Tibet; "The roof of the world," a land that evokes mysterious images of high places, Dalai Lamas, and thousands of Buddhist monks prostrating themselves in worship.
Before my journey there in August, I wondered if the reality of life on this lofty plateau north of the Himalayas would match its many exotic images. As I entered the Kyichu Valley where the capital, Lhasa, is located, I had my answer.
There, in the distance, so high it seemed to float like an apparition above the dusty sprawl of Lhasa, was the awe-inspiring Potala Palace, ancient abode of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal head of the Tibetan state. Upon seeing the towering white and brown walls of this other-worldly palace, I knew that my travels in Tibet would be a fascinating experience. I had come to Lhasa (Altitude; 11,830 feet) to acclimatize for a planned 600 mile overland journey to Kathmandu, Nepal.
With some of the passes along my planned route topping 17,000 feet, getting used to the thin air of Tibet was essential. I had gotten the idea for the trip after meeting two Australians in a Kathmandu bar several years before. They had made the journey the previous spring, and they could hardly stop talking about what a great experience it had been. Though the road to Kathmandu is closed most of the winter due to severe avalanche danger, in the late summer the worst I would have to worry about would be the monsoon rains south of the Himalayas.
I had hoped to make the trip independently, hitching rides on trucks or whatever other modes of transport became available along the way. However, I was told in no uncertain terms by the Chinese authorities in Lhasa that it would be impossible to make the journey alone. To travel "independently" to the Nepalese border, I would have to obtain a permit. - And to get that I had to hire a jeep, complete with driver and interpreter.
Since the communist Chinese "liberated" Tibet in 1950, they have maintained control over virtually all the country's affairs.
Aside from destroying over 5,000 monasteries during the 1966-76 cultural revolution, by some estimates they have killed over a million Tibetans. Although the situation eased somewhat after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, today Tibet is a police state administered by the communists as the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) .
With a population of only about three million people spread across an area larger than Texas and California combined, the country is defenseless against a calculated, ongoing policy of massive Chinese immigration. This influx of Chinese is so overwhelming that the Dalai Lama, recipient of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, recently stated that the Tibetan way of life is in danger of someday disappearing altogether.
The Chinese presence is ubiquitous. Not so subtle reminders of their grip on the country are everywhere. Red army soldiers, with AK-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders, are apt to turn up at even the most remote checkpoints.
After setting-up a four wheel drive vehicle for the five day trip to Nepal, I took a week to explore Lhasa. Riding a rickshaw through stifling vehicle exhaust fumes, I saw a seemingly chaotic place teeming with activity.
Precariously stacked freight trucks, over�loaded buses, cars and motorcycles, each continually blaring their horns brushed closely past me following a Darwinian style "survival of the biggest" right of way.
In maze-like alleyways bargain hunters jostled shoulder-to-shoulder as Tibetans with brightly colored head dresses sold goods ranging from Buddha statues to prayer wheels, decorated cylinders that when spun send blessings aloft.
Occasionally, orange and maroon robed monks would stop me seeking alms for their monasteries, while other merchants beckoned me over to see their rugs, cheap watches and turquoise jewelry.
Around a corner a destitute man with no eyes in his sockets sat silently on the ground as passersby dropped small amounts of money in his tin cup.
Walking from the shadows of a crowded passageway, I came within sight of the golden canopies of the Jokhang, the most sacred and ancient of Tibet's temples.
Circling the Jokhang in a clockwise direction called a "korla" were thousands of Buddhist pilgrims and worshipers, some completely prostrating themselves at the temple entrance, others softly chanting mantras as they shuffled along. In an amusing juxtaposition further on, a small crowd overflowed on to the street as they scrunched against an open door and strained their necks to watch an afternoon Indian soap opera on a flickering TV inside.
Nearby, a group of dishevelled nomads, with knives in ornate scabbards tied to their waists, grew boisterious as they drank chang, a traditional beer. When I would ask permission to take a photograph of a Tibetan, a bustle would go through the crowd as riveted bystanders curiously watched me line up a shot. One young Tibetan woman shrieked and giggled so loudly at the multiple flashes from my camera that everyone in the immediate vicinity erupted in bemused laughter.
For centuries Lhasa was known as the Forbidden City because of its inaccessibility and xenophobic hostility to foreign visitors. The Tibetans I met during my journey though were among the most gently inquisitive and disarmingly friendly individuals I have ever encountered in my travels.
Despite the people and activity in Lhasa, I found it to be a rather sad, deceptive place. Impressive as it is, the Potala Palace, vacant since the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 has taken on the feel of a grand tourist attraction; one preserved both to bring in foreign currency and to distract attention from the atrocities the Chinese have committed in Tibet.
Even the area around the Jokhang is not as open as it first appears. After a short while there you notice the closed circuit cameras the communists have set up to watch for any protests against their rule.
And the Tibetans themselves, now clearly in the minority in this city of 160,000, have their lives so completely dominated that photos of the Dalai Lama are now strictly prohibited.
In contrast to China itself, where you rarely see photos of Chairman Mao these days, there even seems to be a bizarre effort underway in the city to somehow replace the Dalai Lama with a flood of Mao photos. Mao, sporting that enigmatic smile of his, turned up in the oddest places. From a hotel night table to handouts at a Tibetan festival, I came across his photo. Not quite getting into the spirit, I made sure several ended up in the toilet.
Couple such things with the propaganda vehicles periodically cruising the streets blaring Marxist doctrine from loudspeakers, and you have less than a carefree atmosphere.
I felt a sense of relief when a few days later the tensions of Lhasa were left behind as I bumped along in a jeep on a zigzagging thread of dirt road weaving across the mountains to the horizon.
The high plateau of Tibet is a lonely, dry land inhabited by nomads, occasional villages, and spindly vegetation set amid rocky scree slopes and serrated snow covered mountain ridges that tower well above 20,000 feet.
It is a place of staggering natural beauty with sweeping panoramas so beguiling that human concerns can momentarily seem trivial.
Such feelings are quickly brought back into perspective, however. At many stops travelers are approached by rumpled, hungry-eyed Tibetans begging for a few Chinese yuan.
In one small, wind raked village, as the driver, interpreter and I ate a meal of rice and greasy vegetables in a smoky, dirt-floored hovel, I fumbled a sticky clump of rice. No sooner had the rice hit the floor than a Tibetan boy of perhaps six years of age scurried in to wolf it down. Looking over at other frozen-faced kids gawking at us from the doorway, I could eat no more. As we headed out I dished the rest of my meal into their eager hands.
Scratching out an existence on the plateau makes for a tough, hard-bitten life; one the Tibetans approach with a quiet tenacity tempered by their deep Buddhist values.
By following a path respectful of virtually all living things, Tibetans strive to attain a higher level of consciousness in the present life and a higher level of being in the thousands of reincarnated lives they believe we all pass through.
Though poor by worldly standards, the majority of Tibetan villages are fairly self-sufficient.
Most are a hodgepodge of one and two story structures made of sun baked, shoe box size bricks. When viewed from a distance the whitewashed walls of these villages take on a luminous, almost ethereal quality.
This airy feel is heightened by the fact that nearly all Tibetan structures are festooned with colorful prayer flags; retangular pieces of red, blue, green and yellow cloth inscribed with various Buddhist mantras.
Each color of a flag represents a different element of the Earth and every flutter in the wind, it is believed, carries a prayer off to the heavens. Although fields close to some of the larger villages and towns are planted with barley and wheat, much of Tibetan country life is centered around the raising of sheep, goats and yaks, a shaggy animal that looks like a cross between a cow and a buffalo.
While women are winnowing barley or preparing tsamba, a doughy Tibetan staple consisting of flour, butter and tea, the males of a household may be out tending to livestock or bringing in a harvest.
Village children are frequently seen amusing themselves by flying kites on the ever present high plain breezes. On occasion, I discovered, they may even pass the time by throwing rocks at westerners.
Most of their days though are spent pitching in with household chores. According to my Tibetan interpreter, precious few kids on the plateau receive any formal education.
Outside of Lhasa, access to western doctors is severely limited. Tibetan medicine; an interesting discipline relying on pulse diagnosis, rudimentary urine analysis and herbal remedies is often the only sort of health care available.
One aspect of Tibetan life which westerners should take special care not to intrude upon in the backcountry (99% of Tibet) is the unusual practice of sky burial.
Simply put, Tibetans carry their dead to an isolated place, chop up the body and leave the pieces for vultures. Even the bones of the deceased are crushed and mixed with tsamba so the birds will eat them too.
In his adventure travel classic, " Seven Years In Tibet," Heinrich Harrer observed, "The Tibetans wish to leave no trace after death of their bodies, which, without souls, have no significance." During a side trip on my journey, we came within sight of a half-dozen vultures soaring in tight circles on the thermals of a cloudless, azure blue sky.
With more birds joining the circles, my interpreter nervously said we should go no further because if it did turn out to be a sky burial, it would not be safe for me to be there. Understandably, the usually good natured Tibetans do not take very kindly to outsiders viewing these sites.
Slicing through curlicues of early morning mists on the road the next day, I looked south toward the snow clad Himalayas, and thought that outside of Lhasa this land was little changed over the last two centuries.
This impression was strengthened as we entered Gyantse that afternoon, and viewed the Gyantse Dzong, a 14th century stone fort that looks like something straight out of Lawrence of Arabia.
As donkey drawn carts manuevered around a score of emaciated dogs in the cobbled streets of this medieval town, I heard deeply pitched horns calling monks to prayer in a nearby monastery.
With the late afternoon sun creating a silhouette of the fort on nearby mountain slopes, I ventured into the monastery.
Inside the cavernous main chapel ancient Buddhist frescoes reflected the light of hundreds of flickering candles as the soft murmur of praying monks echoed from adjacent altar rooms.
Thousands of carefully bound scrolls, written long before Columbus sailed, lined the walls of these rooms from floor to ceiling. Following the customary clock-wise circumambulation path through the chapel, I looked back at the shadowy figures of several monks amidst ancient columns, and walked into the wide courtyard of the monastery as the setting sun dappled the ground with amber light.
That night I slept fitfully. Listening to the faint sound of barking dogs and the muffled conversation of a nearby Tibetan family, I wondered how much longer this place would remain unchanged.
Two days later after traveling on a kidney jarring mountain road that rose above the clouds and splashed across streams that brought waters onto the floorboards of the jeep, we neared Nepal.
To the left of the road, Mount Everest, or as the Tibetans call it, "Chomolangma," Mother Goddess of the Earth, thunderously rose into the clouds of the monsoon pushing against it from the south.
After crossing a three mile high pass through swirling snow flurries, we began our descent from the plateau on a seemingly unending series of long, at times trackless, switchbacks. Finally, we entered a narrow gorge that would lead to the border.
Rounding a curve on this passage through the Himalayas we abruptly came to a stop. Before us was a major landslide which had obliterated the road. In front of the slide were over a hundred Tibetan and Nepali villagers who had trekked to the spot in the hopes of being hired as porters through the slide areas. With the villagers crowded closely around our jeep the interpreter determined that there had been five or six major landslides along this the only road to Kathmandu, making it impossible to proceed further.
Following a little good natured haggling with a barefooted Nepali over the charge for carrying one of my two bags, I bid farewell to the driver and interpreter. The porter and I then began the walk across the first slide and down the muddy road.
Much of the road in the vicinity of the Tibet/�Nepal border is simply a knuckly dirt track literally carved into the sheer walls of a precipitous chasm.
Owing to the especially heavy monsoonal rains of this past summer, the road was not much more than a sloppy ledge. In places it was completely gone.
What was left was a treacherous path that in places took travelers under cascading waterfalls and through shifting, leech infested mud. A few days before two people had been killed after losing their footing along the way. After walking about six miles through low hanging clouds we neared Zhangmu, a grimy little border town jammed on to a steep mountainside.
Approaching the border checkpoint, I passed two Chinese soldiers hunched over a dead dog, skinning it with a straight edged razor, presumably in preparation for the evening meal.
As a light drizzle began to fall, a pock-faced Chinese border official with long fingernails and dark aviator sunglasses emerged from a rickety shack on the edge of town and gave my passport a cursory glance. Flicking open a lighter, to be understood through his spotty English, he inquired if I had any cigarettes.
Since I didn't want any bureaucratic snafus to suddenly arise in such a delightful place, I deferentially presented him with a battered Snickers bar from my pack. With him passably pleased, I continued on my way.
Several hundred yards further along at the customs check, another official interrupted his card game just long enough to take a toothpick from his mouth and airily waive me through to the three mile no-man's land between Tibet and Nepal.
After paying the porter for the slog to Zhangmu, I threw my bags against a wall out of the rain, sat on top, and waited for the inevitable phalanx of touts to approach offering terms for a ride to the Nepal border crossing. The set-up was pretty straightforward. With little else to do, vehicles stranded by the slides simply transformed themselves into taxis. Rates were whatever the market would bear.
Being a westerner I was offered some pretty exorbitant prices for the three mile lift. After one turned down agent grew petulant and caustically asked me what I planned to do then, I shrugged and replied that I kinda liked Zhangmu and was thinking about living there.
As he puzzled over that one, a big Indian made truck gaudily decorated with red fringe in the cab and decals of the Hindu god Shiva on the cracked windshield pulled up.
The driver, a green toothed Nepali gnawing on a nasty looking plug of tobacco, stuck his head out a side window, offered up a reasonable rate, and I climbed in.
On the way down to the border, slowly edging around each hairpin bend, I began to feel a certain queasiness as the ticking of rain on the windows gradually grew to a roar.
Twisting slightly in my seat, I could see water rippling across the mountain road and flowing off the cliff into open air to the side of the truck. About half way down, the truck suddenly lurched as the right rear tire broke off a piece of the road on the edge of a precipice.
With the driver slamming at the brakes and the rain coming down in sheets, the left front tire slowly began to rise off the ground. Flashing a quick look over the cliff, I felt the brief tightness in my throat of an adrenaline rush as I scrambled for the door, dove off, and landed in a pool of mud.
Sitting there in the muck, I watched the terrified driver's relief as the brakes strained and the truck settled back down. After helping to shove a few rocks behind the truck's tires, I grabbed my bags, and yelled my thanks through the deluge to the two driver assistants who had jumped off with me. I then paid for the ride, saluted the driver, and walked the remaining mile or so to Nepal.
Though the rest of the way to Kathmandu involved crossing more slides, hitching rides on a motorcycle, a donkey cart, and finally another truck, I realized that the discomforts, the glitches as well as the many highlights encountered along my route were all part of the fabric of a truly memorable journey.
At another bar in Kathmandu two nights later my route came full circle when I found myself urging some Brits to take the trip.