Dispatch from China: The time I got drunk off tiger wine (part 1 of 2)

by Jerry Guo on

On a nondescript street near downtown Harbin, the Double Mountain Local Products Wholesale Center offers the usual array of kitsch items stripped from the wilderness: deer antlers, pelts and dried starfish. A request for tiger wine, a traditional brew of corpse-steeped cheap liquor with dozens of reputed medical benefits, raises a stern eyebrow from an employee who informs me that as such concoctions are illegal, they are not available at the store.

But at the mention of American money, a store manager intervenes – $100 would buy two bottles, and true to the employee’s words they are not at the store; they will be delivered via courier. Doubts about the brew’s authenticity are shooed away.

The manager is certain the bottles are the genuine article because, she says, “they came from over at that tiger park”. She is referring to the Hengdaohezi Feline Breeding Center on the outskirts of the city. By most accounts, that tiger farm is an enviable success. Started in 1986 with 8 Siberian tigers, it is now home to 800 of the big cats. Compare that with the estimated 150 Siberian tigers in US zoos. The largest tiger-breeding facility in the world, Hengdaohezi – like its cousin down south at the Wolong Panda Reserve – has learned the art of churning out cubs, 100 this year alone.
And whether or not she is speaking the truth, the manager is highlighting a looming international stand-off between conservationists and the Chinese government.

China banned domestic trade of tiger parts in 1993, but that did not arrest the desire for their use in wine or traditional Chinese medicine. A black market fills the demand and goods can often be traced back to breeding centres. In August 2006, a tiger farm in Guangxi province was caught with 400 vats of wine, each stewing a whole tiger carcass. This past June at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) conference in The Hague, the Netherlands, wildlife officials used DNA evidence to accuse the same farm of serving tiger meat.

In a walk-in fridge at Hengdaohezi – off-limits to tourists and journalists – 200 frozen tiger carcasses lie scattered, waiting to be turned into tiger wine and medicine, according to a breeding consultant for the park at neighbouring Northeast Forestry University. Whether Hengdaohezi benefits tiger conservation is questionable, but one thing is certain – if the government lifts the ban on the tiger trade, places such as Hengdaohezi will profit.

Liu Dan, the park’s chief scientist, didn’t see a problem when I paid him a visit. “We can use dead tigers to save live tigers,” he explains, promising to use profits for the centre’s genetic and reintroduction projects.

With its baffling breeding techniques and plans to open a market in tiger parts, Hengdaohezi hardly seems the safest place for Siberian tigers, but how they would fare in the wild is even more uncertain. So perhaps it is fortunate that the reintroduction campaign is mainly hype for now. Although media reports mention plans to release 600 of the captive tigers (apparently hoping to coincide it with the Beijing Olympics), the center has not yet separated any group for eventual reintroduction, selected any potential release sites, or built specialist training enclosures.

As Liu Dan broods over his nursing mothers, he defends the conservation work of the center, posing the rhetorical question that if they weren’t keeping the tigers around for a greater purpose, wouldn’t they be just another tiger farm? “From breeding to reintroduction is a long process,” Liu Dan says. “The program isn’t mature yet.”

A decision on the tiger trade ban can come at any time, according to Chinese government officials. As of 2006, all tigers have been required to wear a microchip, and some authorities say such tracking abilities combined with a certification process – a system that met with success with China’s ivory, crocodile and ginseng trade – could lead to a win–win situation for everybody. But lifting the ban may be illegal. US wildlife enforcement officers say China would be flaunting an existing international ban on tiger parts – and noncompliance could lead to sanctions.

For now though, the world waits for China’s next move.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment, in which I visit the evil breeding facility and play Dance Dance Revolution with a Siberian tiger.

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Dispatch from China: The time I befriended a fossil smuggler

by Jerry Guo on

The Imperial-styled strip mall may look like a relic of the past, with its clay tiles, ornate sidings and those Chinese New Year red lanterns, but like much in China, it’s spanking new. Yet relics of the past are good business here. In one of the mall’s countless stores, apron-clad Zhang Lijie is chipping away the rock around a 120 million-year-old fish fossil that she plans to sell for $3. Zhang, 38, went from selling vegetables a decade ago to hawking fossils on a street corners. Now, she owns her own store, The Treasure Mansion, which stocks the fossilized remains of ancient fish, trees, plants and insects – but no dinosaurs, which are officially illegal.

“Business is OK,” she says with a blush of modesty, after reluctantly admitting she earns 10 times what she did as a farmer, and now lives comfortably in an airy loft above the shop.
Here in Chaoyang, an impoverished northeastern Chinese city surrounded by cornfields where farmers still use horse-drawn plows, prehistoric bones have jump-started the economy in a way no free-trade zone or joint venture could have done. The region shot to fame in the mid-1990s when paleontologists began discovering feathered dinosaurs and other well-preserved fossils. They eventually logged at least 500 new species in the area. Good news for scientists, but even better news for an entire generation of farmers, dealers, shop owners, and even local officials who profit from a flourishing underground trade in priceless fossils.

Most fossils find their way to Ancient Street, the pedestrian boulevard that, despite its name, opened only last year, boasting over 60 stores that make it by far the biggest commercial fossil market in the world. There’s a noticeable hierarchy here, with the newly minted dealers competing with each other, as well as peddlers of gaudy flowers and pirated books, out on the street. More established dealers set up booths in a crowded three-story building. Only the shrewdest, like Zhang, can afford the stand-alone storefronts.

Trade can be slow, and a gaggle of bored shopkeepers sit around a table sipping tea as a couple of college-aged students browse for gifts for their professors. Most customers buy fossils for others, as gifts or bribes. After an initial rush, shopkeepers say, demand has leveled out, although their stores remain open. “It’s normal to go a month or two without a sale, because there are so many other shops,” says one dealer. But she didn’t seem worried, explaining that selling just the occasional $300 petrified tree stump or $600 marine lizard will keep her business afloat.

Ancient Street is for the casual fossil buyer, of course; Chinese moguls and Western collectors head instead for dealers like Wang Facai (literally meaning “fortune”), whose store called Rare Stones, carries no precious jewels, just some dusty Ming vases (likely fakes) and cheap fish fossils scattered on the shelves. The bulky Wang, in a muscle T-shirt, glances around before beckoning me into one of two back rooms. From a secret closet behind a mirror, he pulls out a slab of rock which contains the profile of a half bird, half dinosaur, Confuciusornis sanctus, whose discovery in 1994 helped scientists develop the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

“Everyone wants this bird,” he says, trying to convince me the $8,500 sticker price is a steal. Wang also shows me pictures of a $1,500 dog-sized dino (uncanny resemblance to the pet dino in The Flintsones) and a $25,000 unidentified feathered dinosaur.

Although sales of dinosaurs are strictly illegal, local officials tend to look the other way. “The middlemen and authorities are in bed together,” says a retired reporter for the Chaoyang Daily, who has investigated the local fossil trade for the past decade. “The officials receive money, and even fossils, so they ignore the situation.”

As fossil collecting becomes the next big thing for China’s nouveaux riches and even Hollywood leading men – Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage reportedly recently got into a bidding war over the remains of a $276,000 Asian T-rex – the paleontological paradise of Chaoyang is under threat. Farmers and dealers are hard at work disturbing potentially valuable sites in the race to find specimens to sell. In a cornfield outside of town, farmers have sliced open an entire hill. Layers of earth, each covering deposits millions of years old, protrude naked, leaving only broken slabs of rock. Along the road back into town, farmers ride bicycles with shovels lashed to their backs, returning home after a hard day’s treasure-hunting.

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Dispatch from somewhere in Indonesia: A secret school for orangutans

by Jerry Guo on

I’m struggling to make friends here. Miriam, a 9-month-old orangutan orphan who’s learning how to climb a tree, almost scales past her trainer when I approach. For good measure, she starts to cry. Another orangutan signals displeasure by emulating the sound of a Harley barreling toward me. In fact, the only one who tolerates me is 11-year-old Leuser, and not because the 42 air-rifle pellets lodged in his body have mellowed him. He’s also blind.

At any zoo, these surly apes would bomb the aw-isn’t-he-cute exam, but here at the world’s most successful school for rescued orangutans, they’re taught to get back in touch with their wild side. Even playtime is serious business. Passing, say, the test of recognizing a friend (another orangutan) versus a foe (a human logger) could spell life or death for these critically endangered icons of the old world jungle.

Everything happens here with one goal in mind: graduation day, when the shaggy students are set loose into the harsh Sumatran rain forest. But for the students to have a shot at survival, handlers must teach them to avoid humans at all costs, a tough task considering they need to be fed by humans.

And teaching them about the dangers of Homo sapiens means no lines of gawky tourists dangling bananas and posing for pictures. That’s why this center at the far north of Sumatra – one of the main islands of Indonesia – is closed to the public and barely known to outsiders. Even if you made it to the nearby village – where the specialty dish is fruit-bat soup and the humid air is clouded with mosquitoes – this part of Sumatra is definitely not for the faint of heart.

Palm trees line the one-lane road to this village, and in the distance, various plantations – chocolate, banana, papaya – dot the endless green of the hills.

The locals don’t seem to understand why the special training and care given at this school. For instance, keepers will offer the apes a hollowed-out block of wood with honey inside to play with, rather than just chicken and rice, the customary diet of pet orangutans. Turns out, it’s a useful skill for wild orangutans to learn how to scrape honey out of a tree hole.

Another trick to keep the students sharp is to tie up rice sacks with the food inside (they like any sweet fruit). The dim ones will rip the bag open, but the smart ones? They will untie the bag.

But you could say those are elective classes. Most of the orangutans come here either completely spoiled by their former owners – almost all military officers who keep them as illegal pets – or with injuries from clashes with farmers and illegal loggers. The injured receive medical attention, and former pets are quarantined for a few weeks and then transferred into a sprawling system of socialization cages. For the young ones, it may be the first time they’ve seen another of their kind.

During the socialization stage, the residents make friends – and sometimes enemies. Two 30-pound toddlers, Kevin and Irwin, are rolling around some blue oil drums when they decide to fight (it looks more like tickling). Just as quickly, they become bored and begin swinging from ropes attached to the ceiling of their metal cage. The playground bully, Prince, who’s bigger by at least 25 pounds, glares at them, ready to steal their milk when the handlers bring the twice-daily bowls.

Though wild orangutans are usually solitary animals, a landmark 2003 Duke University study revealed that they have culture, the only primates besides chimps with this human characteristic. Even more surprising, they’ve been observed using all sorts of tools to dig for termites, scrounge for honey, and get at the seeds inside the razor-sharp neesia fruit – knowledge passed from ape to ape. After all, it’s unlikely a whole troupe of orangutans simultaneously realized leaves could double as gloves or umbrellas.

If all goes well, the students will soon leave this garden paradise – with its freshwater springs, wood gazebos, and hanging orchids – for the tiger-infested rain forest of Jambi Province. It’ll be a 36-hour drive down the spine of Sumatra to a place even more hidden away.

There, they must pass their final test. Handlers will bring them into the jungle each day and teach them everything else they need to survive: what fruits to eat and where to find them, how to eat ants and build nests, and perhaps how to use a tool or two. The wilder ones may graduate in a couple weeks. Tamer ones could take months or years. And the tamest ones? Well, like human students, they don’t want to get out of bed until noon and will expect food to be handed to them on a plate (and don’t even ask them to build a nest anywhere off the ground).

Regardless of their survival know-how, these orangutans face poor odds. Only 6,500 remain in Sumatra and 50,000 in Borneo, down by half from two decades ago.

Indeed it takes stellar teaching to assure an orangutan takes to the wild. More than 90 orangutans have been released since 2003, when the reintroduction began. And it’s not goodbye after graduation. Field observation of the animals suggests the survival rate may be as high as 80 percent.

As it stands, wild orangutans need all the help they can get. At current rates of growth, illegal logging, mining, and oil palm plantations, could destroy 98 percent of the orangutan’s habitat by 2022, a UN report warned last year. Many conservationists predict the extinction of the orangutan within a decade or two.

Olympic torch on top of Mount Everest. Yes, burning.

by Iva Skoch on

Politics aside, this is actually pretty spectacular. Chinese mountaineering team, including a woman from Tibet, took the Olympic flame to the top of the world today, AP reports.

The team used torches designed by rocket scientists to take the flame to the peak of Mount Everest. Fueled by propane, the flame burned brightly in the frigid, windy, oxygen-thin Himalayan air thanks to technology that keeps rocket motors burning in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The flame was carried most of the way in a special metal canister. As the team neared the summit, they used a wand to pass the flame to the torch.

Wow. All this effort just to say “we did it.”

The Mount Everest climbers were struggling for breath in a live television broadcast as five torchbearers each shuffled a few feet before passing on the flame to the next person. The final torchbearer, a Tibetan woman named Cering Wangmo, stood silently on the peak with her torch while other team members unfurled small Chinese and Olympic flags. They then clustered together, cheering “We made it,” and “Beijing welcomes you.”

One would almost think that China and Tibet are best friends. Almost.

Travel and racism: What’s love got to do with it?

by Jamie Rhein on

I posted a story about an on-line test developed by the University of Chicago to help people learn about their tendencies to think a wallet or a cell phone may be a gun depending on the color of the person’s skin. Two commenters wondered what the study has to do with travel. I think most things have to do with travel, but I majored in sociology as an undergraduate, so I see connections in EVERYTHING. Name two subjects and I’ll find the connecting dots somewhere.

Since my post, Iva wrote a post about gun related deaths in Chicago during one weekend, and the people she knows who wants to see bad neighborhoods. This is not that different, I don’t think, than people who drive through Appalachia looking to see if people have teeth.

When I learned about the study about racism and guns, I flashed to ideas about safety and travel. Perhaps, I was thinking, people’s ideas about safety have something to do with where they choose to go on vacation, and perhaps, if they travel at all. There are plenty of reasons why people choose vacation spots, but there are reasons why people don’t pick certain destinations as well. I don’t think racism is it, but a sense of security and the predictable is.

There’s a reason why Disneyland and Disney World get a crowd. Part of it has something to do with feeling safe, I would guess. The Magic Kingdom has a far-reaching comfort zone. When our daughter was five-years -old, we lost her in Disneyland for a few minutes because my husband thought she was holding my hand, and I thought she was holding his. We were busy arguing about something, thus distracted. Our daughter had stopped to look at something and we had kept going. We freaked a bit, running pell mell, retracing our steps, but I didn’t think something bad would have happened. Disneyland is about as controlled an environment as one can get.

New York City, also a popular tourist destination, isn’t controlled, and perhaps, because of this, people may feel more on edge, particularly on a first time visit.

The first time I went to New York City without adults, I was with a high school friend. We went for a day walking a tidy path from Times Square to Grand Central Station, down 5th Avenue to Rockefeller Center and back to Times Square. There wasn’t any risk of getting lost. Never mind that as a 4th grader, I had ridden my bike all over State College, Pennsylvania when I lived there. On my next trip to New York, also in high school, I did strike out on a subway for more of the unknown. Years later, I feel perfectly safe in the city, even when walking to my brother’s apartment at night by myself.

People have ideas of danger that are on a subconscious level. When a friend and I traveled across the United States by bus (yes, it can be done) after we got out of the Peace Corps, we spent a few nights hanging out at bus stations in the middle of the night the further west we got. For some reason buses don’t seem to leave any earlier than 1 a.m. or arrive any later than 5 a.m. once you get past St. Louis. At least that’s what we found when we were traveling.

While we were waing for a city bus in Denver to take us to the bus station, after we went to a movie blocks away from the theater we asked a woman about the safety around the bus station that time of night. She gave us a police whistle she had around her neck. In Salt Lake City, one couple, who knew that we were heading to the bus station late at night, decided they would take us there when we stopped to ask them for directions. As far as I could tell, we were as safe at the bus stations as we would have been at Disneyland, but there are impressions people have of bus stations at night.

I’ve lived several years outside of the United States and have talked to many, many, many people who think that cities in the United States are not safe because of all the guns. At times it has seemed like people think that as soon as you step off the airplane at JFK or La Guardia, you’d better duck and cover. (That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but people, mostly taxi drivers in Singapore, have said that they worry.) Whenever people mention a thought of the United States not being safe, I tell them that it is safe. Really.

My thought is that people who travel extensively may see the world as a much safer place just because their exposure to diversity is that much higher. The unknown becomes less threatening because the unknown is smaller. This is my hunch based on conversations I’ve had with people who don’t travel much. I’m not saying that those who travel are better people, but their experiences may give them a broader knowledge of humanity.

To mr, the study by the University of Chicago is not a definitive account on racist attitudes, but one that is looking for an explanation about an aspect of human behavior. Just like it is surprising to think of Robert Quest, the CNN reporter getting caught in Central Park with a small bag of meth in his pocket, we have notions of who we think might be more likely to be holding a gun. As I said in my post, I never think anyone is holding a gun. I actually don’t know anyone who has a gun besides two people–one of them a hunter. There may be others who think everyone is holding a gun.

I do think that which type of person travels, and where people go, has something to do with safety. Whether people think an object that is pulled out of a pocket late at night is a gun, a wallet or a cell phone probably has more to do with where someone is and the circumstances. Where someone is may have something to do with where the person feels safe. That’s my opinion, anyway. I can’t help it. I majored in Sociology.

Oh, and what does love got to do with it? The line from the song, “What’s Love Got To Do with It?” played in my head for some reason when I was thinking of a title for the post. It stuck. It’s a line from the Tina Turner song. The next line line from the song is “What’s love but a second hand emotion?” I don’t think this has anything to do with travel, but it’s catchy.