Up In The Clouds

After some fairly lengthy planning – Tibet is not an easy place to be allowed into; whoever would have guessed? – Heidi and I boarded the plane to Chengdu, which is the main stopover in Western China to connect on the way to Lhasa. Except actually, Heidi was not on the plane at all; she was on another plane to Shanghai, instead. Despite the build-up and planning, she had been offered a job interview the first day of the trip, and so I ended up starting the trip on my own as she went for the interview.

I had my stopover in Chengdu lined up before the transfer to Lhasa, knowing that I had to re-check in after clearing customs. My carefully laid plans went slightly awry when the Hong Kong flight was delayed, meaning that when I eventually landed in Sichuan, I had only around forty-five minutes to go through passport control, grab my bags, check in again for the second flight, and then get back to the new gate before the connecting flight – last of the day, of course – left without me. You can imagine that I was a bit nervous about this as we came in to land, but it was to my pleasant surprise that I managed to clear customs and get my bags from the luggage carousel within just five minutes of getting off the plane. I tell you, you would not get away with that at Stansted. Bag in hand, I ran upstairs to the check-in and to the front of the “late passengers” queue, where they were thankfully receptive to my situation and put me straight through. You would be surprised just quite how late you can turn up at the airport in China and still make it onto the plane. I ran to the gate for the next flight, and they had not even started boarding. Never in doubt.

Sitting at the gate, I actually had time to make a phone call, so I called Nigel, an old friend living in Australia. Not surprisingly, the conversation came round to discussing what I was up to, and I told him of my trip to Tibet. Nigel has known me for some time; he knows of the other places that I have been to and my urge to explore every corner of the world. I could pardon him his immediate retort: “Mate, are you sure you’re not in MI6?”

Alas, no. But if anybody out there is listening, I am always interested …

The flight from Chengdu was a further two hours; we finished by flying through the Himalayas. You know when the pilot says over the Tannoy, “We are now flying at an altitude of 35,000 feet” and you look down to see the ground so far away below you? That does not really happen when you fly through the Himalayas. The uppermost peaks reach 29,000 feet, and they are so high that as you look out of the window you feel that you could touch them as you fly past. Something like that is slightly disconcerting if you are not expecting it. Thankfully the pilot was, and he steered us through on the correct course.

I arrived in the bright sunshine of Lhasa to be met by our guide, Pasang, and our driver, Qiang. In the car, Pasang was quite chatty, telling me about the local area, the local culture, and what to expect from the trip, whilst Qiang did not say much. We went straight for dinner in a Lhasa restaurant, enthusiastically named the “Tibet Steak House”, which, while not quite as salubrious as it sounds, was still fine. Most restaurants in Tibet serve a combination of foods representing the surrounding cultures, e.g. Chinese, Nepalese/Indian, and some Western food for the tourists. They also serve their local Tibetan specialities, and there is one main ingredient that dominates the local culinary scene: yak.

Well, when in Tibet, do as the Tibetans do, so I ordered a yak sizzler. The menu did not lie, as I heard it coming from about 20 metres away. It was yak meat on a hot plate, and it certainly sizzled. A yak is basically a big cow, and so, not surprisingly, yak meat resembled beef more than anything else. Not quite everything tastes like chicken. Washed down with some Lhasa beer, it was all good, and the trip was up and running.

I woke the first morning somewhat sluggish due to the effects of altitude sickness, particularly as one of the symptoms is that you do not sleep very well. Lhasa is at 3800 metres above sea level, and the air can have up to 40 per cent less oxygen than normal, so it took a few days to acclimatise. I was told the key was to move slowly and drink lots of water, both of which I made sure to do whenever possible. However, it was going to take more than some tiredness to stop me. I was there, and I was ready to go, so I met up with Pasang, and we headed off to see the Potala Palace. The Palace is one that you might recognise from pictures of Lhasa; it is a huge timber temple/palace situated on the top of a hill in the middle of the city. It is the spiritual home of the Dalai Lama (the fourteenth); as well it was his physical home before he left the country. It is now the most religious site within the Tibetan arm of Buddhism.

Tourists are only allowed in for one hour at a time, given its fragile wooden nature and the numbers of people that want to come through. Pasang and I sped through the temple for our allotted hour, stopping on the way to see various statues, altars, and even tombs. At least three of the previous Dalai Lamas are buried there, as well as some previous kings of Tibet. By Pasang’s count, we saw 26 rooms in the palace, which I thought was quite good until I asked how many there were – apparently there are over 1,000. Imagine playing hide-and-seek in that lot; you could be lost for weeks. However, to be honest, one hour and 26 rooms was more than enough for me. In the bowels of the palace there are no windows and the incense burns heavily. With the combination of the incense, the altitude, and the walk up the steps to get in (100 metres or more), I was feeling pretty wobbly and was very glad to finally get back outside in the fresh air, where I insisted on sitting on a step for ten minutes and not moving. Well, they had told me to go slow.

Once my head had stopped spinning, we continued walking around the outside of the Palace, and as we did so, Pasang told me more about local Buddhist culture. He explained that every day the more devout local Buddhists would walk one complete lap around the base of the palace, a journey called the cora, all the time spinning the Buddhist prayer wheels which are mounted on the wall round the outside. Sure enough, as I watched, there was a stream of local Tibetans walking past, all continually spinning the wheels with their right hands. I had a go at the spinning, but then I realised that it was more interesting just taking photos of the people as they walked round. The local people showed so much personality in their faces, so much of life that they had lived. I always hoped afterwards that my pictures did justice to the character and charm of the Tibetan people. As the trip went on, it became my habit to just stand around taking pictures of local people as they wandered past me.

No one seemed too worried by my taking photographs of them as they went round, apart from one woman who stopped to look at my camera out of curiosity to see what I had taken. I let her see the picture; I then explained where I was from and showed her one or two pictures of the Shanghai night-time skyline that were also on my camera. She just rolled her eyes and walked off.

After my earlier light-headedness, I felt that it was important to have a solid and recuperative lunch, so we went back to the Steak House, and I tried the yak curry, which was not bad at all. In the afternoon, Heidi’s plane was the first of the week to actually arrive in Lhasa on time. She made it out in one piece, and after surviving a slightly provocative start to the car journey back (“Hello, Pasang, I’m Heidi. I’m Chinese. Nice to meet you. So … do you want Tibet to be independent, then?”), we were all set.

After the Potala Palace, there is a second key temple in Lhasa, the Jokhang Temple. It sits in the most historic square in the city, Barkhor Square. (This is not to be confused with the largest square, which is the People’s Square, built right in front of the Potala Palace, an identikit of Tiananmen and the squares in pretty much every major city in China. The Lhasa locals do not like it much.) Anyway, it was to Barkhor that we headed the following morning. If the Potala Palace was the Westminster Abbey of Lhasa, Jokhang was more of a day-to-day church, albeit a big one. There was a huge queue of local worshipers outside waiting to offer their daily prayers.

There were also a lot of people outside prostrating themselves in front of the temple. This involved standing to offer a prayer, kneeling down to pray, lying face down on the ground, getting up, and then repeating the process over and over again. The worshippers even had specially designed elbow and knee pads to make the whole process less painful. They did this to offer themselves to the Lord Buddha, as a means to show their worship, but I could not help but think that there must be easier ways to do this. I lit some candles instead.

The temple was built by an early king of Tibet, who unified the region. He did this partly by taking three wives – one genuine wife, for love, and two others, for political purposes, from other factions and tribes. Having three wives seemed like asking for trouble in my book, but considering that two of them were from enemy groups, he really must have been looking for a challenge.

The tour continued up onto the roof of the temple, where we could see out across the city. By the wall stood a wizened old man who seemed to prove that devout religion and rampant commercialism need not be incompatible, as he alternated his prayers with charging tourists for having his photo taken in front of the city vista. Also behaving surprisingly in the temple were some of the junior monks who, in between prayer sessions, were hanging around, bantering with each other, and then they started to have a play fight. OK, so they were not really going hard at each other, but surely monks are supposed to be peaceful, respectful souls? It is not often you get to see brethren having a scrap.

We had another wholesome lunch (yak pizza) and then went to the park, where apparently there was going to be a local Tibetan opera show going on. There was indeed a show, with a fair number of locals sitting in the sunshine to watch it, so we stood by and watched for a while. To be honest, though, I could not really get into it. The singing sounded like someone treading on a cat, and the dancing involved a few performers in admittedly very ornate costumes just spinning around, much like you would see late on a Friday night in the local nightclub. Actually, the dancing was barely even that good, and when we realised that Pasang was not watching it either (“I find it boring”), we decided it was an acquired taste and moved on.

Our next stop was outside the city at the Sera Monastery, where the highlight is to see the monks sitting and debating their key issues, presumably theological, although no one that we asked seemed really sure. This debate provided a method of examination for them, as they were assessed on the cases that they put forward and their discussion of the doctrinal issues. The way that they did this was to sit round in a horseshoe shape, with the monks being examined sitting in the gap at the end. Then, some of their brothers would stand up in the centre of the ring and ask them religious questions. These were not casual questions, though, because as they asked, the monks would repeatedly smack their hands together right in front of the faces of the seated monks. Apparently, it was a sign of bringing enlightenment. The seated monks then had to respond.

That was the theory, although to me it seemed a bit unfair. The standing monks were shouting and beating their hands together as if their lives depended on it, whilst the seated monks were looking more and more as if they were going to cry at any minute as the hands kept smacking in front of their eyes. I was half tempted to step in to put the seated monks out of their misery, but I tell you, it certainly seemed to put the passion back into religion. If you ever have the chance to visit the region, it is a sight that I would recommend you see.

It is hard to go to Tibet and not to be aware of the cultural and political issues that surround the area and some of the hysteria, on both sides, that goes along with that. Still working in China as I am restricts me from being too blunt about the situation. All I will say is that it was very noticeable, and no great secret, that in every town we went to there was a local Tibetan half and a Han (ethnic) Chinese half. These had very different styles and cultures, and crucially, the two didn’t seem to mix. Pasang, who was Tibetan, admitted to us that he once had a Han girlfriend, and many of his friends would not speak to her. I have to say that during the stops in the towns I never sensed any tension there – unlike, say, the more recent events in Xinjiang. It was clear, though, that the two groups just did not get on. They had different ambitions and different ways of life. Pasang did prove willing to discuss the situation and his views, although he did so only within the confines of the car. Open discourse on this subject on the streets or in the monasteries was not encouraged

As for the future of the region, it seems clear that the National Government is using more soft powers to try to bring the Tibetans into the fold. Building a railway from Sichuan province to ease travel, increasing investment in the area to promote economic growth, and even building a theme park in Lhasa to encourage more tourism – all of these things inspire more people to visit and pass through Tibet, to the point that daily life becomes indelibly linked with the country as a whole. Hence the local people cannot live in isolation or ignore what is going on outside. There are controversies about this, of course, mainly the complaint that the area is being “Sinified” at the expense of the indigenous culture and traditions, but I could also see that this would bring more prosperity to the people there. Without the investment and intervention, I could not envisage Tibet ever advancing very far; it would be left behind in the rush for growth that the rest of the country was undergoing. Whether the local Tibetans cared about this or would prefer to carry on as they were is another matter entirely.

After an early start and most of the morning on the road, we had left Lhasa behind and were heading into the countryside. This was the real Tibet: barren, rocky, and dry but, so far, flat. However, we could see the mountains of the Himalayas off in the distance, and we knew we would soon be climbing to even higher altitudes. After a few hours of driving, we reached the next monastery, where we were to have lunch in the restaurant. Some of the monks were already eating there, and I thought for a minute they would show even more twenty-first-century spirit by having a beer … but it turned out they were only serving other tourists. Their purity was not to be doubted.

Our final stop of the day was at the Yungbulakang Palace, which was conveniently situated at the top of a large hill. It was a pretty steep climb up the steps, given the altitude that was now well over 4,000 metres, but we made it. I remembered the advice: go slow, go slow, which I did, and I made it to the top of the hill. It was a bit dispiriting, however, to see the local 70-something retirees streaming past us up the hill, seemingly without a care in the world. At the top we were treated to some fantastic views through the valley, until a storm rolled in and caused us some nervous moments; it looked as if we were going to get caught in a downpour. Suffice to say, we made it down the hill a lot quicker than we had gone up and were saved a soaking.

For dinner we went to a local Chinese restaurant, meaning I had to miss out on yak for a day. During the meal a local musician wandered in with what was apparently a Tibetan banjo, offering to play a song for anyone interested. I volunteered, and he enthusiastically plucked away at his particular tune, although I then felt a bit guilty to see that Heidi, the other customers, and even the restaurant staff all looked decidedly unimpressed with the song that he had chosen. After one track, Pasang gave him some money to go away and leave us alone. I guess the banjo is not cool in any language.

As we were eating Sichuan-style Chinese food, we ordered the usual array of meat, chicken, and fish dishes. We were then surprised when Pasang admitted that he had only ever eaten fish twice before in his life – and one of those occasions had been with us a day earlier. It turned out that in Buddhist culture every life in the world has equal value, so it is more acceptable to eat beef or a yak, whereby the life of one dead animal feeds many people, than it is to eat fish, where one life feeds only one person. It is even worse, I suppose, if you order a bowl of shrimps. I would love to say that this idea caused me some self-reflection and altered my eating habits to better preserve the fragile nature of life, but it did not. I still like fish.

We finished the meal fairly early and realised that, as we were staying the night in a small Tibetan town, there was not much to do. Pasang muttered that after four days there he would be killing himself; to be honest, there had not even been that much to do in Lhasa. Thankfully, I had had the rare foresight to stock my suitcase with some of my ever-growing DVD collection, and Heidi had also brought her laptop, meaning we could happily entertain ourselves. This was just as well, as the standard of our hotel was not quite high enough for putting flat screen TVs on the walls.

Before we had started on the trip, the tour organiser had made us nervous by saying it was inappropriate to wear either shorts or sunglasses in Tibet. I was heard to mutter to this that if they banned ice cream or beer, too, then I would not be going. However, when we arrived, it turned out that these rules only applied to the monasteries and temples; in general life, either were fine. That Friday was the first day that we did not have a religious stop as part of the itinerary, and out came my shorts. I was feeling pretty comfortable, until in the car Pasang told us what that day’s itinerary actually did consist of. Silent Qiang made no comment. Our route for the day was to go to the top of the highest mountain in that particular area and, after that, to see a glacier. Suffice to say, it was too late to change my clothes by this point.

We drove up into the hills to see our first sight, the Turquoise Lake. It certainly was very turquoise; if had not been so large you would never have believed it was natural. The stop was up at 4500 metres and actually in the clouds. We stood at the outlook alongside other tour groups, most of whom were giving me very funny looks for not having wrapped up in about four layers plus a hat. However, as we drove down the hill, the weather cleared and the views got better. We saw some stunning vistas out over the lake and into the hills, and I snapped away in the hope that my pictures would do the scenes justice. The colours were unbelievable; for the first time on the trip, I had that elated feeling of having reached somewhere completely detached from normal life, somewhere completely different from life in the city. Heidi and I absorbed as much of the atmosphere as we could before eventually returning with reluctance to the car.

In the afternoon we reached the glacier, and to be honest, the temperature was not as cold as it might sound. In fact, my main concern from a clothing perspective was not the shorts but making sure not to tread in yak dung whilst wearing sandals. Not that I would ever want to step in it, regardless of my footwear, but you know what I mean. Seated around the base of the glacier there were a number of locals, giving rise to a lot of haggling about how much money we would have to pay to take a photo of them. Eventually we agreed on a price, and I added to my Tibetan profile collection. Pasang admitted to us as we left that every time he visited the glacier, it had shrunk just a little bit, as the glaciers are receding at a speed of around 4 metres per annum. Given that the glaciers of the Himalayas range feed water into rivers such as the Yangtze, Mekong, Yellow, Salween, Indus, Brahmaptura, and the Ganges, providing water for anything up to 2 billion people downstream, this is clearly something of an issue. Certainly, the comfortable temperature we experienced did not feel very glacial.

We spent the night in the somewhat small town of Gyatse, staying at their finest hotel (which was not saying much). The hotel did have a small bar, and Heidi and I challenged Pasang and Silent Qiang to a game of darts and then pool. The pool challenge was nicely balanced at one game each as we went into the decider, with Heidi stepping aside and another tour guide joining my team. The game was getting close to the end when, to our surprise, there was a power cut, and all the lights went out. In the pitch black, with only a few balls on the table, there was only one sensible solution – play on in the dark! We used a mobile phone to light the cue ball and my camera to light the pocket.

Then, in one of those so-random-it-has-to-be-true moments, the new tour guide, who had previously shown himself to be a solid if unspectacular pool player, turned on the style. In the dark, he nailed all three remaining striped balls into the pockets in a row, before turning to slam home the black and win the game. To be fair, he was as surprised as we were.

Back on the road, and whilst still wondering how the tour guide had been quite so good at blind pool, we were headed for a monastery again. We toured round Gyatse’s holiest spot, the Pelkor Chode Monastery. Then we wandered through the back streets of the town. This was the local Tibetan end of town, and each alleyway and street was filled with cattle and animal life; there was no hiding their farming roots here. Let me just say that I was glad I did not have my sandals on. Again, we saw a big distinction when we crossed over from the rural Tibetan end of town into the built-up Chinese Han end of town, full of shops and businesses. The differences were like black and white.

We spent the afternoon in Shigatse, which is Tibet’s second city. It had a decent market, in which I showed my ace negotiating technique for buying local products – key tip: run away! When the market woman runs after you to offer you a discount, you know you are on getting a bargain. For dinner, I ticked off the final missing dish on my Tibetan culinary tour – a yak burger. It was high quality, but it did lead me to wonder where I could get some yak for my barbeque at home – and why was there no A1 sauce?

Shigatse was another hive of evening entertainment, so we again spent the evening sitting in the hotel room watching a DVD. This time we were on Al Pacino in Scarface, and I tried to explain to Heidi why, “Say hello to my leeetle friend” is one of the best lines in movie history – ever.

I was confused and blamed it on Chairman Mao. Chairman Mao once said that he wanted everyone in China to be eating their rice at the same time, which is why if you look at a time-zones map, despite its huge size, China comprises all the same time zone, even though it overlaps into other zones in every direction. Given that we had travelled so far west from Shanghai but were still on the same time zone, it meant that things were thrown out of kilter. For instance, just a few kilometres across the border in Nepal, the time was two hours behind. We had some dark mornings and very light evenings. Going to bed when it was still light made me feel as if I were about 10 years old again and enjoying the late-evening summer light of the UK.

When the sun finally came up, we had another monastery to visit on the tour. Although smaller, this was still important within the local Buddhist world, for this particular monastery housed the tomb of the previous Dalai Lama. His remains were encased in a tomb made with three tons of gold plus an assortment of rare gems. For an area inhabited almost solely by peasant farmers who were surely earning less than China’s still surprisingly low average wage, this display seemed quite gratuitous to me. I found it disappointing – although on reflection I decided it was, unfortunately, not that surprising – that the local Buddhists should be so devout but that so much of their organised religion’s wealth stayed in the temple, when the value in the temple could have fed the local population for many years. I have much respect for the local people’s faith and devotion, but in life generally, I have always had a healthy disregard for the structure of organised religion and for the way that many bigger organisations have taken the resources away from their followers.

Once back on the road, we discovered that the route we were on was the G318 Chinese highway, which you could join in Shanghai on the east coast and follow all the way to the Nepalese border. Although I knew that it was not exactly a dead-straight road, I was still surprised to see a big road sign that marked the distance from our current location back to Shanghai: exactly 5,000 kilometres. China, lest I ever forget, is a big place.

As we were spending a lot of time driving, there was naturally some debate in the car about what music would be played on the car stereo. Pasang introduced us, thankfully briefly, to some local Tibetan music, and then he spent a lot of time playing Michael Jackson, who at the time had only just passed away. As a big MJ fan, I had no problem with this, although I was a bit surprised by some of the conspiracy theories that were being thrown around following his death. For example, according to Pasang, he had been murdered in a plot set up by his ex-wife to get the kids back, whilst Heidi’s take was that they were not actually his kids in the first place. I pointed out the minor detail that when Prince, Paris, and Prince II appeared in public for the first time at Jackson’s memorial service, it had been striking how much they all looked like their father. Ah, but apparently the surrogate father had been chosen specifically because he had a facial resemblance to Jackson. Ri-i-i-i-i-ight. Silent Qiang was so surprised by these theories that he was stunned into further silence.

We set off early for Everest and drove up through a mountain pass and across the top of a ridge, from where we could see a clear vista of the Himalayas in front of us. It was a wonderful sight. Trust me, whichever mountains you have seen, anywhere in the world, you have never seen a range as spectacular as this. We stopped the car to admire the view and to appreciate where we were. I had started this trip looking for the best places in the whole world to go – surely we had finally managed to find one!

For all you trivia fans, the Himalayas contain five mountains of over 8,000 metres, and from the pass we could see four of them clearly, with only the big one still stuck in the clouds. However as we came closer, Mount Zhumulangma, as Everest is more locally known (trust me, one day it will come up as a quiz question), started pointing its head out, and not much later we saw it with a flawless view.

We continued the drive, reaching Everest lower base camp, which is made up of a series of tents, some optimistically called hotels. I did ask if we wanted to stay there, but my suggestion was politely declined. This was not just by Heidi but even by Pasang. Silent Qiang declined to comment. From the lower camp, we hopped onto a bus, which drove us up to the main Everest Base Camp. On the journey we were accompanied by a hardy Canadian ex-climber, who seemed to think that the authorities had sold out a bit by allowing a bus; he assured us it had been much more a pure mountaineering experience when he had had to hike the last few kilometres when he came the first time, back in 1981. Well, maybe, but I know which I preferred. Even now, when I tell people I have been to Everest Base Camp, they assume that it must have been some major hardship to get there and that we had had to hike our way up there, gasping for breath at every step. I tend not to mention that we went on a bus.

In fact, I have to admit that for the upper Base Camp, even I had imagined lots of rugged climbers camping out in near-zero temperatures, traipsing through the snow dressed in parkas and picking the ice out of their beards, before starting their assault on the summit. In reality, there were not many people there, except some soldiers and a few other tourists. And if not quite shorts weather, it was actually pretty warm. The camp was at 5,500 metres above sea level, and yet it sat on the floor of a valley, at the base of the mountain. Everest, which tops out around 8,900 metres, towered imperially in front of us. Reaching Base Camp, we went as far up as you could go without an official climbing permit, and still we reached just past halfway to the top. Standing there, leaning back to take in the whole of the majesty in front of me, I had to admit that when it comes to Everest, the word “high” seemed entirely insufficient. We stood for some pictures and did that tacky tourist here’s-my-hand-touching-the-top-of-the-mountain type of pose, before the bus came to take us back down again.

Our time at the upper base camp had been short, but it was fantastic to have been there and seen the site. I celebrated with a beer in one of the “hotels” back at lower base camp, and I also sent my parents a postcard. We then set off on the next leg of the journey, which involved a 4x4 drive through some pretty desolate, rocky terrain with the mountains rearing up behind – the sort of places that would have happily doubled up as a random planet in a ’60s episode of Star Trek. We didn’t seen any Klingons off the starboard bow, just a couple of wild Tibetan donkeys which, according to Pasang, apparently was a good thing. Disappointingly – and I was looking – there was no sign of a Yeti, though. I wonder, if they did find a Yeti in Tibet, would they make Yeti curry out of it?

Our hotel for the evening was the Everest Snow Leopard Guest House in the town of Old Tingrit. I would not bother looking for the town on the map. Suffice to say that the tour company had seemingly forgotten to mention the hotel’s star rating on the itinerary. The success rate of the lights working in the room was about 50 per cent. There was not much to do in the town (village? hamlet? road?), and with the DVD stock nearly exhausted, we resorted to taking money from Silent Qiang at cards. It was a place to move on from as quickly as possible.

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