Let's Go For a Stroll: Sulaxia 苏拉夏

I asked Christina and Alan what they wanted to see here, and at the very top of Alan's list was: the mountains. Getting to a good hiking trail is not as straightforward here as it is in California. Hardly anyone has a private car, the buses don't go anywhere good, and these mountains are truly remote and you can get in real trouble if you don't know your way.

So I exploited the contacts I have painstakingly built up over the past few years here, and organized our own private little expedition. It included: a professional guide and assistant guide, a car and driver to drop us at our starting point and meet us on day three at our exit point, and the security of knowing we were going somewhere good and probably wouldn't get lost and die. All that for about $12.

Unfortunately nobody really told us what we were getting into, but I started getting suspicious about the nature of this hike as my friend Wang Jing's text messages to me continued getting more and more dire. Dress warmly, it'll be cold. Be sure to bring good mats, it'll be cold. Dress really warmly, we'll probably be camping above the snow line the second day. Then: wear pants that can be rolled up and shoes you can change into to wade into water, we'll probably have to cross a lot of rivers.

All of her dire warnings turned out to be understated, and we all hobbled along after our (thankfully) very competent ex-Special Forces guide for three solid days of scrambling across rock faces, hopping from rock to rock by the Sulaxia river, and making extremely harry crossings sometimes by wading in and sometimes by leaping over rapids, pulled and coaxed by our strong, tall, heroic leader Lao Mao. (老猫: means "Old Cat". Old is a marker of respect, not age, and Cat because he says he has nine lives. I believe it.)

It was, in a word, relentless. Our first day started with running across loose rock in the dark, and the second day we hit the really challenging parts which a very small number of us were up to the challenge of facing more or less on our own.


There was no trail, there were no flat bits where you could just raise your head and look at what was around you without possibly falling to your death. We just kept climbing, crawling, jumping, slipping, scrambling, kneeling, and cursing.

It was, in another word, fantastic. Those hikes are the kind I live for: where you're simultaneously regretting your existence and stupidly happy to be there. I rarely meet a trail that can wind me, but I could barely walk my own way out of this. Not everyone fared as well as I did though...one member of our team actually did have to be carried out by our guide. Not from injury, but exhaustion.

Poor Alan had another souvenir from a falling-over incident on the part of another hiker, but luckily we all came out with all parts of our body intact and our five senses as intact as they started out as.