Songpan Part 2: Our Guides and the Animals

The guides

Our guides secretly giggled (in a very masculine way of course) when they saw that they were going to get 5 girls in the group. I guess they were happy. Anyway we never could pronounce their names so we came up with names for them.

• Be Careful—he got his name because he would always yell, “Be careful” after he would hit our horses and send us flying as our horses would jolt forward. He is 21 and owns 3 female horses. The other guides joked that he has female horses because he can’t get a girlfriend. I didn’t follow the rest of the joke but I think it went much deeper than the surface joke. He still acted much like a boy and his quick smile made me think that he did indeed enjoy his job.
• Beat the Sheep Skin—the first afternoon for about 5 hours he beat this fresh sheep skin. He would only stop to pull the meat off of the skin. We never saw it after the first afternoon under the tent but the name stuck. It was hard to eat dinner that evening as we were all watching him. He was 24 and looked like he definitely had Tibetan in his genes but his face looked mostly Han Chinese. He was kinda shy but he laughed a lot. He was the tag along it seemed. He didn’t have his own horse so he just would jump onto different horses throughout the trip. The other guides respected him and didn’t tease him too much.
• Earring Guy—he was the leader and the most outgoing. Definitely Tibetan or Mongolian, not actually sure. He’d been doing this since he was 19 and so 7 years latter he was very used to the trails. He had 4 years of education behind him and now he is living with his parents while not on the trail to support them. He will probably do this for quite a while to come with little choice/hope of another job. He wore a dangling earring in his left ear that we found out was given to him by his ex-girlfriend, which is where he got his name from. He had two stallions and always rode in front. His limited English consisted of phrases he’d picked up from previous tourists: “I want to kiss you.” “Kick your horse” “Do you want more food?”. But mostly he was just a big tease.
  

The guides didn’t get one ounce of dirt on them. They easily guided the horses and they had a very familiar relationship with the mountains. Being the Muslim minority in China they had little chance at getting other jobs. I don’t think they were very serious about their religion in fact they probably knew very little about it. I was told that they are the descendants of the Mongolian Muslims who came to northern Sichuan a long time ago. I was frustrated that I could barely communicate with them. They were so interesting to me yet we were left to communicate through basic Chinese, English and sign language. Laughter transcends languages so we did a lot of that too! “Safety First” was not their motto. The 3 day excursion was nothing like my outward bound trip a few years ago. The bonding was done over Chinese whiskey and not through the beauty of the mountains. There were no heart-to-heart talks. I kept my thoughts to myself. The physical activity was not meant to be a character building time. It was meant to just get through. We were not forced to come up with the deep meaning to life! But they made it so fun.

Even though they were young and had little to no education... the cold teaches you something. The quietness of the mountains teaches you something. The uniqueness of the animals teaches you something. The strength of the Tibetan people teach you something .

The animals

• We saw goats and sheep around most bends. I have to put them together because I don’t really know the difference. We didn’t get that far in Zoology! Sometimes they were by themselves but most of the time they had one man walking behind them. He watched them with patience as he would guide them along slowly. Rarely would they acknowledge that horses were invading their space. Others we would hear in the distance and they looked like they were just hanging out on the side of a steep mountain as if it was completely normal. And I guess it was but I can’t imagine just hanging out on the side of a steep mountain would be a great way to spend my life. They were truly mountain goat/sheep.
• The yaks were brown and shades of white up on the mountain. They would at least acknowledge us to a certain extent. They would move to the side of the trail to let the horses go by but not without a lot of “encouragement”! They were completely unimpressed with us. It was my turn to stare though. These animals were huge but very non- threatening. They did not seem affected by anything.
• The pigs seemed to all have given birth about 3 weeks previously. All of the little piglets were running around their mother as she would eat the grass and look completely unaffected by her piglets. They were black and humorously UGLY. I tried to think that the little piglets were cute but they just weren’t! I’ve never thought about pigs before and I realized I haven’t missed much.
• There were no bugs!! I should have taken my cue from them… hehehe