‘Tashi Delek!’ we all shout, clinking our glasses and knocking back the smoothly fierce brew.
Namu is nowhere to be seen.
Day Eighty Two : Lugu Lake to Lijiang
There’s a cockerel somewhere close by that wakes me every morning, long before it’s light. Today I time its first call at 3.29. To make matters worse, it crows only on one note, a monotone cry like someone pretending to be a ghost.
It gives me plenty of time to get my head together and prepare for an early start. Breakfast is basic and heavy. Noodles, hot, spicy cabbage and coils of pudgy, white, steamed bread, washed down with butter tea, made, of course, by Namu’s mother. Our drivers, like most other working people in China, carry plastic flasks of green tea at all times, wedging them perilously on the dashboard. Soon we’re packed, have said our farewells and are making our way on a slow loop round the lake, passing the Coca Cola Hope School, proof that Namu is not the only philanthropist in Lugu Lake. The red soil has turned to mud with recent rain, and the 12,000-foot (3660 m) summit of the Gemu Goddess Peak is lost in the clouds. Compared to where we’ve been, Gemu seems no more than a foothill, but we are still above 8000 feet (2440 m) and, even here, the snow will soon come and shut the passes and Lugu Lake will be cut off for three months of the winter.
This has been the easternmost point of our journey. We are some 2000 miles (3200 km) from the Khyber Pass, as the crow flies, and now we must turn back towards the Himalaya and follow the mountains as they make their great southern arc towards India and Burma.
Within a few hours we are riding into the Yangtze gorges again, this time on the other side of the Jade Dragon Snow range from Tiger Leaping, but into canyons just as stomach-tighteningly spectacular.
Shanzidou, at 18,350 feet (5590 m) is the tallest of 13 limestone pinnacles that crown the summit of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. With its brilliant white scarf of snow, this jagged diadem of ice and snow effortlessly dominates the northwestern horizon as we enter the village of Baisha.
Surrounded by a fertile plain, it’s a quiet, attractive little place. Its main streets are more like lanes, with water rushing down open culverts, past houses of traditional mud-brick built on stone bases and topped with alpine-style, wide-eaved roofs. Some of the buildings, including a fine stone gate-tower, suggest grander times, and, indeed, Baisha was once the capital of the Naxi kingdom, before it was conquered by Kublai Khan 800 years ago.
In recent years it has rediscovered fame as the home of He Shixiu, known to the world as Dr Ho, one of the leading lights of Chinese traditional medicine. It’s not hard to find his house, partly because the bus stops right outside and partly because of a battery of display boards leaning against the trees and covered with press headlines.
‘The Famous Dr Ho’, ‘Dr Ho - He Has Many Friends’, ‘He Loves Open-Door Policy’ and ‘Bruce Chatwin - 17 Years Ago He Stayed Here for Two Weeks’.
His son, Ho Shulong, emerges from the front door of a modest, two-storey house to welcome us. For a moment, it’s hard to get a word in edgeways, as he reels off details of his father’s worldwide fame. Some 500 articles about him in 40 languages, 300,000 people treated in 40 countries. National Geographic Channel are here today to talk about making a film about him, as is a British woman who already has made a film about him, called The Most Admired Man.
The walls of the front room are adorned with hundreds of visiting cards as well as pictures of Mao, the Queen, Princess Di and Deng Xiaoping. Several of Bruce Chatwin’s books, in plastic wrapping, hang from the ceiling like holy relics. My own visit has caused enormous excitement, for apparently I have been here before, with John Cleese, my fellow Monty Python.
Before I can clear this one up, Dr Ho appears, sidling diffidently into the room. He must be in his mid-seventies, and sports a black, knitted scarf and hat and a white lab coat. His face is that of the classic wise old Chinaman, thin, with a wispy white beard and moustache. His eyes are bright and responsive.
He clutches my hand and says how nice it is to see me again.
I’m aware of other visitors hovering - a French girl, two Japanese and two Australian doctors, who tell me they are here to discuss Dr Ho’s treatment of prostate cancer. Ho Shulong, hearing our conversation, thrusts a sheaf of documents in front of me. They’re from a physician at the Mayo Clinic in America, acknowledging the part that Dr Ho’s herbal treatment played in the recovery of a patient from prostate cancer.
I’m taken through to Dr Ho’s consulting room. It’s modest, like the house itself, and a bit of a mess. The floor is covered with red plastic buckets and there are various preparations open on the shelves.
‘So, old friend, nice to see you again,’ he repeats.
I can’t lie, but I don’t want to spoil whatever game he’s playing.
‘You’re looking well,’ I offer, neutrally.
‘I’m 80 years old and getting stronger,’ he grins.
He sits me down on a lab stool and I tell him of the hard travelling I’ve been doing and the fatigue and all that.
He asks me about my lower back, then asks me to put out my tongue.
He nods.
‘Take care of the food,’ he advises. ‘Eat simple food.’
‘The pork is very good in Yunnan,’ I suggest.
‘I think pork not so good.’
He checks my pulse and nods reassuringly.
‘Good pulse, no high blood pressure. No high cholesterol, no liver fat, no kidney stone, no gall bladder stone.’
I feel like someone who’s just won a scholarship. And Dr Ho isn’t through yet.
‘This morning many French people come. Some have high cholesterol.’
‘Yes?’
‘Fat liver.’
‘Ah.’
‘Diabetes.’
‘Really?’
‘High blood pressure.’
‘It’s all that French food.’
‘But your chi is weak.’
‘Oh.’
‘You know “chi”? It is your energy levels.’
I nod. Here comes the bad news.
‘And your stomach. And you have a Chinese cold, a little Chinese cold. I see it from your lips.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘But be happy, happiness is best medicine you know.’
Happiness alone is clearly not going to be enough for me, and he sets to work preparing some of his herbal remedies. He will make something up for me. I glance at the labels as he measures out the powder. Fennel, Plantain, Wrinkled Giant Hyssop, Indian Madder, Chinese Sage, Nepal Geranium.
The slopes of Jade Dragon Mountain are famous throughout China as the Home of Medicinal Plants, with over 600 species available. Dr Ho takes pride in the fact that all the ingredients he uses are either grown here or collected from the surrounding hills by himself or members of his family. No outsiders involved, and nothing bought from markets.
Clutching my various powders in brown paper cones, I return to the now even more crowded front room to be met by Dr Ho’s son with an open visitors’ book bearing incontrovertible proof that Michael Palin and John Cleese did indeed come here some five years ago. Unfortunately, our names and comments are the work of a man from Woking who clearly thought he was being very funny.
I try to explain the error but Mr Ho Junior is not really interested. He’s now jettisoned the visitors’ book and is showing us out through a small back garden, where seeds are drying in wide, shallow baskets, and onto a wooden verandah where food is being set out. Dr Ho’s wife, a beautiful woman, and a calming presence too, is supervising what turns out to be a wonderful meal, served in dishes that spread over the table and beyond: hyacinth, water-lily, anchovy, baby pig, Yunnan ham, tofu, broccoli and more.
She wears traditional Naxi costume: a blue bonnet and deep blue top with a white apron and a quilted cape tightly secured by two cross-ribbons and on its back a slip of white fur, representing the day, and above it a dark blue cloth representing the night.