Quotes of the Day

This road, I've been told, leads to paradise. Everyone says my journey to the pristine village of Yubeng in the northwest corner of China's Yunnan province will take my breath away. I'm breathless alright. But for all the wrong reasons. My minivan is careening along a tiny ledge of compressed rubble, gouged out of a steeply pitched ravine, a few hundred meters above a tributary of the Mekong. I'm convinced I'm seconds away from becoming part of one of the small avalanches the van is leaving in its wake.

Will tourism help protect China's natural wonders or destroy the places that visitors are bused in to admire? Northwest Yunnan, which has made its first forays into ecotourism, is a perfect place to find out. Through it run branches of four of Asia's major rivers—the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween and the Irrawaddy. Between their banks soar some of the fastest-growing mountain ranges on earth, which in turn harbor the world's most biologically diverse temperate forests. Since 1998, when a large-scale ban on commercial logging axed 80% of Yunnan's income, its local governments have latched onto tourism as their salvation. But China's standard models for tourism development—the building of big roads, bigger hotels and gaudy karaoke palaces—pose a threat to these natural riches. Conservationists, most prominent among them the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy (TNC), are lobbying to have the area designated as the country's first national park. In order to succeed, they must have the support of the area's 3.1 million residents, many of whom are desperate for the fast, cheap kind of tourism development that is most inimical to conservation.

So far, what I've seen doesn't inspire confidence. When I finally arrive at the end of the road in the picturesque ethnic-Tibetan town of Xidan, where the trail to the isolated Yubeng Valley (and village) starts, I'm expecting tranquillity. Instead, there's a phalanx of bulldozers clawing at the hilly approach to the trailhead. "As you can see, we're opening up to tourism," says Ga Te, a young official from the local tourism bureau. "Soon we'll have a parking lot. For now, though, we'll have to settle for mules."

The winding trail climbs steeply over a foothill of the province's stunning Meili range, through forests of rhododendron and towering hemlock and past open views of the snow-capped peaks that have kept Yubeng in a state of fairy-tale seclusion. By the time we finally crest a prayer flag-festooned summit and drop into the valley below, it's late afternoon. Beneath us are the handful of dwellings that shelter Yubeng's 65 ethnic-Tibetan inhabitants; in the crook of a slim, glacial stream, a white, sagging stupa glows in the low sunlight. The locals feed and water their livestock, while one of the women invites us to dinner cooked over an open hearth before showing us to the small wooden outbuilding reserved for travelers.

Ed Norton, an American lawyer and longtime environmentalist who co-heads TNC in Yunnan, believes the area around Yubeng can sustain both conservation and tourism. He informs me that at Yellowstone, one of the U.S.'s busiest national parks, 90% of some 3 million annual visitors stray no more than 100 meters from the road and most of the tourists stay in the park for less than an hour.

So far Yunnan's most highly trafficked areas have not achieved this balance, but a number of small-scale projects are making worthy efforts. Near Lijiang, TNC-trained locals offer bird-watching tours at the lake they once fished. In Wenhai, TNC helped build an "ecolodge" for hikers, which boasts "biogas" (methane) stoves and solar-heated water.

For the time being local leaders have no plans to pave paradise—even if they are putting up a parking lot. Says Diqing County Chief Pu Luhua: "Yubeng is a tranquil place. And we mean to keep it that way. We know this approach will be more profitable in the long run." But for now, the challenges of doing so take my breath away.

• Susan Jakes
• How will China manage ecotourism?