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the road to nowhere
Entry 12 of 20 | show all | print this entry |
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for those of you thinking that a trip to tibet might be nice, as i did, a suggestion: do more research than i did before coming here. i bought a tibet guide but scarcely read it before the train journey to lhasa. and even then, seeing as the guide is three years old and the intricacies of travel in tibet change with the wind, i should have read more first hand accounts of moving around tibet outside of lhasa. because lhasa is easy, entering tibet via lhasa is easy, seeing sights in lhasa's periphery is easy...leaving lhasa is fucking hard. well, as with most things, money makes everything go much smoother. i've discovered, too late, that the only reliable way to get around tibet, both physically and bureaucratically is to hire a jeep. toyota land cruisers seem to be the truck of choice. land cruiser tour groups include all the requisite permits. of course, a 3-5 day tour in a land cruiser costs 6000-8000 yuan. unless the truck is full it's prohibitively expensive as the cost is usually divided by the number of passengers and generally a land cruiser can only fit four people + bags. so a full land cruiser tour to the nepali border will still cost about 250 dollars, not including accommodation and food along the way. that's a massive amount for china. considering the difficulties in not booking a tour, the amount could probably be justified...but i didn't budget for it and can't really afford it (here's where the lack of research rises up to bite me in the ass). posted in hostels, hotels, and travel agents around lhasa are a multitude of hand written notices, people looking for others to join them in a tour to make hiring the land cruiser as affordable as possible. it's a frustrating way to organize travel as the posters are often for a specific time period, a specific route, or often just old and no longer relevant. there are generally a lot of people trying to hook up with land cruiser tours, but finding a group of people that meshes well with your own plans is often a matter of luck.
tam and i gave up on our first attempt to leave lhasa...we wanted to go to nam tso lake, a holy lake a few hours drive from (and 1 km higher than) lhasa. the huge rise in elevation can be dangerous, but we had been in lhasa for four days and felt pretty good about the altitude. we were further buoyed by how easily we managed the potala palace stairs (of which there are a lot) on our fourth day. at first we thought that the only way to get to the lake was a jeep tour as well (1500 yuan for two days) but we discovered that there are minibuses that make the trip for 120 + 80 entrance fee. accommodation at the lake is basic and rugged, but cheap. it sounded perfect until we met a couple of people in our hostel who had made the four hour journey to the lake only to be turned back. no permit is necessary for nam tso, but the gate attendants claimed that bad weather was forcing the closure of the lake area. we heard rumours that the lake would reopen in a couple of days. when we inquired at a travel agent that had been recommended to us about booking a two day trip to nam tso we were told that they didn't know when the lake would reopen and they had no further interest in talking to us. we decided to give up on the lake and focus on getting to the nepali border, trying to see whatever seemed most interesting on the way. we decided to go to shigatse as we had information that we could get a bus there without a permit. shigatse is the second largest city in tibet, and the only other city outside of lhasa that tourists are allowed to enter with relative ease. the information we had about the bus (buses in general, really) was pretty sketchy. supposedly there were public buses for shigatse that leave from the main bus station, as well as private minibuses that troll the main drag of the tibetan quarter looking for people to pick up. the problem with buses is that the chinese government doesn't want foreign tourists using them so often it's impossible to buy tickets from a bus station because the ticket sellers don't want to get into trouble, and on the private buses the operators may not want to pick you up for the same reason or will overcharge to make the risk worth their while. we had heard from a number of sources that minibuses would leave at around 6:30 or 7 am from just east of the yak hotel on the main road, which was just a few minutes walk from our hostel. we got up at 5:45, checked out, and walked over to the yak hotel in the pre-dawn darkness. there was a bus slowly moving towards us which stopped when the driver saw us walking down the deserted road. we asked if it was going to shigatse, he said it was, so we hopped aboard and settled in for the 5 hour, 250 km journey. it had taken us about 5 minutes after leaving our hostel to find a suitable bus and we were very pleased. the sun rose as we bounced along...the river valley that the road followed was gorgeous...it was nice to realize that just traveling through tibet was interested considering the amount of land travel ahead of us to get all the way to kathmandu.
my guide book claimed that shigatse had been inundated with far fewer chinese than lhasa...but in the three years since the book had been published much had obviously changed. tam and i agreed that shigatse felt almost like a random town in china proper. it was a bit dismaying. we did manage to find the old tibetan part of town (a tiny corner of shigatse is all that's left) and explore the beautiful tashilhunpo monastery, the traditional seat of the panchen lama (when he's not under indefinite house arrest in china). most of our time, however, was spent discovering (learning the hard way?) just how difficult it was going to be to get to the nepali border as independent travelers. we found some dorm beds in a hotel near the monastery, and fortuitously also right beside the official chinese travel agency where information about permits and further travel might be had. our original plan was to try to get a bus to a town called tingri about two thirds of the way to the border from shigatse and then hitch the rest of the way since as far as we could tell there was no longer any bus service all the way to the border. we quickly learned how naive an idea that had been when we went to the bus station and tried to buy tickets. we were immediately told that no foreigners were allowed on buses except back to lhasa...chinese and tibetans only. as we walked out of the station we caught the attention of a group of men standing around near an unmarked car. at first they asked if we wanted to go to lhasa...we said no, to tingri. one man said he would drive us there for 500 yuan. thinking it might be our only chance we agreed (after getting the price down to 400). as soon as we had settled on everything the man said he would take us only as far as shegar, a town about 60 km nearer to shigatse than tingri, because there was a checkpoint just past shegar that he didn't want to deal with. all the men nearby began making gun shapes with their hands and pretended to shoot the air. we got the point. we decided that shegar was still pretty far along the road and was better than nothing...maybe we could hitch from there. the man told us to call him at 8 am the next morning and gave me his mobile phone number.
already exhausted from the day i decided to have a nap while tam went to change some money at the bank of china. 3 minutes after he left tam came bursting back into the room, startling me. he was seriously out of breath (running at 3900m is hard!) but managed to convey to me that the tourist office next door had opened up and that a group of 4 suiss people on their way to the nepali border were hanging around while their land cruiser guide sorted out some permit details with the tourist office. we went out to the street hoping maybe that there would be space in the land cruiser for us. the driver seemed interested in trying to pack us into the land cruiser (for 500 yuan each) but the suiss travelers less so. there wasn't really any space and the driver was being really cheeky in trying to get us to pay him for passage as the suiss travelers had already paid for the entire vehicle...really we should have paid them for space. it became obvious that it wasn't going to happen...but the suiss people were from the french part of switzerland and so while chatting with them in french (which was fun for me) they passed along that they had heard of an australian guy who, after being sent back to lhasa twice by chinese authorities while trying to get to the nepali border on his own, had arranged a tour bus with nine other travelers. the man i was talking to thought that the bus had enough seats for twenty and if we could find them (they were supposed to be arriving in shigatse that afternoon) we might be able to get on the bus. the australian man had blond, dread-locked hair. tam and i both thought that we might have seen a bus full of westerners pull into the tenzin hotel (frequented by tour groups according to my guide book) while we were wandering around the tibetan area. we devised a plan...the tour group would probably go to the monastery during the afternoon so we decided to head there and search for them. if that didn't work we would check the tenzin hotel to see if we could find them there. it seemed like a crazy long shot and i had no real belief that we would actually find them, especially with a plan like 'wander around a huge monastery'...and so i was quite stunned when it worked. tam had been going up to every westerner that he saw asking them if they'd seen a blond dread-locked australian, and while we were talking to some other, non-tour bus australians tam suddenly jumped up and headed off towards a tall, blond, dread-locked man that had just turned the corner. he was the australian we were looking for...but unfortunately the swiss man had been slightly wrong. the bus only had enough space for the ten travelers and their bags. regardless, the permit that the australian had acquired only had space for ten names. there was no way for us to get on the bus. the dread-locked australian man provided us with as much information as he could, even as he was somewhat disconcerted that in a short time he had become something of a legend...that we knew about his tour bus and that he had been sent back twice unsettled him a bit. he was a wonderful source of information, having obviously spent a great deal of time in the region, and he painted a picture for us of just what we were up against. there are four checkpoints between shigatse and the border, one just past the small town of lhatse about half-way, one just past the turn off to shegar (the one that scared the drivers near the bus station), one just after the town of nyalam 30 km from the border, and one just before zhangmu (the chinese border town). as well as the borders, the PSB (public security bureau) could nab you in any town if they suspected you of traveling outside of a sanctioned tour. at the very least, if you do get sent back the chinese authorities put you in a land cruiser going staright to lhasa free of charge. they might also try to fine you, but in the australian's case (i never did learn his name) the first field office couldn't find the fine log book and so sent him on to the next prefecture...where they didn't know how to deal with it, so they sent him on to lhasa...where the PSB office was closed, so they told him to wait at the side of the road while they figured out what to do...and then never came back. it seems that the name of the game for chinese police is 'cover your ass'...what they really want to avoid is responsibility for decision making. the australian had made it as far as nyalam, 30 km from the border, only to be caught by a policeman while wandering around the town. we told him about our ride to shegar and inquired about getting past the shegar checkpoint. he told us that the checkpoint closed down at night...that traffic, mostly commercial trucks, just went through unhindered after dark. he said that we could try to hike around the checkpoint and then hitch from the other side. when he warned about carrying a stick to fend off the wild dogs i started to wonder just what we'd gotten ourselves into. that the dogs are supposedly more of a problem in that barking alerts the police then that they attack didn't really help. after pumping the australian for as much information as we could we parted ways...he wished us the best of luck.
to give some sense of just how absurd the whole permit situation is in tibet i'll briefly mention our attempt to get our own permit from the PSB in shigatse. both my and tam's guide books mentioned that a permit could be purchased from the PSB which would allow travel on the friendship highway (the official name of the road between lhasa and the nepali border) therefore possibly allowing us to buy bus tickets. when we finally managed to find the PSB office we were told that we could buy a permit for the friendship highway for 50 yuan each, but only if we had the travel permit issued to us when we registered our tour group, which of course we didn't have. but any tour group with a permit already has everything they need to travel in their land cruiser. so we could get a permit only if we had another permit which would make the second permit completely unnecessary! bureaucracy truly has been elevated to an art-form by the chinese.
so tam and i set out for the nepali border tomorrow, our plan having become increasingly ridiculous. we've started having fun with it really, imagining ourselves sneaking past checkpoints and inventing elaborate stories with which to confuse and/or pacify the police. after a long, long day of scrambling around and trying desperately to figure out how to get to the border, the steep learning curve weighing us down, tam and i both agree that we just want to get to the border as fast as possible and leave 'china' behind for the friendlier realm of nepal.
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