Matt and Vicki: September 2007

Wonderful Tibet. We presently wait in the town of Ali in western Tibet for a bus back down into China proper and to Kashgar, having completed our tour across Tibet from Lhasa.

But the fun commenced a month or so ago with the 48 hour train ride from Beijing. Controversial the construction of the Quinghai Tibet railway may be but it certainly allows for a remarkable train ride, passing through a series of vast landscapes on what appears to be one enormously long bridge and tunnel combo. Our 'hard' seats made for a less than very comfortable journey. Sadly, the sale of these train tickets is tied up in a Chinese mafioso ticket agent scam restricting the availablity of sleeper tickets in a hapless system that shames the Chinese authorities. Still, a bit of corruption helps the Asian world go round and we still made the journey without difficulty. For those interested, no-one checked our permit. Those critics of the railway who fear the environmental destruction of the Tibetan plain as a result of the railway seem to have something of a point. It is evident aloing the route that the Chinese have grand plans for a number of 'stops' along the way - the huge, presently deserted stations and sneaky mining towns that pop up along the line tell the story.

Lhasa is and remains the most fantastic city. Despite everything, the Tibetan quarter around the Barkhor is a wonderfully old and enchanting place, and no amount of Chinese drudgery surrounding it can diminish its spirit. The central Jokhang monastry is an incense filled ancient world of spiritual devotion, all yak butter lamps and mumbling pilgrims shuffling around the timeless chapels. The hoards of prostrators out front make the lethargic Chinese police stationed in the square opposite seem particularly pathetic. The walking circuit around the Jokhang is known as the Barkhor. The Tibetans are fond of walking around important places, a circumbulation known as a kora. Indeed, completing a kora is an especially meritorious thing to do in a country where collecting merit is what life is all about. The Barkhor is also a markety place, a combination of tourist tat and monkly goods, with burning incense at every corner and robes and prayer flags aplenty. An intoxicating place, and we never tired from wandering around the area. Neither, it seemed, did the chap who completing numerous side stepping prostrations of the Barkhar for the entire week that we were there. He may still be at it.

Sadly, travelling around Tibet independently at present is a bit of a hassle given that the Chinese persist with their pointless and corrupt permit system. In essence, one needs the permission of the Public Security Beaureau to go anywhere in Tibet. This permission is given, in exchange for a fee obviously, in the form of a paper permit which is place and time specific. No permit no go. However, the PSB will not generally issue a permit to individuals, only to tour groups created through certain officially sanctioned travel agents, even if that group is one person. Thus one must purchase the assistanfce of a travel agent to obtain a permit. The tour group must have a 'guide', and must include the hire of a vehicle and driver. In short, we scouted about before spending a small fortune on a 4x4 Toyota Landcruiser, driver and 'guide' for 17 days to take us where we wanted across Tibet with all the necessary permits. A tiresome business. There can be few places in the world where the government places such absurd travel restrictions upon visitors. But it's an especially fat cash cow. Comically, our 'guide' (who was at least Tibetan) hardly spoke English, had never visited some of the places we were going and wasn't even licensed to 'guide' foreigners. The poor fellow got clobbered with a 1000 Yuan fine at one checkpoint for his troubles (10 days wages) at which point we learnt that his limited vocabluary did at least include "fucking Chinese".

With the high altitude in Tibet we spent a fine week in Lhasa aclimatising including an overnight trip up to Nam tso Lake, an extremely beautiful mildly saltwater lake that does everthing to make travelling to the Tibetan plateau worthwhile.

And then it was off west. Our tour took us via the towns of Gyantse (where the Brits once invaded in the days when the empire was worried about the Ruskies marching through to India)and Shigatse to visit their variously famous monastries. Shigatse is the home of the Pachen Lama's, the Tibetan number two only to the Dalai Lama's, and their grandiose monastry. It remains a place of delicate political and religious machinations, with the current Pachen Lama abducted as a young boy by the Chinese and replaced with the son of communist party members. The police coach in the carpark attested to the seriously sensitive state of affairs, though the Chinese concert being televised from the park across the road and being broadcast to China proper as part of the ongoing propoganda about Tibet in the lead up to next year's Olympics demonstrated the present day approach to authoritarian control of the region. Walking the momnastry kora to the booming tunes of Chinese military numbers was an interesting experience. The Tibetan pilgrims carry on regardless.

Next was Everest. En route we celebrated Vicki's 30th birthday, an event marked appropriately by getting high in Asia. 5,250 metres, to be precise, a fine place to drink wine. From the grubby town of Tingri (Old Tingri to some, the previous road to basecamp is being sealed in advance of the Olympic torch coming next year and is thus presently closed - vehicles now take the upgraded walking track from Tingri, a rough 3 or 4 hours) we soon found ourtselves staring up the enormous north face of the top of the world. With something of a dream achieved in wandering around the Rongbuk monastry, the highest in the world, we found the cloud lingering frustratingly around the peak itself. The desolate, rocky valley through which one approaches the basescamp is a wild place, but all energies are focused on the mountain ahead. At basecamp itself it was a little difficult to imagine Mallory and Irvine in 1924 staring down the great challenge that was their one way journey given the incedibly offence army post that has just been constructed there. (We think that in April or May some American Tibetans visiting basecamp decided to burn a Chinese flag and erect a Tibetan one. The Central Committee's response, obviously, was to clamp down on the whole permit nonscense and to build a bloody great army post at basecamp. Nice). Still, it is a fantastic place, and when in the early evening the skies cleared and the mighty Everest loomed into view it was all very worthwhile. The following morning we were again blessed with fairly clear views, and the north face of Everest is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular views that can be had, a mesmerising experience.

From here we returned via Tingri, and were blessed with more spectacular Himalayan views, especially of the mighty Cho Oyu. A rough road, better thought of as a dirt track carried up bumpily west, past Shishingpagma, the only 8,000m hill wholly in Tibet, and picnicing beside Plekio Tso, to the army town of Saga. Barely worth a night's stop we pushed on along through mile after mile of properly spectacular scenery to eventually reach the muchly sacred Lake Manosarovar. Revered by millions or more, these holy waters are apparently a cure for a lifetime of sins. Its sits a short distance from equally important Mount Kailash, and on our second afternoon by the Lake the mountain conveniently revealed itself from its veil of low cloud, the famous ladder to heaven of the south face dripping with snow.

Those keen readers of this blog, of which there may well be none, will have seen Mount Kailash before. Whilst visiting Angkor Wat in Cambodia we enjoyed the wall frescoes, thousands of years old, carved onto the temple walls. The Bas Relief of the churning of the sea of milk depicts the gods and demons joining forces to spin mystical Mount Meru to create the elixir of life. Mount Meru, now revered by Hindus and Buddhists amongst others as the home of Gods and life, is closely associated with Mount Kailash - the holy mountain beside the holy lake from which four rivers flow to give life to the world. More of less. Indeed four great rivers fo flow from nearby Kailash and as they variously dissapear across Asia they water over half the world's population. To walk around, or complete the kora of, Mount Kailash is a pilgrimage dreamed of by many and is a very holy event indeed for the Hindu and Buddhist believers. It's also a very nice walk. At 52km the route is not a long one, but at all above 4,500 m and with a high pass on the far side of 5,600 m it is a somewhat breathless event.

Starting from the shithole of a town that is Darchen we moved clockwise around the mountain. The spiritual places keep coming as one wanders around; monastries, sacred rocks, sky burial sites (the Tibetans don't bury their dead traditionally, but chop up the corpses and allow the remains to be eaten by vultures - sky burial) sacred lakes, glaciers and more. Interestingly, the route is traversed by both Tibetan pilgrims and Indian Hindus. The mountain is sacred to all of them for different but related reasons. We found the Indians to be great fun, and they have different places of importance. At the first night stop at the Diraphuk monastry we enjoyed some amazing views of the north face of Kailash and found the energy to leg it up to a glacier right at the base of the mountain - an awsome sight. The Indians like to get up here to touch their foreheads against the glacier, to touch Kailash itself. The next day we made our way up and up to the 5,600m Dromla pass. En route we passed through a fairly appropriate death zone, an area in which Tibetan pilgrims can carry out a symbolic death. Presuming they carry on it is auspicious to leave behind something of oneself, usually a piece of clothing. Hence there are lots of cairns dressed in t-shirts and cowboy hats. The chilly struggle up to the pass was broken with various detours clockwise around certain rocks, a quick climb atop one for unexplained reasons and a sip of the holy water in a dirty puddle beside another. Sticking small denomination banknotes to other places with a smear of yak butter is also all the rage before finally reaching the prayer flag laden pass itself. The endlessly cheerful Tibetans sing most of the way in bellowing if far from tuneful tones and amongst the panting and sweating it's impossible not to be carried along with what is for the believers an incredibly holy and spiritual place and experience. On the way down any fatigue we may have been feeling was completly washed away by the incredible sight of five faithful prostrating themselves around the kora. Prostrating, the act of laying down face first and then getting completely up and moving forward a few steps before repeating the process, all the way around Kailash must be the ultimate merit achieving feat and seeing these five folk laying themselves out down this steep, rocky path was a remarkable reminder of the strength of faith. They smiled and waved as we strode slightly awkwardly past. Coming round the mountain we were drenched by a torrential sleet and rain storm before reaching the Ziruputh monastry and our second night stop. There, we shared dinner with a group of Kham monks from the eastern areas of Tibet, a region that we had taken in some months ago when in the Sichuan province at Tagong, the most Eastern edge of their domain. The following morning we completed the kora in warming and drying sunshine with a small caravan of yaks jangling their way along the trail. A truely amazing walk.

Getting out of Darchen as quickley as possible we drove further west onto the Guge Kingdom. Beyond having a fantastically enigmatic name and quite possibly being somewhere in Star Wars, this area on the border with India, provided us with an unexpected change of scerery. Indeed, the drive from Kailash to Zanda, the base town of the Guge Kingdom, proved to be about the most spectacular of the whole trip. From the plains of Manasarovar we climbed on hairily switchbacking trails over 5,000 m plus passes with a snowy Himalayan backdrop to the pastel shades of the valleys below until, suddenly, we discovered the fractured, desert landscape of the Sutlej valley. Amongst this fractured labyrith of valleys and canyons once nestled the ancient Kingdom of Guge (Goo gey). As an important link between India, Tibet and beyond, both written language and Buddhism came through here to Tibet. The small and dusty Chinese town of Zanda at least provided us with a shower (the first since Shigatse, a couple of weeks before) and access to the wonderful crumbling monastry at Tansparing. About 1,000 or so years a go over 3,000 people lived here, mostly in cave homes that we could still wander around and explore. Although the area was abandoned as a kingdom by the 17th century, the monastry continued in various forms. Sadly, the Red Guards did for much of the remainder during the Cultural Revolution, as they did with just about every other monastry in Tibet (and beyond). Here were found, however, the damaged reeked in that madness to be much much more abovious that in other places. Whilst most the monastries in Tibet have been significantly restored, Tansparing has been very much left. The scar are more obvious. Golden statues lay broken on the floor. Bolt holes on the walls that once supported giant halos are now a dot to dot outline. Piles of bricks now do for former alters. Some of the wall paintings are still impressive, almost all the more so for the stark surrounds. This ancient citadel climbs up a steep mountainside, and above the monastry complex would have been the residential area, now an amzing Indiana Jones style complex of crumbling walls and caves and staircases leading over cliff edges. At the top the old summer palace has commanding views over the spectacular if stark rock valleys. Intriguingly, underneath the summer palace, burried into the mountain itself, was the winter palace, a warren of low caves from narrow corridors hewn from the rock. Stunning.

And so we found our way to Ali via perfect sweeping views of the Indian Himalaya, the western region capital, a military town from which we can take a bus tomorrow. It has been a wonderful journey.

Matt and Vicki

Monday, September 10, 2007

Tibet

Sunday, September 09, 2007