A motorbike journey goes behind the scenes of Yunnan’s tourism industry
“Can I get a helmet with this?” I ask the owner in a small courtyard shop in downtown Dali, the picturesque city in China’s southwestern Yunnan province known as a hip backpacker destination. It’s also a gateway for exploring the mountainous borderlands between northern Yunnan and southern Sichuan province, on which I’d agreed to escort a Thailand-based tour operator called Aleks Konge by motorbike, acting as his fixer and interpreter in the summer of 2019.
Potted plants dot the walls of this compound, which is built in the traditional architectural style of the Naxi people in Yunnan. There are also several old motorbikes, including the one that Mr. Konge and I have just taken off the owner’s hands. “Here is one for you,” the owner says, handing me a sky-blue helmet worn by drivers from take-out delivery platform Ele.me. I am not sure what people will make of this on the road, I think to myself, but I put it on anyway.
“You can get this for free,” he says, “just don’t tell anybody where you got this motorbike from.” Secondhand motorcycles are illegal in many parts of the Chinese countryside and obviously this man does not want any of his remaining bikes confiscated.
“And here we are, searching for the perfect route from the magic of Shangri-La, through greater Tibet and over the roof of the world to Chengdu,” Mr. Konge croons, with no-holds-barred drama, as he stares into the black eye of an iPhone camera.
Having operated and planned tours across Asia for over a decade, Mr. Konge, who is originally from Denmark, knows what story to tell Western tourists in order to sell package holidays. He has come to plan a “Tibetan adventure” which he can pitch to travel companies in and outside China, and even though we are technically in Yunnan province, he says that any tour that has the word “Tibet” in it carries a romantic allure that is an easy sell with most Americans and Europeans.
Trips to the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) are notoriously costly, due to the expenses related to special permits and mandatory fees for local guides. Finding a way to undercut this, without undercutting the experience, is good business. And the alpine peaks and prayer flags in the background of Mr. Konge’s video will do just fine as content for his travel company’s social media platforms.
Selling Lost Horizons in Rugged Yunnan Province is a story from our issue, “Public Affairs.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine.
Mads Vesterager Nielsen is a burgeoning explorer who rides his trusty motorbike, nicknamed “The Little Black Yak,” to far-flung corners of the People’s Republic. He is a staunch believer in the spirit of adventure, even in a modern and demystified world. Rather than clinging to old notions of glorious exploration, his background in the social sciences has led him to believe that “authenticity” is a messy mixture of ingredients such as culture, society, history, technology, and mythology as it exists today.
