POSTCARD FROM ZHONGDIAN

No, not without a consultancy fee! This is a poor village, you can't just write about us, make money off us and give us nothing...."

The woman stood before me that day in early July, her craggy voice a mixture of outrage and distress. She has been eyeing me suspiciously for some time while I scribbled furiously into a notebook for my summer job as a researcher-writer for the budget travel guide "Let's Go China." She calmed down somewhat with the realization that I was not professionally interested in her personal life, in how she, an Australian, came to become a hostel owner in the Chinese wilderness, apparently a topic of great ongoing interest to the Chinese press.

But the image of her worn body leaning against the steep green drop of the deepest gorge in China's Yunnan province has since remained to haunt me as I prepare to travel to the small town of Degen, less than 50 kilometers from the official Tibetan border.

The citizens on my route through the northern Yunnan region--mountainous, isolated, populated predominantly by Tibetans and other non-Chinese ethnic minorities clinging determinedly to their traditions on their red-brown earth--have been relatively late in embracing tourism. Stretches of the area are closed to foreign travelers. Zhongdian, the town which I am currently exploring, still has a rough-hewn, construction-made frontier feel, and Degen was opened up to foreigners less than a year ago. Through the long days of riding rickety minibuses whose doors are kept shut with screwdrivers, my excitement would rise with the knowledge that I probably wouldn't see another foreigner until I arrived at my special "foreigners-allowed" hotel at night.

I like it that the wood and mud-brick houses of towns have yet to become drab, concrete cities, that the villagers have not traded their packhorses for personal cars, that food is still cooked in hot pots over live, burning coals, that the women still wear their brightly colored headdresses and ethnic dress. Perhaps even the fact that I cannot access the latest international newspapers has been therapeutic for this would-be journalist.

But the rest of China is changing. Domestic tourism is booming as the increasingly prosperous Chinese overflow into Yunnan's parks, ethnic music halls and village markets, gorging themselves on their newly acquired freedom to travel. Tourism, it seems, is one way the wealth of the coastal cities is being transferred to the rural interior, and I hope to help do the same by bringing in foreign currency as I help international travelers enjoy northern Yunnan.

I only wonder, when the paved road from the provincial capital of Kunming reaches all the way to that deep green gorge, bringing busloads of photo-snapping tourists, will that Australian hostel-owner be happy? I hope so.

Nanaho Sawano graduated from Dunster House in June, 1998.