Some Chinese fishermen walked alongside the road as we headed along the river out of Lhasa. My government-mandated guide and driver both chuckled from the front seat of the white Land Cruiser.Okay, I'll bite.
"What's so funny?"
My driver, a 60-ish Tibetan man in tinted 70s glasses, didn't speak much English and didn't answer me. My guide, a fluent English-speaking Tibetan in his forties, did.
"Tibetans don't fish. We find fishing to be really funny."
That didn't really answer my question, so I tried again.
"Why?""Because eating a fish is a sort-of cannibalism. In Tibet, we have something called water burial. That is where the body of a dead person is chopped up and fed to the fish. There is also sky burial, where the body is chopped up and fed to the birds. The body is not the person, because the person's spirit will be reincarnated."
Eww. So either way, someone's got to chop you up. That can't be fun for the chopper. Anyway, I'm allergic to fish, so I wasn't really worried about accidentally eating anyone.
We were heading from Lhasa to the town of Gyantse today, another 300 meters higher. En route, we were passing Kamba-la Pass, which would put my altitude tolerance to the test at 4700 meters. That's fifteen-and-a-half thousand feet—lots. I was pretty sure I'd never been anywhere that high before in my life.
But about ten minutes after we'd started, we stopped. I looked puzzled, but my guide Rinchin explained.
"There is an interesting rock carving here."The driver waited with the car and our luggage, as he would for the next four days. Rinchin led me past a whitewashed incense-burning stupa to a cliffside covered in prayer flags, paintings, and Buddhist rock carvings, which were painted in bright golds, oranges, and blues. Lovely.
And alongside the cliff, as we drove away, white ladders were painted. Stairway to heaven? I inquired as to their purpose.
"I told you about that before," said my guide. "We saw them at Drepung Monastery. Remember?"
Uh, no. The four days I'd been in Lhasa were a whirl of sensory overload, of pilgrims, monasteries, prayer flags, bell-ringing bicycle rickshaws, and soldiers. I didn't remember seeing ladder paintings at the first monastery we'd gone to.
My guide explained the ladders to me again. But I hadn't adjusted to his sing-song tone yet. I did what I'd been doing for days, which is pretend to understand. Whenever I do this, I get renewed sympathy for people who pretend to understand me when I speak too fast.
We drove on, passing more fishermen, then stopped at a rest area with toilets and souvenir sellers."You should go in here," said Rinchin. "This is the best roadside toilet you'll see until Nepal."
I nodded and went in. The stench knocked me back a bit, and I remembered then that the reason to take paper into the loo is not necessarily for its clear purpose, but rather to cover your mouth and nose so you don't get the dry heaves. A Chinese woman squatted in front of me, considering me curiously as she did her business. I had forgotten about the doorless squats in China of ten years ago, since China's toilets had improved now. But the toilet consultant's reports that had been issued prior to the Beijing Olympics hadn't made it to Tibet yet. I hurried through and got out of the "best toilets," walking back to the vehicle.
"It's okay?" I noticed the guide and driver hadn't visited. But they're guys, it's easier for them."If that's the best…" I started, then just grimaced.
Both the guide and driver laughed. No translation required.
We drove on, eventually turning off the main road.
"That is the way to Nepal," said my guide, pointing back where we'd turned off. "We're taking the Southern Friendship Highway. It is more scenic. We'll be back on the main Friendship Highway tomorrow night at Shigatse."
And with that, we wound our way up a mountainside for a few hours.
The road was narrow but new. At first, I ignored our driver having a hot-rod habit—he wanted to overtake and pass everyone. Sure, whatever, I thought.But when he started to overtake on hairpin turns, where he couldn't see the oncoming traffic, I started to think about a book I'd read about an American woman who had been at the point of impact on a bus in Laos. I didn't want to be airlifted out of Lhasa on a helicopter, and the third time our driver veered into the oncoming lane at high speed when he couldn't see around the turn ahead of us, I groused at him.
"I'd prefer to arrive in one piece, please."
But he didn't speak English and I didn't speak Tibetan or Chinese, so this went nowhere.
The next time, I exploded.
"I've been driving more than 20 years and I know you do NOT take blind corners in the wrong lane!"
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| The nice mastiff licked me |
We pulled over at the top of the mountain, next to some prayer flags. I stomped up the hill, inwardly cursing my inability to breathe deep at altitude but too proud to let it show. I stopped at the top and looked out over the mountain pass, past the prayer flags to the ribbon of asphalt, and the green lake of Yamdrok-tso just below.
Stunning.
I was less grumpy now. We continued on—even higher!—to the summit of Kamba-la. Here I had to pay an admission fee, but the view of the green lake and mountains was stunning. I walked around taking photos, posed with a Tibetan mastiff and yak for ten yuan each to their friendly owners, and visited what was definitely NOT the best toilet in Tibet. I'm done with Tibet toilets, I thought, considering not drinking or eating for 3.5 days. I remembered Yancey and Michael's rules for toilets in China from 2001—double-knot your shoelaces so they don't sit in urine, hold your breath, and the third one might have been RUN.
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| The yak's name was also Rinchin |
We drove down to the lake next, then stopped for a delicious vegetarian lunch in the chilly town of Nangartse. Thankfully, the driver and guide ate elsewhere. I could eat in peace.
After lunch, we continued on past a glacier, stopped, and look past it at a mountain range.
"That is Bhutan," said my guide, wistfully (I thought).
"What, Bhutan is right there?"
"Yes. We are the same people, you know. Different countries, same people."
And here I was, bound for Nepal, then into India, then back up to get to Bhutan. Seemed silly.
"Can we cross here?""No, only local people."
We drove on to Gyantse, where we found a new hotel–Tibet Gyantse Yu Yun Hotel–on the outskirts of town.
Breakfast included, hot water, TV!
Okay, I don't care about the TV, the breakfast is probably something I won't eat, and the hot water didn't reach my room in the 20 minutes I turned it on in the morning. I ended up improvising with the tea kettle and a cloth. But the price was right, and we were right on the outskirts of town.
Rinchin took me to the stunning Pelkor Chode Monastery and Gyantse Kumbum. This meant nothing to me, just a jumble of words. But inside the 500-year-old compound was floor after floor of rich tiny chapels full of religious treasures, paintings, and statues. Truly remarkable.
A tiny gray-haired woman in traditional Tibetan dress and a single braid stopped us to greet Rinchin. She spoke cheerfully to him, taking a break from her clockwise circuit, slowing her twirling of her prayer wheel. She laughed and joked with my guide, and after we took our leave, he said to me that she is always there when he arrives and always has a kind word.There were monks here—not as many as there once were as nowadays, monks had to apply to Beijing for permission to join a monastery. Permission is seldom granted. Thousands of monks live in exile in monasteries across the border in India.
The monks of Gyantse laughed as they walked around, and they openly stared at me. Tibetan monks were as different from Thai monks as Tibetan Buddhism was from Buddhism of Southeast Asia. Tibetan Buddhism is a combination of the animist Bon religion, endemic to Tibet, combined with Buddhism and the Hindu gods. The result is a colorful cast of characters and a lot of circles—walking in circles, twirling handheld prayer wheels, twirling entire rows of prayer wheels, single giant prayer wheels, fingering beads on a necklace around and around, painting circular artwork called the wheel of life. Everything is cyclical and nothing is permanent. We're born, we grow, we die, we start over.
The complicating factor of the foreign overlords wasn't helping me to easily comprehend this weird and wonderful Tibetan society. I didn't understand China's right to Tibet anymore than I understood any countries right to annex a neighbor, but I do understand how things that happened in the past can be rectified later. There did seem to be some attempts by China to right the wrongs of the past by pouring infrastructure into Tibet.
Of course, it's a bit of both. And when charming Chinese tourists hurried over to help me translate a sign and innocently welcome me to "China," I can't help but see that the regular citizens are friendly, and certainly mean no harm to Tibet. As an American, I have been welcomed by the cultures I visit no matter who is currently governing the USA and no matter what current policies are in place. Most of the rest of the world can separate the government from the citizens. Why shouldn't I?
"The Great Firewall is kicking my ass today," I sent to my Twitter (also banned) by using SMS-to-Twitter on my OneSimCard. My phone was able to do like Genghis Khan, to use a gate through the wall, but the lengths I had to go to for simple online tasks were unforgiveable.
"Welcome to the life of the average Chinese dude or dudette," wrote back a friend in my former home of Kuwait.
Where, of course, we also get censored. But Chinese censorship was making me pine for the relative Internet-freedom of the Gulf.
And that was absurd.
More photos here.
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