Cha Huilan, a mother of two living in a Chinese mountain village cut off by a raging river, dangles from a harness hooked to a zip line every time she crosses its violent rapids and jagged rocks on frequent trips to buy medicine for her mother.
Using a boat is out of the question for the villagers of Lazimi, which lacks proper roads and bridges because the rocks and foaming waters of the Nu River, whose name means “angry” in Chinese, make it just too dangerous to risk.
“If they built a bridge, that would be nice, but for now we can’t get over there,” said Cha, who has come to see the zip line as just another inconvenience, even if her two-year-old has to cling to her for dear life on every visit to a Saturday market.
Photo: Reuters
Most villagers, who are members of the Lisu ethnic group and are deeply religious, also zip-line across every Sunday for Mass at nearby churches. The nearest bridge over the river is 20km away from the village.
The villagers have applied their own ingenuity in building the zip lines, which are inclined downhill and rely mostly on gravity, to cross the Nu, which snakes from Tibet along China’s border with Myanmar through southwestern Yunnan Province.
People estimate about 20 to 30 hamlets in the region still rely on the zip lines as their primary means across the river, although the lines are not always reliable, since they become slippery when it rains and too dangerous to use.
Several zip line villages remaining in Fugong County, an eight-hour drive from Lazimi, are swiftly being connected to the outside world with bridges built by road construction projects.
“Right now, conditions are a bit better and they’re building bridges, so these zip lines are being torn down,” said Yun Zeqing, an engineer who has for decades maintained a zip line in one of the Fugong villages. “Here we have no bridge, so we get across with the zip line.”
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