Nine days in Tibet
Trip Start
Feb 29, 2004
1
19
33
Trip End
Nov 24, 2004
Lhasa, Tibet,
China
Friday, August 20, 2004
OUT OF KATHMANDU
Occasionally on a long trip like this one, circumstances turn out very well indeed. It can't be a coincidence that the people that fate had thrown together on the five-day jeep trip from Kathmandu to Lhasa were a sort of dream team. Although Tibet itself was not completely the highlight I had expected, the company was more than excellent.
Travellers going into Tibet from Nepal have a problem. The main problem is that Tibet was invaded by the Chinese some time ago, and that they still don't really know how to treat foreigners wishing to have a look. So although it's a 'liberated and integral part of the People's Republic of China' you *still* need seperate visas and all kinds of permits to visit this far-flung corner of the planet. The Chinese themselves seem to treat it as a seperate country. So, coming from Nepal, a Chinese visa is not valid (if you purchased one in advance it even gets cancelled) and you'll need to apply for a special group visa and enter with an official tour guide.
It wouldn't all be so bad if the Chinese didn't change their minds about the rules all the time (and then apply them in all possible ways). The poor travel agents in Kathmandu (already hit by a decrease in tourism due to the Nepalese Maoist revolt) also have to deal with the real Maoists across the border, who two weeks before my Tibet trip suddenly decreed that you can't be an individual on a group visa document - there have to be at least two people on it. So they had to look for someone with a similar travel plan to mine (heading into rump China after visiting Tibet), telling me that it's a routine procedure to 'split off' from the group visa and carry on on seperate routes. Enfin, in the end it all worked out and after my few days in the Kathmandu valley I stocked up on bananas, ready for a trip to the highlight (or skylight?) of the world.
I piled into a bus at 06:00 in a Kathmandu back alley. It was one of the cleanest and most rattle-free ones I've seen in several months. Kathmandu travel agents cooperate by sharing the bus transport to the border, and the jeeps on to Lhasa. The early departure hour was designed to extract more cash from the tourists - by stopping at 08:00 for breakfast, they could charge us a full day of food (instead of leaving at 08:00 with breakfast already down the hatch). Oh well. I sat next to Alex, a tall Dutchman who had just completed a spell of teaching English to young schoolchildren in Baktapur for a few months. The rest of the bus seemed to be full of a group of rather arrogant Italian tourists, who thankfully set off on their own route after the border crossing.
The four-hour ride north to the border was quite spectacular, going through very lush green valleys and over some impressive landslides. Our Nepali guides were great and Alex (speaking the local lingo well) was joking and singing songs with them all the way. Just like the Indians and Chinese, they're not always well-informed on the status of their national sights compared to those abroad: when we passed a suspension bridge across a gorge they claimed it was the deepest bungeejump site in the world at 180m height... but I reckon the gorge was about 100m deep at the most. I just hope the guy measuring the elastic also uses the more conservative estimate.
The weather turned nasty halfway the ride, and by the time we reached the border town of Kodari, a one-road village crammed in a steep valley next to a wild river, it was really bucketing down. While we waited for the guides to do all the passport business on the Nepali side, we had a chuckle at one of the arrogant Italians who had overstayed his visa by two days and had to cough up $50. We had our last Nepali thali dish before heading into noodle-land. My last Nepali rupees were spent on a bottle of Indian Royal Stag whisky, which lasted well into China.
Umbrellas aloft, we crossed the 'Friendship Bridge' to the Chinese border posts. All over the world, communists, after having invaded/bombed/otherwise wrecked a place, love to name bridges, roads, tunnels etc after the new-bred 'Friendship' between their 'Peoples'). At the first little border kiosk, a smiling Chinese official aimed a little pistol-thermometre at everybody (to check for fever and SARS) and with your temperature scribbled on a card (37.5°C, phew) we could get the entry stamp and walk confidently into Tibet, and into the ever-increasing rain.
The Nepali guides put us all into the jeeps, and we drove to Zhangmu, just 8km along the road but 900m up the valley. The Toyota Landcruiser we boarded was already 20 years old, and it really looked the part. It had trouble starting, driving, braking and de-fogging the windows, and my first thought was how we'd ever get to Lhasa over several 5000m+ passes, if it didn't even want to start properly because of a bit of rain at a piddly altitude of 1700m. Fortunately our driver, Tato the Tibetan, was good-humoured and competent, spoke some English ("jeep not happy today") and assured us we'd be allright if I'd just help him clean the fogged-up windows as he drove along the atrociously muddy road to Zhangmu.
INTO TIBET
After setting back our watches 2 hours and 15 minutes (the whole of China is on Beijing time, regardless of when/if the sun actually rises in this huge country) and another passport check, we came to modern, concrete, one-road Zhangmu and checked into the dorm rooms for the first night. After months of rigid Hindu-influenced societies it was delightful to note that Zhangmu's main industry seemed to be prostitution. Brothels were badly disguised as brighlty red-lit bars and 'hairdressers'. My guidebook writes that it's not Chinese occupation itself but rather Chinese morals that have most damaged Tibet and Tibetan culture in the past few decades.
The second day of the trip was a tough one - 12 hours of driving, first through tropical forest, valleys with huge waterfalls, and finally the arid Tibetan mountains where the road went up to 5200m. The irritating Tibetan-Chinese guide who took over from Zhangmu announced a departure time of 06:00... which was 03:45 Nepali time. You can imagine we weren't happy campers the next morning, and the first few hours of driving were pretty quiet as we got used to the idea of sitting crammed in this Japanese tin for the next four days.
But as I said, the company was good: Tato, the driver of the now-happy jeep; Alex, our in-jeep philosopher (singing 'Tato is OK, ole ole!'); Mika, a quiet Japanese girl who quit her receptionist job and went on an adventurous tour of the world; Teresa and David, two fun English teachers from Australia now living near Shanghai; and me. As the days progressed and we got insight in the inhabitants of the other four jeeps in our convoy of foreigners, I realised we were lucky to have each other - others would have to scream at their reluctant and non-understanding drivers to stop for photos. Some jeeps were inhabited by morose French teachers, while some of the others (grown adults, no less) ended up fighting with each other in Lhasa. Tato's jeep kicked ass.
Tibet was much greener,wetter and less vertical than I had imagined it to be. It rained on two of the four days we crossed over to Lhasa, and as a result, flowers and agriculture were doing well. Unfortunately it also meant there were lots of clouds, so we had no view of Mount Everest from the one-yak stopover town of Tingri. The lower valleys (ie under 4000m) are cultivated, there are scruffy-looking villages plonked all over the valleys, and also some impressive ruins of castles perched on hills.
Compared to Ladakh, the chunk of Tibetan plateau in northern India, Tibet is not as vertically dynamic, with high but easy passes and lots of greenery, whereas Ladakh is much rougher and wilder. Ladakhi villages are much prettier - but in western Tibet the people seem much more traditional, the men also always dressed up in local costumes and curious about everything passing on the road.
We visited the huge monastery at Shigatse, home of the Panchen Lama who is the competitor and Chinese candidate for the replacement of the exiled Dalai Lama. Also here differences with Ladakh - the entrance fee of 40 yuan (€4) was more than I paid at all Ladakhi monasteries combined (and this goes to the Chinese state, not to the monastery). Also,in theprayer halls, the atmosphere was touristy rather than devout (you could even keep your shoes on - unheard of in any Buddhist temple I visited previousely). Shigatse is the size of a town and is Tibet's second city. At 3900m, it's probably the highest town in the world, with ditto ATM (although India claims it has the highest ATM, in Sikkim, at 4000m!).
A few hours further southeast lies Gyantse, a town beneath a huge ruined fortress and with a famous monastery complex. This one was my favourite - many pilgrims were here, making visiting it much nicer. Next to the impressive monastery stood a huge stupa with several levels of balconies giving access to dozens of chapels.
The roads in the valley weren't too bad, but often the asphalt would just stop and the jeeps would have to bump their way through a river or kilometres of deep mud. On the higher pastures, we sometimes spotted tents of nomad camps and flocks of huge yaks - animals that can't stand the heat below 4500m in summer, and who seem happiest when it's really shitty weather. From a distance they look like big rocks with a 1970s furry carpet tossed over them. When Tato took a nap during the first day, we walked down (pleasantly dizzy from the high altitude) to a field where a few dozen yaks were grazing. They all had with little prayer flags attached to their backs, so that they sent prayers to heaven while munching grass. From up close they're even cuddlier, but too shy (and too scarily big) to approach.
Once we took a short cut to avoid a blocked road, and drove for an hour over a little-used sandy track going through a large valley full of yellow and blue flowers, and passing an arid sand dune area comparable to the one I camelled through in Ladakh. Beautiful. Apart from meeting the super-friendly Tibetans, the sense of remoteness and isolation in this huge, huge land must be the best thing about Tibet.
LHASA - THE FORBIDDEN CITY
All in all, it's pretty easy to get to Lhasa nowadays. You pay the agency or airline and you travel there with maybe just a few days of problems with adjusting to the altitude. This used to be different, as Tibet, and especially the holy city Lhasa, were completely shut off for foreigners for hundreds of years, most zealousely in the first half of the 20th century. Just reading about the trouble that Heinrich Harrer had to arrive in Lhasa (it took him more than a year, coming from the Spiti valley in India) in his book 'Seven years in Tibet', you realise how priveledged we travellers are now.
Still, after days of quiet villages and a few small towns, Lhasa came as a bit of a shock. It has been thoroughly Chinesed over the past decades. Even before you catch sight of the huge Potala palace, you drive along a four-lane highway between modern highrises and Chinese shops for 15 minutes. The Tibetan part of Lhasa is now well encased in a new Chinese town. (Think what you may about the arrival of the Chinese, they did bring good roads, the airport and good cuisine!).
Thankfully, what remains of Lhasa's old centre (ie what has not been bulldozed by the Chinese up to the 1990s) is beautiful, lively, and inhabited by the most friendly and smily people I've ever met. Called the Barkhor, the old town is a jumble of Tibetan-style courtyard houses that are a delight to get lost among. In the centre stands the Jokhang, Tibetan Buddhism's most important monastery, and dubbed the 'cathedral'. The main prayer hall here contains some of the most sacred Buddha and Buddhist statues around, and hundreds of pilgrims walk around offering butter (for the butter lamps) and banknotes all day. In India, the comfortably low entrance prices to Buddhist monasteries would buy you a scruffy ticket - here the steep 70 yuan fee is rewarded with a ticket that doubles as a credit-card-sized CD-ROM. Oh, Tibet!
As a geographer, I was delighted to note that Lhasa is probably the only city in the world where you can find your way around by simply looking at which way the people are walking - if you see the mass of prayer-wheel-twirling pilgrims walk to the left, the Jokhang monastery is straight ahead! In all Buddhist monasteries and holy places, pilgrims walk clockwise around the rooms, or around the perimeter walls on a 'kora' (round) prayer walk.
In and around the Jokhang there are three busy kora circles; one inside the building around the main hall, where hundreds of prayer wheels are kept in motion by the believers hurrying on their rounds. The next kora is around the complex, snaking between the tourist kiosks and antique shops. The third kora is a six-kilometre walk on the road around the Barkhor area - unfortunately the Chinese bulldozed the old winding lanes and replaced them with a busy four-lane road, so the pilgrims are limited to hurrying along the pavement.
Lhasa was busy with tourists, and the five main budget hotels in the centre were booked full, though Mika and I managed to get dorm beds at the nice Yak hotel (with a Dutch-run restaurant; good apple cake). My days in Lhasa were spent wandering around the old town, discovering new alleys with small temples and prayer wheels every day, and visiting the new town for a taste of China-to-come, and to do practical stuff like booking the 1500 yuan flight to Chengdu (alternative: a gruelling multi-day bus journey) and mailing my winter clothes home.
I rented a bicycle for the day to sightsee, and cycled around the famous Potala palace, which is just outside the centre. It's truly a magnificent building, even more impressive because of the dramatic mountain backdrop. As the official residence of the Dalai Lama, and holding a town (largely demolished by the Chinese to make place for a nice parade square), a temple and many chapels, it's a holy place for Tibetans. And just like the Jokhang, thousands of people were walking clockwise around the complex all day, using prayer wheels and prostrating themselves dozens of times on the pavement in front of the building. I didn't enter - the people from my jeep who went in on the guided tour that was included on the trip said it was a depressing place, with most of the rooms closed (robbed empty, most gold statues carted off to Beijing long ago) and with ridiculously high photography prices. Only the view from the roof was apparently worthwhile.
The last day in Lhasa turned out to be the first day of a week of religious festivals, and with some jeep friends I headed out to Drepung monastery, 8km west of Lhasa, at 06:00 in the morning. Despite the early hour, dozens of private buses were already driving around the Barkhor area picking up people headed for Drepung. We joined thousands of pilgrims and a scattering of tourists for the walk up the dusty road to the monastery, using our hats and the dense crowds to do a little kora around the ticket office and their reactionary stooge ticket-checkers (of course, only tourists were fleeced to pay the 60 yuan entrance).
The flood of people headed up the side of the mountain behind the monastery, where at 08:00 some 50 monks slowly unfurled a huge thanka, similar to that in Ladakh's Phyang monastery. At the top, monks honked long deep blasts on alphorn-type horns. Together with the scramble up the rocks the whole experience was a bit like the scene in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' where the heroes climb over the mountain, hearing the UFO tune. It wasn't a completely enjoyable experience, as most pilgrims insisted on buring juniper twigs along the road, resulting in thick cloads of choking smoke. Juniper may be a holy plant for Buddhists, but us Dutchies have a much better use for it, wisely using the berries for brewing jenever, or gin.
The pilgrims were excited, shouting and praying when the thanka unfurled, and proceeded to throw white scarfs onto it and walking in a kora underneath the raised upper side. The festival went on all day, but we descended through the huge monastery complex, had some momos (Tibetan dumplings, delicious with veg soup) and took a crammed bus back to Lhasa to chill out for the rest of the day.
Mika and I took the surprisingly luxurious bus (seatbelts! AC! DVD! on time!) out to the airport down at 3400m altitude, two hours away along wide valleys. It was interesting to see that the Chinese like Hindi culture - not only are there Hindi film hero posters for sale all over Lhasa, in the bus they put on a DVD with the usual Bollywood lovesongs. It's funny that with my limited Hindi I must have been the only one in the bus who actually understood what the songs were about (not too difficult to guess though: "my heart, your name, your smile, your stupid father" etc etc). Lhasa airport is brand new and outclasses many European airports I've seen for its gleaminess, though I wasn't so happy to pay the obligatory 50 yuan 'airport management and construction fee'. On the way up we got great views of the mountains and some glaciers, but soon we were in the clouds, seeing nothing of what must be one of the best flights in the world.
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Next up: Chengdu, and why pandas are better off extinct.
Currently reading: 'Seven years in Tibet' - Heinrich Harrer. He can't write very well (he even admits this), but the descriptions of his voyage and meetings with the young Dalai Lama in Lhasa are simply amazing.
Stomach status: not so happy at 5200m, this time... sick for the first time on this trip.
Word of the Day: "Tashidelley"; Tibetan for hello/goodbye/thanks.
Sign Of The Day: "TIBIT HOLCHNIE OUBTIRFOAANCMDNOIDMWI" (Lhasa city centre tourist shop sign. Obviousely typed by someone who has considerate difficulties comparing the latin letters with the keys on his keyboard)
