Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Life and Death on the Gorge

The blog In the Footsteps of Joseph Rock has a terrific tribute to Margo Carter, an eccentric Australian woman who ran a guesthouse near the beginning of Yunnan's Tiger Leaping Gorge trail. Carter died recently, likely from exposure while hiking. Sadly, her demise followed reports of bizarre behavior:

I got much of my information from a website set up by a Yunnan-based British trekking guide called Richard Scotford, who used to run a trekkers lodge in Deqin. In an article Death on The Kora, Richard describes a strange encounter he had with Margo while he was leading a group of trekkers over the Doker-La pass on the first leg of the Kawa Karpo kora in October 2009.

His group were surprised - to say the least - to be passed by a lone western woman traveling at speed (alone, that is, except for her dog and a local guide with a horse, left trailing well to the rear) and they noted that she was only lightly clad for the trail. Not only that, but they were taken aback by how rude she was to the trekking group, refusing to talk with them at all during their brief encounter on the trail.
Things got stranger later in the day when they saw her again and she chose to camp alongside them, but again was uncommunicative. That was until she started saying that she would 'turn them in' to the local authorities and warning them that they would be turned back at local police checkpoints further up the Salween (Nujiang) valley and the local Tibetans would shun them. The group were un-nerved by her unfriendly and bizarre behaviour (she would only talk to them in Chinese at one point) and her apparent threats.
Margo left early the next day and they never saw her again. In fact, they were some of the last people to see her alive. Richard is an experienced trekker in the region and he thought the claims that Margo made to them about the authorities were implausible and hard to believe. He was proved right. There were no roadblocks, and after some cautious checking, his group continued on uneventfully into the Salween valley, where the local Tibetans were friendly and helpful, and soon the trekkers had put the memory of this odd encounter with the 'mad' western woman out of their minds.
However, a few days later when they came to do the strenuous return leg of their kora, back over the high passes to the Mekong valley in the east, they got a shock. After the exhausting climb up to the exposed Shu-La pass, they descended on the eastern side to find Margo's guide waiting at the first small settlement high up on the mountain. He was frantic and said he had not seen Margo for two days. She had gone missing at some point after leaving the guide behind when she hurried along in front to attempt the pass by herself

I actually met Margo once, when hiking the gorge in 2006. From what I remember she was small and wiry and talked a mile a minute; she struck me as the kind of person who was always doing a million things at once.

I found her helpful, though- she provided useful recommendations for how much to bring, for what to eat, and other details inexperienced hikers like me were bound to get wrong. She also recommended a guesthouse in Lijiang which proved to be a nice place to stay.

I imagine it takes a dash of eccentricity for a Westerner to want to live in a place as remote as the Gorge, and certainly spending 15 years there would be challenging from a mental health perspective.

The list of foreigners drawn to Yunnan's stunning landscape is long and peppered with eccentrics like Margo, someone whom I'm sure never intended to settle here but did anyway. That her last days were characterized by bizarre and unpleasant behavior are merely a sad coda on what was apparently an interesting, full life South of the Clouds.

(link via Danwei)