Filed under: travel | Tags: sichuan, yaks, car sickness, butchery, aba prefecture
There is at least one thing an Australian woman traveling with an electric toothbrush has in common with a Tibetan matriarch who has just carved up a yak – susceptibility to car sickness.
In this part of Sichuan, where the air is thin and the roads just an idea, going just a short distance in a bus with two wrapped slabs of fresh bovine flesh can make anyone green around the gills.
The bus and the rest of its passengers were on official business in the Munigou nature reserve and the Tibetan woman and her family had just finished packaging the yak into portable blocks. The yak had died a kilometer or so inside the reserve among its pristine emerald waters and aquatic wildflowers, which was scenic for the animal but presented some problems for those keen to get at its flesh.
Most of the beast had already been wedged into packs and sent back home on the back of a robust horse and a tipsy two-stroke Honda motorbike when the bus driver offered the woman a trip back into town. She was dressed from head to toe in silver bracelets and dark blue, 1,000-count cotton and was carrying the last two saddle packs of meat.
She accepted but said little else on the trip down except for “Here’s good!” when she got where she needed to go. The bus driver said the woman was probably car sick. He then turned his attention to using a pack of tissues to mop up the rivulets of escaped yak blood running riot over the vehicle’s floor.
Munigou is – or at least was – a fair way from anywhere in a particularly heavily populated province. It’s part of Aba prefecture in Sichuan’s northwest, which is close to the Qinghai border and home to 450,000 ethnic Tibetans.
Tourism authorities insist on calling it a fairyland but this a region where the landscape can kill. On the way to the reserve, the guide pointed to an unremarkable valley where an earthquake in 1933 brought down a mountainside and buried a town of 3,000 people. That place is now a lake.
