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.