It is as I remembered: really wet. Our 777 arrived in Hong Kong, a bit wobbly from an approaching typhoon, and I was jostled from a shallow sleep repeatedly during the night by a lashing storm the likes I had never before witnessed. By morning, “Canceled” and “Delayed”, in green and red, sparkled on the departure screens like a morbid holiday greeting card. One must never take bad weather personally.
All things said, I was fortunate to arrive in Chengdu relatively early; Ozzie and Scott were Shanghai’d by the same storm and had a harder slog of it . Over a quiet - make that desolate - dinner at my hotel, my taste buds and digestive tract were reunited with Zanthoxylum piperitum - so called Sichuan Pepper - while I stared through a window spattered with succulent drops of rain.
Off we were the following morning, after the niggling details of dollar bills exchanged and the tiresome inspection by a bevy of bankers. Our route was, until the end, precisely that of my last trip to Sichuan in 2006 while shooting The Last Flower for Nova. Across the immense, gray, industrially battered Chengdu Plain to the immense rift of mountains and valleys before the rise of vast Tibetan Plateau. Our destination was LaBaHe Nature Reserve, recently created and surprisingly intact.
There was enough daylight and energy upon our arrival for a bit of roadside botanizing with sufficient enough interfacing with both familiar and unknown plant species to prime our anticipation for the first hike the following morning. The rain carried on heavily through the night but the sound of which was masked by a seething river directly outside the windows of our bedrooms.
Gary, our Chinese guide who speaks impeccable English, drove us to the selected trailhead yesterday morning and gave us a rough description of how we were to proceed. Roughly translated, he said, “be careful as I do not have a clue where this trail goes.” As it turned out in the end, what we followed for seven hours, from 2007m to 2300m were game tracks made by a healthy population of wild deer and an ungulate that appears to be a cross between a mountain goat and a wildebeest. Ankle deep mud, thickets of bamboo, and a fiercely armed rose thwarted our forward advance. During our retreat, covered in mud, lacerations on our limbs and noggins and shortly after Scott had found a sizable leech attached to the back of my neck, Ozzie wondered aloud precisely what had possessed us to continue.
Collecting and exploring is a remarkable metaphor to living. It is what might be beyond the next seemingly impassible copse of vegetation or sludge that keeps us insistent on moving ahead. Had we turned back, we would have bypassed one of the most remarkable days of botanizing in my life. As before the day would end, I would stand amidst centuries old Cercidphyllum and groves of the fabled Dove Tree, Davidia involucrata. Tonight I am nursing a tiredness I have not felt for many years, and too many leech bites on my ankles, hands and back to count, but I am more satiated from a day in the field than I have been in many years.
Mountain scenery in western Sichuan Province (with Acanthopanax
evodiaeifolia on left)
Ozzie Johnson with Davidia involucrata, LaBaHe Reserve, Sichuan Province
Viburnum Betulifolium, LaBaHe Reserve, Sichuan Province
Beesia deltophylla, LaBaHe Reserve, Sichuan Province
Helwingia japonica, LaBaHe Reserve, Sichuan Province
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