the trees behind him loomed a massive gray form, and we pulled an immediate 180 and booked it the other way.

I caught sight of my mother skittering like a sandpiper. At that moment, you'd never have known her leg was fractured, if not for the cast that clopped against the ground as she fled.

Our second sprint from the cable car station was successful. We stood on the bridge with heaving chests, watching the herd splash in the trickling river until twilight fell.

The next morning, we rose before sunrise to catch our flight to Chengdu. Our plan was to hop the cable car back to the main gate, from where our driver would take us to the airport. But when we heard elephants bugling across the river, we wondered if they would stand between our tree house in Yunnan's rainforest and our hotel in Sichuan's provincial capital.

Just as we were pondering our predicament, a small head peaked out of our tree house's door. "There's a monkey in our room!" my wife shouted.

Suddenly, the gibbon scampered out and barreled toward us, rearing up on its legs and waving its arms in the air.

"Grab your stuff!" I yelled, leaping in front of our luggage with arms out and legs bowed like a basketball point guard.

The monkey veered course, hopping into a trashcan where it plucked out a takeout box of vegetables. It then catapulted itself up a tree, hunching on a branch for a moment before blasting out of sight.

The guards told us the coast was clear, so we trudged to the cable car and glided away, leaving the rainforest of Xishuangbanna for the relative calm of Chengdu's concrete jungle.

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