If you’ve visited Kangding, you’ve likely noticed the little necklace of red gondola cars heading up the cliffs that skirt town. If you are somewhat familiar with Sichuan’s exuberant seismic history and Chinese construction norms, you may have concluded no earthly force can compel you to get on said gondolas. I am here to tell you it is worth it, because they bring you to Paoma Mountain.
At the Zhilam Hostel in Kangding, I ran into a young man from Wake Forest, North Carolina, who had recently passed the bar exam and was now knocking around China for the holidays. My father hails from North Carolina, and we happily exchanged cultural pleasantries about the correct way to cook barbecue as we headed for Paoma, and the Dentok Monastery that lies at its top.
Finding the entrance to the cable car was a remarkable pain in the ass, considering that the track itself can be easily seen from just about everywhere in Kangding. We hiked up the hill to the approximate spot where we saw the cable car hitting the bottom of the mountain, made a left, walked past a promising looking parking lot – and found ourselves on the busy highway that runs through Kangding, full of trucks honking at us.
Confused, we escaped into the vertical warren of Kangding’s tenament buildings, the residents staring at us with unveiled amusement. We eventually emerged on the hill exactly where we had started, and hiked up again. This time, we chanced making a left into a beer garden area ringed with international flags. Sure enough, we passed a curiously empty Tibetan museum, and there was the gondola terminus. We paid 40 RMB and boarded, thankful it wasn’t a windy or rainy day.
The entrance to the grounds around Dentok cost an additional 40 RMB, which seemed a bit silly until we realized how large and impressive the mountaintop actually was. We first went inside the monastery, which had impressively elderly stone steps, and two monks reciting sutras inside. Reasonably aged paintings of Buddhist deities lined the walls and the doors.
From the monastery, I walked down a tree-lined path that led to a barred stone Tibetan house. To my left, a path led upwards to a flat, grassy plateau. Frightened looking Chinese tourists bounced around the circular lawn on annoyed-looking Tibetan ponies. Two Chinese girls in traditional costumes begged me to take a photo with them. White statues of Himalayan goddesses looked down upon the scene.
I walked up a series of white steps to take photos of the goddesses, which were framed elegantly by a sea of well-maintained wildflowers. Up there, I met up with my North Carolina countryman again, and we walked down the hill to a little pagoda and water-works area.
SOME NOTES ON PAOMA MOUNTAIN
Gondolas cost 40 yuan, and stop running around 5:30 PM. Be sure to enter at the beer garden, lest you suffer the fate we did, of wandering around aimlessly up and down hills while looking hopeless.
If you remain opposed to the gondola concept, it’s quite possible to walk up the mountain, a likely pleasant uphill track through pine forest and tattered prayer flags. Guidebooks will tell you that a tourist got murdered here in either 2000 or 1998, but Angela from the Khampa Cafe in Tagong scoffed at the idea of being frightened as a result.
“It was 15 years ago!” she told me, when I mentioned it. “Fifteen years! I’ve been walking up there and I haven’t been killed yet.”
Nor have I.
