as part of my preparations and research for embarking on this trip, i read a number of books, as well as watching a number of films and tv shows. one such book was "himalaya" by michael palin, and the accompanying tv series. in it he traverses the himalaya from pakistan, through india, nepal, tibet, china and down to bangladesh. as i had never been to any of these countries, it seemed a good resource.
in his travels through nepal, along the annapurna trail and to langtang, michael was accompanied by a sherpa called wang chu, a caring man of incredible talent and what you might call "extremely" fit. he has summited everest twice, and on the second trip, arrived a little earlier than everyone else, and so promptly lay down and had a nap. at the top of everest. for a while. during the course of the nepal adventures, wang chu was michael palin's shadow, helping, carrying bags and giving advice on the landscape and assisting in dealing with altitude. great! i thought, now all i need when i head to nepal and tibet is a "wang chu" of my own and making my way through these foreign and unfamiliar places will be a breeze.
and so it was that my journey commenced from the tibetan plateau to nepal along what would turn out to be the craziest road in the world.
i had made my way from gyantse to shigatse by bus after parting ways with my fellow landcruiser buddies kris and deb, who were to make their way back to lhasa and shanghai. i managed to secure a lift in a 9 seater minivan with 14 people, 2 babies and 4 bags of animal feed bound for shigatse, where i was to try and find a lift for the 8 -10 hour journey to the border.
i checked back in to the tenzin hotel and ran into martin, a german guy who i had run into about 4 times in various different places around tibet, and hung out in shigatse for a few days biding my time to see what turned up. then i heard a rumour of a group of land cruisers departing first thing the next morning to pick up a tour group at the border. bingo. time to leave.
the journey to the border was pleasant and uneventful, if you can call driving through the most amazing lunar landscape, through lovely dusty tibetan villages and through sweeping plains with glaciers and views of mt everest uneventful, but there you go. it was compared to the final stages from nyalam down to the border at dram. and i had a lovely nepalese businessman to share the journey with. he spoke good english, and was on his way home from doing some work in tibet, which he does quite regularly. he shared his food and beer and told me many a tale of life in nepal.
approaching the border from tibet, we crested a 5000m pass and then promptly dropped 3000m in around 60km. the crazy highway, as it has become known to me, was cut from the hills and sheer rock faces, rarely with any guardrails and covered in snow and ice. i stopped looking down after one to many glances out the window revealed no road between the edge of the tires and the 300m drop to the valley floor. the nepalese man could obviously see that tensions were high, as he kept offering me more beer. i finally accepted one, when we drove into a waterfall and stopped. "will clean car" our chinese driver said. yeah, either that or the force of the water dropping from 400ft up will peel the roof off like a can opener. i kept this option to myself. no major incident occurred, and we drove off in a clean car with the thunderous roar still in our ears.
once we got the bottom and i got shakily out of the car and considered asking someone for a cigarette, it dawned on me how unprepared i was. no hotel, no currency for a nepali visa, no transport accross the border for the following morning and no transport to kathmandu. then the lovely nepalese businessman appeared next to me and said "we're here". and then informed me that the hotel we were standing in front of was run by his friend.
"you stay here, have dinner with me, and then we go to the border together in the morning." he said.
"but i haven't changed any money yet, and the banks are closed"
so this man gets his mobile phone out, makes a quick call in nepalese, hangs up and says "okay, lets go." we go into the hotel and just as we sit down to dinner, a woman comes over to the table, greets the lovely nepalese man warmly, opens up a bag of different currencies and asks how much did we want to change?
i knew how much the visa was, but wasn't sure how much i needed for a ride to kathmandu. "it's okay" says the nepalese man "my driver pick me up tomorrow at the border, you can get a lift to kathmandu with me." the next day, surely enough there was a driver in a big black 4WD waitng at the border and drove us the 6 hours into kathmandu.
"thank you very much for your kindness." i said "but i'm afraid i don't even know your name."
"wang chu." he replied.
"no kidding."
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
the anti-plateau
after an extended hiatus in the blog, thanks to mao's finest and their slightly capable but unsurprisingly huge surveillance division, i'm back online. whoa, so much to catch up on.
tibet
the climb up emei shan was great for all the reasons i had hoped, and one important extra. as the sun rose over the sea of clouds surrounding the jutting peak of of the mountain, i turned around and low and behold, a rare sight apparently - tibet.
it rose up out of the clouds in the distance, pretty much higher than anything else. not surprising given that i was on the (i thought) rather high emei shan at 3100m, and there's tibet, with it's 8000m peaks and it's valley floors 500m higher than my precipice.
3 days later i flew in to lhasa and marched with the pilgrims around the barkhor, ate yak and drank butter tea, which incidentally i never really developed a taste for. i think someone got it right when they hypothesised that if they called it soup, it wouldn't taste quite so bad. hmm... butter soup. sounds quite nice actually.
as emails in the absence of blogging have told, the journey then turned to the plateau proper. we hired a land cruiser, which is a little more efficient than i would have liked, but given the areas and distances involved and the limited time frames of chinese visas and tibetan travel permits, it was clear tibetan public transport would be too slow. if there is an overall lesson that tibet instills in all it's travelers, from which they can take what they chose into life itself, is that things happen at their own speed, and when they are meant to happen. heinrich harrer tells of a nomad who gave him some of his most valuable advice: the haste of europeans has no place in tibet. i suspect the tibetan universe is not a middle man, you deal direct with the factory.
there is much to be absorbed over many recollections to give a fully coherent description of the tibetan experience, but let me say that as a country it is very real, with real people and real challenges, quite grounded in ways the myth of shangri-la, the kingdom in the clouds, brushes over.
on the whole, the tibetans are very poor, and the chinese are reasonably wealthy, creating more of a divide than a tension. they seem to spend most of their time ignoring each other, the tibetans going about the task of being buddhists, farmers and families while the chinese go about being keen entrepreneurs or government types. i think next time i visit i will learn the mandarin for "don't yell at me, i'm not going to buy anything". i might also learn "excuse me, i couldn't help but notice you just spat on the floor of the restaurant. would you like me to get you a cloth to wipe it up?"
anyway, the plateau, like a huge mountainous desert covered in prayer flags and dung smoke and beautiful stones, was a wonderful experience, and the tibetans were a joy to be around. the monasteries we visited were an emotional mixed bag. they can be truely charged and lovely places, but it is a little sadly that i report the extortionate entry fees they charge are certainly not going to the maintenance of the monastery, not even the Potala. the monks do a great job, but obviously on a shoestring. i guess the money goes to beijing, who probably use it to fund the police stations and PSB and SSB agents that are located at each monastery. at the Potala, there are 300 staff - 80 monks who clean, cook, carry out maintenance and serve as guides, and 220 security staff, who....er....secure the huge crowds of less than 200 people who go through there every day. every time anyone asks a monk a question, a mysterious chinese man appears at their shoulder, also interested in the response.
a plateau it is, but only in part. the soaring physical and emotional peaks the landscape gives birth to are profound. and yes, when you crest the pass outside shegar and before you lies chomolungma, known to the west as everest, you think to yourself "by gum, that actually looks like the highest mountain in the world".
it's absolutely huge.
tibet
the climb up emei shan was great for all the reasons i had hoped, and one important extra. as the sun rose over the sea of clouds surrounding the jutting peak of of the mountain, i turned around and low and behold, a rare sight apparently - tibet.
it rose up out of the clouds in the distance, pretty much higher than anything else. not surprising given that i was on the (i thought) rather high emei shan at 3100m, and there's tibet, with it's 8000m peaks and it's valley floors 500m higher than my precipice.
3 days later i flew in to lhasa and marched with the pilgrims around the barkhor, ate yak and drank butter tea, which incidentally i never really developed a taste for. i think someone got it right when they hypothesised that if they called it soup, it wouldn't taste quite so bad. hmm... butter soup. sounds quite nice actually.
as emails in the absence of blogging have told, the journey then turned to the plateau proper. we hired a land cruiser, which is a little more efficient than i would have liked, but given the areas and distances involved and the limited time frames of chinese visas and tibetan travel permits, it was clear tibetan public transport would be too slow. if there is an overall lesson that tibet instills in all it's travelers, from which they can take what they chose into life itself, is that things happen at their own speed, and when they are meant to happen. heinrich harrer tells of a nomad who gave him some of his most valuable advice: the haste of europeans has no place in tibet. i suspect the tibetan universe is not a middle man, you deal direct with the factory.
there is much to be absorbed over many recollections to give a fully coherent description of the tibetan experience, but let me say that as a country it is very real, with real people and real challenges, quite grounded in ways the myth of shangri-la, the kingdom in the clouds, brushes over.
on the whole, the tibetans are very poor, and the chinese are reasonably wealthy, creating more of a divide than a tension. they seem to spend most of their time ignoring each other, the tibetans going about the task of being buddhists, farmers and families while the chinese go about being keen entrepreneurs or government types. i think next time i visit i will learn the mandarin for "don't yell at me, i'm not going to buy anything". i might also learn "excuse me, i couldn't help but notice you just spat on the floor of the restaurant. would you like me to get you a cloth to wipe it up?"
anyway, the plateau, like a huge mountainous desert covered in prayer flags and dung smoke and beautiful stones, was a wonderful experience, and the tibetans were a joy to be around. the monasteries we visited were an emotional mixed bag. they can be truely charged and lovely places, but it is a little sadly that i report the extortionate entry fees they charge are certainly not going to the maintenance of the monastery, not even the Potala. the monks do a great job, but obviously on a shoestring. i guess the money goes to beijing, who probably use it to fund the police stations and PSB and SSB agents that are located at each monastery. at the Potala, there are 300 staff - 80 monks who clean, cook, carry out maintenance and serve as guides, and 220 security staff, who....er....secure the huge crowds of less than 200 people who go through there every day. every time anyone asks a monk a question, a mysterious chinese man appears at their shoulder, also interested in the response.
a plateau it is, but only in part. the soaring physical and emotional peaks the landscape gives birth to are profound. and yes, when you crest the pass outside shegar and before you lies chomolungma, known to the west as everest, you think to yourself "by gum, that actually looks like the highest mountain in the world".
it's absolutely huge.
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