Kathmandu Hotels
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lady luck is a tibetan goddess
Entry 13 of 20 | show all | print this entry |
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it was only about a week ago that tam and i arrived in tibet but it feels like everything before that was another life. we made it through to the nepali border, unmolested and relatively intact...in love with tibet and exhausted by it. we woke up promptly at 7:30, checked out of our hotel in shigatse and just before 8 am asked the woman at the desk to call the man who was supposed to drive us to shegar as he didn't speak much english. she told us that his mobile phone was turned off. i had a brief moment of total frustration before tam and i set out, in the early morning darkness as had become our custom, to the bus station to see if our ride was hanging around as he usually did. he was nowhere to be found, but there was a gaggle of transportation touts that caught whiff of us very quickly. we explained that we wanted to go to tingri (hoping that one of these guys would be brave enough to take us past the shegar checkpoint) and they directed us to the bus ticket office, which we knew wouldn't sell us any tickets. one of the men went up to the ticket window, and i briefly wondered if it would all be as simple as having a tibetan man buy the ticket for us...but then the bus official looked over at us and shook his head. the man came back and told us that he would take us to shegar for 200 yuan each...the same price that the other man had agreed to the day before. i suspected that our new driver had been hanging around then and knew exactly how much we had agreed to the day before. seeing no other options, we agreed, although tam convinced him to accept half up front and half when we made it safely to tingri. strangely the man led us through the bus station...to a bus. we put our bags in the large trunk and sat where we were instructed to sit, all the way at the back. the man disappeared and other people started getting on the bus as well. i had a moment of panic where i began to suspect that the man we had just given 200 yuan to had nothing to do with the bus and we had been taken for a ride (no pun intended)...but eventually he came back and sat in the driver's seat, confirming that he was the driver. we learned from a chinese woman who taught english in tingri (the degree to which china is desperate for english teachers made clear by her halting english) that the tickets actually cost about 65 yuan...so we had been overcharged slightly more than three times over. we weren't actually allowed to be on the bus though, so there wasn't really much to complain about. the bus filled up entirely but no one accused us of being in their seats, so i assume that the bus driver bought two tickets for 130 yuan and would pocket the rest of our 400. it must have been incredibly obvious to the officials at the bus station what was going on, but as long as none of it could implicate them they didn't seem to care. tam and i both got really nervous when 3 chinese soldiers got on the bus...but then we remembered that the army has little to do with enforcing permit restrictions, and the 'not my jurisdiction, not my problem' attitude came to our rescue again. we left shigatse at around 8:30 am headed for tingri.
our first test came at the checkpoint just past lhatse, about half way to tingri. as we approached i slid the curtain across our section of the window as tam and i both assumed positions that we hoped were diminutive but inconspicuous. it didn't really matter as a police officer came right onto the bus and asked us for our passports. he checked everyone else's documentation as well, and even pulled a tibetan man with no papers off the bus. we sat nervously for about 10 minutes before being asked to leave the bus as well and enter the little police shack beside the barricade. as we got off the bus, the dread-locked australian man's bus past us and he gave us a quiet, despairing wave. the driver was already in the shack having handed out cigarettes to all the officials. we were asked where we were going, to which we responded emphatically that we were headed straight to the border. tam's chinese visa only had five days left on it and we had been told that if tam were to be sent back causing him to overstay his visa the officer who had made the decision would be held responsible. tam played up the fact that he had to leave right away, hoping that the guard would be unwilling to risk censure for causing a tourist to stay longer than allowed. it opened up the possibility that tam would be let through and i would be sent back (as my visa doesn't expire until the 15 of november) but we had talked about it earlier and decided it was our best strategy. for my part i tried to make it clear that we were traveling together, hoping that the benefit of tam's soon-to-be expiring visa would help me as well. after a period of seemingly endless contemplation, during which i imagined the policeman weighing the consequences of action vs inaction very heavily, our passport information was taken down and we were allowed to continue on the bus. we embraced our luckiness and hoped that it would carry us through the next three checkpoints as well.
we made an unfortunate discovery when the bus stopped at the turnoff to shegar about an hour and a half later. the bus seemed to be pointed up the road to shegar and not down the highway to tingri. as we tried to figure out what was going on a little bell started ringing in my brain and i opened up my guide book to read the shegar entry. it was then that i remembered that shegar is also called 'new tingri' and that the place we wanted to go (and which we thought we had purchased some 'tickets' to) was 'old tingri'. our bus was really a bus to shegar, and so we got out having made it halfway distance-wise but only through one checkpoint. we paid the remaining 200 yuan to the driver as they hadn't directed lied to us, we had just misunderstood. we grudgingly started discussing our plans to wait until nightfall and hike around the next checkpoint (about 5-6 km down the road) as we walked to a nearby restaurant to get something to eat. our luck was holding up however as before we could even make it to the restaurant a tibetan man approached us from the gas station across the street. there was a land cruiser refueling there and the man presented himself as a tour guide and asked us where we were headed. we told him the nepali border, hoping (praying) that he was headed there as well. he was...and he had two free seats in the land cruiser. i waited to hear the crushing blow of the cost of such a ride...and was stunned when he asked for only 150 yuan each. considering how much a whole land cruiser costs he was being incredibly generous. we accepted quickly and hopped into the truck filled with intense relief that our ridiculous plan to sneak past the checkpoint under the cover of darkness had proved entirely unnecessary. when we made it to the shegar checkpoint i was surprised to see that the checkpoint was under the authority of the military and not the police. the reluctance of the men in shigatse to drive us past it become more clear. the shegar checkpoint is a big deal mostly because it's where all the permits to enter the mount everest wilderness preserve are checked...permits that are a large source of tourist income for the government. the land cruiser that we were on had permits to carry tourists, and it didn't even matter that our names appeared on no documents related to the 'tour'. first the driver and the guide had their information taken down, and then my and tam's passport information was taken down...and that was it. we were sent on our way. the rest of the trip was stress free...and it became apparent why land cruiser tours are the most popular way to deal with the permit hassles. it's a very comfortable way to travel through tibet. well...about as comfortable as tibet can get seeing that the paved part of the highway ends at tingri and the remainder of it is rough gravel road.
the landscapes in tibet are absolutely astounding. it's very dry and there are a surprising number of sand dunes strewn about the countryside. from (old) tingri the views of the himalayan mountains are stunning and it's possible to do a three day trek to everest base camp from there. we were floored by the views from the top of the two high passes on the way to the border from tingri...a sea of rolling, scrubby foothills with a line of pristine snow-capped peaks floating on top. as the road descends to the border it falls into a lush river valley with sharp cliffs and a gorgeous river cascading below. it made the three gorges look like bumps along a thin pool of muddy water. our last surprise was that the road between nyalam and the nepali border, a stretch of about 30 km, is being completely rebuilt...and so the final piece of our ride to the border was like being inside of an old, slightly off-kilter paint mixer. i can't imagine the ride that the australian and his nine charges must have had in a bus. there were moments where our land cruiser was centimetres away from a sharp drop hundreds of metres below to the rushing water and large rocks of the deep valley. all this while insane construction was going on all around...the chinese seem to love engineering projects that everyone else thinks are impossible. the final two checkpoints had been temporarily removed due to the road work...but we wouldn't have had a problem with them anyway thanks to our land cruiser. all told is cost us 420 yuan to make it to the border...far less than most people pay. i suppose we were charged more in stress and uncertainty than money...but being ultimately successful it's easy to let that fade away into the background and think fondly of our tibetan adventure. tam and i both agree that tibet is a staggeringly beautiful place...and that we both want to come back at some point now that we're better prepared to deal with all it's bureaucratic hardships. all throughout our journey we were awed by the warmth and friendliness of the tibetan people who, by all rights, have every reason to be angry and despondent. we found aid in so many unexpected places and felt welcomed in a land where even the inhabitants are no longer totally at home. whatever i might think about the superstitions and customs of tibet's intensely spiritual people, i hope the chinese occupation comes to an end, although i suspect that it might be a long time coming.
i'm in kathmandu now and i'm leaving to do the annapurna circuit trek tomorrow morning. i should be back from the trek by about mid-november and until then i will have no access to the internet. i'm sure that i'll have a lot to write about by the time i get back. i have to admit that as much as i enjoyed china, i felt myself smiling wide as i walked in thamel, the bustling, wonderfully crowded backpacker quarter of kathmandu. i'm really happy to be back in south asia...something about it suits me better than china to the east. we have run into a number of people here that we met in tibet, all of whom arrived here in more conventional ways. whenever we tell the story of how we got here the reaction is always one of quiet astonishment...and tam and i can't help but to be a little bit proud of our journey across tibet, even as we know that it was mostly pure, dumb luck.
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