The next stop after Jiuzhaigou was Songpan, a small Tibetan town in northern Sichuan that’s popular with backpackers as a launching pad for horse treks out into the surrounding mountains and valleys. There’s a distinct sense that this whole region of northern Sichuan has been marked off for tourism, and eventually Songpan will probably also be a part of the tour-bus loop, but for now it’s still small, dusty and laid-back, and quite an interesting place.
Even though horse treks are the thing to do for tourists coming to Songpan, there’s only one trekking agency, which has been around for 20 years – back then they charged 30 rmb per day for treks, and now it’s 200 rmb per day. After our guide had led the horses on a slow walk through the hills to a Tibetan monastery in the next valley, he cooked us a noodle soup and complained about how little of what we paid went to him. A few years ago, there had been a rival agency as well (started by a couple of guides from the original agency), but the two companies fought with each other (bad for harmony) and cut their prices to win over customers (bad for business), so the local government presumably decided things would be simpler with just one trekking agency, and they were forced to merge. Now only the merged company has a license, and is free to charge as much as it wants from customers, and give as little as it wants to the local farmers who raise the horses and act as guides. 80 rmb out of the 200 per person goes to the guide (who is responsible for providing the horses and most of the food), and presumably another chunk goes towards things like taxes, insurance, and fancy dinners, but that should still leave quite a bit for the people at the trekking agency, who spend their days gambling on the second floor and evenings signing up the next round of tourists for treks. Not a bad business model.
We got the story of the trekking agency from Sarah, the owner of one of the two backpacker-oriented restaurants next to the trekking agency. She doesn’t have a monopoly, and clearly has to work hard to compensate. She’s our age, born 1984 to a Tibetan mother and Han Chinese father, and opened the restaurant seven years ago. After leaving school at 16, she moved to Chengdu and worked in the kitchen at Holly’s Hostel, where she learned to cook. She got married to a man from Chengdu when she was 20, and now she has a son who’s five years old and who goes to school in Chengdu, where he lives with her husband’s parents. She told us that she misses him, but her parents-in-law refuse to move to Songpan. When she opened the restaurant, the only words she knew in English were “Come, eat”, but through talking to customers and reading in the evening, she worked herself up to a level where she spoke to us maybe not with perfect grammar but with amazing confidence and fluency. She worried that tourists weren’t coming to Songpan as much as before because they were worried about earthquakes, but it probably has more to do with slow progress on rebuilding the road from Chengdu.
For those who haven’t found a way to get a slice of the tourist economy, there’s construction work and farming. Our guide on the horse trek was a Hui Muslim farmer from near Songpan, and he complained about the burdens of providing for three sons and a daughter. When I told him he was xingfu to have so many children, he replied that sons were’t a blessing at all, they only meant more mouths to feed, and he wished he had only had daughters. He blamed the trekking agency for taking too large of a cut for the treks, and then blamed the size of the Chinese population, which seems to be the catch-all explanation for poverty.
Once the road to Chengdu has been fully repaired, it will become that much harder to escape from the tourist trail — and the people we met in Songpan probably won’t mind.
Saddling up