"I always thought that someday I would come back to do something here, but the time wasn't ripe. People still wore Mao suits everywhere, food was rationed, and my own relatives looked at me with some suspicion, as an outsider. The decades of ideological labelling in China were finally ending, and healing was just beginning,” recalls Khampa Caravan Chief Yeshi Gyetsa about his first visit to Gyalthang in the early 80’s.
Having grown up and lived in Nepal and India, and later in America, Japan and Switzerland, he was a teenager when Tibetans abroad were finally allowed to visit family and relatives at home. He felt it important to nurture the connection to his hometown throughout and, after that first visit, went to study Chinese at the Central Nationalities Institute in Beijing, then continued with East Asian studies at Middlebury College in the USA.
Describing the Gyalthang of the 80’s as the "logging decade” and the 90’s as the "mushroom decade," he says, "When I first visited my hometown, the only way to get here was by hitching a ride with a logging truck in Kunming. The whole economy revolved around lumber. A decade later I found that almost every other person including my monk relatives were picking mushrooms and building Dali-style houses which are rather unsuitable for the Tibetan climate."
Then the Japanese economy began sliding, and that hurt the export of Tibetan wild mushrooms. When logging was subsequently banned, people started to realize that only taking from nature was not sustainable. “It dawned on people that they needed skills to make a livelihood,” Yeshi says.
He believes that the Tibetan highlands must and can participate in the global economy. “Time doesn’t stand still,” Yeshi says. “We must develop forward-looking indigenous responses to proactively shape the course of things.” He says, “Buddhism teaches us we must embrace change as an opportunity because nothing is permanent.”
With a natural environment so richly endowed and Tibetan culture relatively intact especially in the rural areas, adventure travel presented the best opportunity. “After all, there was an indigenous tradition of travel, adventure and hospitality among the Eastern Tibetans,” he says. “As traders and pilgrims they travelled across the Tibetan plateau and the Indian subcontinent, with room and board guaranteed wherever they went.”
In 1996, Yeshi helped his New York-based entrepreneur brother Kesang Tashi to find a plot near the outskirts of Gyalthang town and Tashi invested in a hotel venture that became the first Sino-American joint venture in the Dechen Prefecture: The Gyalthang Dzong Hotel gradually turned into a major stimulant for tourism in the Kham region, and in 2003, The Banyan Tree group bought into the project with a line to open its first soft adventure tourism project in Asia. At the same time, Yeshi and his wife Yangdol launched Khampa Caravan together with their friends Dakpa Kelden and Lobsang Tenzin.
“Khampa Caravan’s expertise is to provide the visitor with an authentic but rich Tibet experience,” says Yeshi. Groups are accompanied by well-trained multi-lingual Caravan Leaders with interesting personalities and stories to tell. Most have international study and/or work experience, yet remain rooted in their culture and communities. “They are not academics or Buddhist scholars but real life people coming from diverse backgrounds - former nomads or farmers, ex-monks, artists, and herbalists. The breadth of our collective cross-cultural skills makes Khampa Caravan unique and distinct.” The challenge, according to Yeshi, is to deliver the cross-cultural skills and indegenous knowledge along with state-of-the-art service and professionalism.
Yeshi and his team envision Khampa Caravan as an industry leader, at the top of the global niche market for Tibet adventure travel by 2008. But he wants to get there with flair and substance: “Sheer numbers are not a sustainable economic solution to the poverty in the highlands as is widely believed here”, Yeshi points out. “Khampa Caravan prefers 10 tourists who spend 100 USD each over 100 tourists spending 10 USD each,” Yeshi says. “The highlands should not be a mass tourism destination; the ecology is too fragile for that.”
Thus, aside from building sustainability into Khampa Caravan’s business processes, Yeshi and his crew are actively working at the grassroots to win over the community, the authorities and peers to this concept of “responsible tourism.” The next step is to test the water for the creation of a responsible tourism network for the whole eastern section of the Tibetan plateau, with Khampa Caravan taking the initiative.
“Both visitors and visited live in exciting times,” Yeshi says, “Never before could so many people travel to Tibet, and never before were so many Tibetans so exposed to the world. Curiosity and creativity are emerging in the highlands, as a result,” Yeshi says, describing the times as important for the “reinvention” and further development of Tibetan culture. He believes people have an immense yearning for intellectual exchange, for economic development and for decent jobs.
“It’s wonderful to be a part of all this and to carve a path for us that is distinctly personal and at the same time innovative."
