May 8, 2019
Yartsa Gunbu to you too
Yartsa Gunbu
08/05/2019
I had a pleasant undisturbed night’s sleep at the Dan Dan Hotel, which goes to show that appearances can be deceiving. I sherpad my bike and gear up the two flights of stairs to the lobby and it was only a short walk to what turned out to be the morning bus to Bingzhongluo. The bike went up onto the roof rack again, lashed down with one of my panniers for shock absorption against the bumpy ride.
Then we waited. Waited until we reached what the driver felt was the critical mass of passengers had assembled. We all loaded up and we were off…. Off for a couple of laps around town looking for more passengers and parcels to deliver along the route. It was approaching 0900 by the time we finally started up the Nujiang valley for the final 40 km to Bingzhongluo.
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Apart from a couple of sections that were still being worked on, the road was in fairly good repair and I’m seriously considering at least riding back to Gongshan. Those bits they are still working on were on the most dramatically unforgiving terrain, steep walled rockfaces where they were still battling to chisel out the road from the cliff walls or securing steel cable netting to the unstable rock face above to try to keep it from shedding rocks onto the road below.
My fellow passengers were a colourful lot and we kept dropping off and picking up more of the local indigenous population as we moved up the valley. The guy sitting directly behind me looked a bit simple minded, but he was garrulously engaging with the driver and fellow passengers, myself incuded, no common language didn’t slow him down one bit. At one point he tapped me on the shoulder, leaned forward and opend at tidy small cloth bag to reveal a small collection of Yartsa Gunbu, about 300 grams worth.
Yartsa Gunbu is a small caterpillar grub that has been infected by a parasitic fungus. The fungus eats the worm from the inside out, eventually killing it and sending out a sporing body from the head of the grub. Every year serious money can be made by local villagers who comb the steep hillsides on hands and knees looking for the dried mushroom stalk attached to the grub’s head that protrudes a few centimetres out of the ground. The grub is valued for its aphrodisiac properties, the Viagra of the Himalayas. How valued, you ask? Well, I’ve read it can sell for over $50,000 a pound. So, that is about double the current price of gold. And that was probably more than $25,000 worth of Yartsa Gunbu I was looking at in that bag. It's now considered an endangered species, yet is the main cash income in Himalayan villages above 3,500 metres where it is found. Territorial disputes are common, deaths not unheard of.
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This is suppose to be a designated UN world heritage area and at one point just outside of town there was a sign so stating and a small toll booth where they extracted a 100 yuan (about $20 usd) fee from foreign tourists. The sign and the toll are currently missing. I think I’m the only westerner in town this week and it's probably not worth posting a sentry. I guess they will reinstate the toll again when the road is finished and the tourists return.
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I’m staying at Aluo’s Guesthouse/hostel. And today, it is raining.
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