Challenge 4: FAILED!
Challenge 4: Catch a Fish.
We thought China’s biggest salt water lake, Qinghai Hu, would be the perfect place to catch a fish. Located 3,200m above sea-level on the Tibetan plateau, it’s home to an abundance of fish. Surely this would be our easiest challenge yet…Well, the only problem was, once we arrived we discovered that anyone found fishing in the lake faced 7 years imprisonment. Even more strangely, it seemed that no-one was even supposed to talk about fish. The local restaurant owners immediately put a finger to their lips and shooshed anyone who so much as asked if they sold them.Clearly something fishy was going on and we needed to find out what.We had dinner with a local Tibetan man who wouldn't give us his name but insisted that we just call him "Shushu" (Uncle) in a small town beside the lake, a place known only as “One Five One”. He told us that the government has imposed a strict ban on fishing to protect the nearly extinct population of “yellow fish”. People still risk catching them during the night and there’s a clandestine place for restaurant owners to buy the fish and sell them secretly to tourists for high prices, but for anyone caught, the punishments are severe.So we didn’t catch a fish and we didn’t even try. And in case you’re wondering, we didn’t even eat it for dinner. Instead we enjoyed a plate of yak meat with potatoes.
