Lhasa to Kathmandu: A Long Unedited, Rambling Affair

(I wrote this as an email to several people, in a free-ranging style, which, as is usual for me, didn't follow the rules of punctuation, capitalization, or good sense. It turned out to be rather long, so I am posting it here, to be edited, refined, deleted, whatever, at a later date...)

lhasa was good, in the sense that i was able to rest, spend too much on foreign good, and have a wander around on something other than a bicycle. it was bad in the sense that the place is being overrun by chinese migrants, is being paved over and built up with shopping malls and expensive restaurants catering almost exclusively to han chinese, leaving the tibetans confined to their small piece of a rapidly expanding city. i have an image in my head of the pilgrims who have troubled themselves to make their way to lhasa - the trip of a lifetime for some - staring in amazement at temples to capitalism in communist china ("communism with 'Chinese characteristics'" is the official explanation for the free - and massively corrupt - market in china, meaning that a completely stifling political environment is still alive and well in the middle kingdom), clutching a color brochure advertising "Sale!" in english (a language they were even less likely to read than chinese) for some useless household items they have no hope of affording. and of course the police. police everywhere, in uniform or plain clothes, checking out pilgrims, checking out monks, checking out foreign tourists. they have little tables all around the jokhang circuit, sipping tea and eyeing the devout as they circumambulate tibet's holiest temple. they stand in a cluster in the middle of the barkhor square (just outside the temple). there are no fewer than 3 police offices within a stones throw of the wall that the pilgrims prostrate at, one with the english title "barkhor square community service center", another called the "jokhang control office". if you get a tibetan to talk to you frankly, they will say that there are police posing as monks inside the temples. there are supposedly cameras watching the whole tibetan "quarter" (i wouldnt say that it constitutes even a quarter of the city anymore), which i have no reason to doubt. they station themselves next to sacred hearths where juniper and barley are burnt, scowling out from under their blue hats.

i had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a tibetan artist, who walked me around a few smaller monasteries, explained a few things, talked quietly about chinese policies. "they destroyed almost everything in their cultural revolution, and now they take is away from us to sell as a tourist attraction, a commodity". and we - the tourists - keep coming, by the thousands, giving our money to government run tourist sites. it was depressing. but i do have confidence in the tibetan people, though their whole culture may one day be only sustained in diaspora communities. the railroad is coming, and most of them know what this means. their spirit is incredible, and they are without a dounbt the most sincerely religious people i have ever encountered. i tend to extreme scepticism regarding religion, particularly as practiced in the West, but here, confronted with something so genuine, it merely put me at ease. there is no distinction between "religion" and "everyday life": it is a seamless whole, which is beautiful to see, to hear, to feel. this is what cannot be crushed under the boot, either of the police, the military, or consumerism. and it is gentle, tolerant, holistic, not revelatory or messianic: there is no "hard sell". they are indifferent to yours, or anyone else's, religion, or lack thereof: they are undisturbed by whether your sould goes anywhere, stays put, or doesnt exist. theirs is unshakeable.

and lhasa was the first place i was able to relax with some foreigners, speak a bit (actually too much, for those who know me...) of english, check up on news, be a bit lazy. i did visit one government site, the drepung monastery, which was enormous and relatively full of pilgrims. i was reticent to contribute to government coffers: as if anticipating me, there was a sign at the ticket window "all entrance fee go to maintenance of monastery, thus same as donation". i chuckled, borrowed tara's student card, and knocked about 20% off of my admission.

i left lhasa after dragging my feet, enjoying a bed a day longer than i had planned. the ride to yamdrok yumtso (one of tibets holy lakes) was pleasant, and the weather south from lhasa was considerably warmer than that in amdo (ie qinghai province and the golmud highway). a long climb rewarded me with a view of the lake, very blue against the brown hillsides of the mountains dropping down to its shore, and a few distant snow clad peaks. i was also rewarded with a view of the chinese hydropower project sucking water from the lake at 4500m, and taking advantage of physics, collecting energy on the way down to 3700m. unfortunately the lake has no significant inlet, so this is a one way ticket, and the lake cant be replenished naturally. "we'll fix that later", the chinese say...and this is one of 4 holy lakes in tibet? lest we become too righteously indignant, i should mention that most of us could very easily cast our critical eyes homeward to find the same errors taking place right now.

i met four foreigners on the way to the nepali border, all on the same day. a landcruiser drove by, with a head out the window and a friendly "jeff!", from didian and anne-claude, a french pair i met in lhasa several days earlier. they stopped, we chatted, discussed the pros and cons of travel by different modes, and they were extremely generous (tres
genereux) in their offer to cram my bicycle and me along with it into their truck to nepal. i politely declined, privately thinking they had better run before i change my mind, but in the end accepted a few
chocolate bars...we promised to meet up in kathmandu, assuming i could make it there within some reasonable period of time. an hour or so later, i met two fellows with trekking packs sauntering down the pass i was climbing. these turned out to be an argentine and an indian, 2 months into a 9 month walk from kathmandu to mt. kailas, via lhasa. we chatted for 20 or 30 minutes, they shifting their weight from the packs on their backs, i wishing they would put the packs down to keep me from feeling i was detaining them, traded news about roads, distances, the political and security situation in nepal, and so on.

from here to gyantse was no great challenge. the pass was beautiful, the glaciated mountain perfect in the deep blue sky of nearly 5000m, brown against white against grey agains blue. and then a nice roll down that afternoon and the next morning, past farms, whitewashed houses, pony carts. the dzong (castle) of gyantse was visible from 15km away, perched on a large outcropping over the town and surrounding valley. i had a look around, arriving too late for a tour of the pulchoi monastery there and its stupa, so i climbed the castle, along a path which was perhaps also designated as a toilet, with human dung all along it, and a disinterested ticket officer knitting, so i just walked up to the top and surveyed the valley. unfortunately, the weather had turned cold and cloudy, so i found a room at the "gyantse fur niture (sic) factory hotel" and settled it, watching boys and men plane wood for cabinets and beds, tibetan-style. it was the sort of place where you probably arent supposed to stay as a foreigner, but there is no record, no examination of a passport, just 20 yuan passed to the smiling woman and a room with two beds, a tv, and a washbasin.

i poked around the monastery the following morning, which was quite impressive. the stupa had small alcoves all along its perimeter with buddhas, pilgrims shoving into them and shoving back out. in the main monastery, the carvings were ornate and fantastic wood pieces, showing various manifestations of the buddha, present, past, future, angry, woman, and so on. old women, already hunched over, squeezed underneath walls stacked with ancient mouldering sutras to cleanse sin, stooping sometimes as low as a meter or less to do so. and always the drone of a chant in the semidark
.

that afternoon i headed south, hoping to take an alternate route to the nepali border, having been warned away from stone throwing kids and agressive beggars. the road was good, paved even, for 45km, winding up a valley past farms, through a rocky gorge, past hillsides coated with splinters of shale shining in a warm sun. it was all looking good as the road changed to dirt and i started to climb toward a pass near the indian border, when i saw a barrier down along the road. i debated whether to walk around it, or to just run straight in and see what happened. since i had no knowledge of it, i just went straight in. an army youth stopped me and asked for my passport. this wasnt a police checkpoint, but a military one, and it was probably for the better i didnt attempt to run it. while waiting, i watched young guys vault concrete blocks and hide behind trees before raising and aiming rifles. a few shots were fired in the exercise. so this place was serious. the soldiers inspected even donkey carts, and held trucks for half an hour and more. in the end, as i had guessed almost immediately, i was turned around: "go to shigatse", the main friendship highway to nepal. i sighed and headed off to shigatse, tibet's second city.

the place had grown since 1999, particularly on the outskirts, and it had the boutiques along the main street. the area around the monastery (tashilunpo monastery, seat of the panchen lama) had been "revitalized", meaning it was that boring sort of strip with clean vendors and shops, sterile in the bad sort of way. all the shops had english signs, which are always fun to read in china. there was a hair salon entitled simply "beauty": a promise? a threat? an arrogant statement? my hotel wasnt far away, a rambling place called the shambala tibet hotel. it was a dump, like most. the staff were bundled up next to a yak dung stove when i came in, sipping, or drinking, depending, chang - tibetan barley beer. they were convivial, and soon were dancing and singing to the man's tibetan banjo, recording themselves into an old tape player and giggling at the results, which i thought actually sounded pretty good. i stopped in at a chinese restaurant, where a nice sichuanese prepared fried noodles for 4Y (about half a dollar), and we talked about chengdu, kunming (his most recent stopover - for 10 years), and shigatse. how did he like it here? he was slow to answer..."its fine". he had been in shigatse 2 1/2 months, a very recent migrant. i asked why he came. "for money...what else would you do here?" a nice straight answer. i liked him, like i like almost every chinese i met, but i worried again about tibet's future, or if it had one. was there a government subsidy. "a small one, related to taxes" he told me. no cash subsidy, but i guess it had been enough. i almost told the guy that he wasnt charging the proper tibetan price for chinese food, since 4Y was much more of an eastern price for the food, not the 7 or 8Y one typically paid in tibet, but i figured he had time to learn, or fail and return to chengdu (which was where the vast majority of han in tibet come from).

here lies the problem: can you blame the poor chinese migrants, who are coming from sichuan, one of the most densely populated places in the world, poor, and told that money is easy if only you will go west, the place is virtually uninhabited, or only by savages? didnt something similar happen in the US: "go west, young man, and find yourself" and free land to the white people who were willing to homestead the "frontier"? meanwhile the indigenous population is overrun, often brutally and murderously (tibet in the 1950s and 1960s lost perhaps as many as 1 million people, the american frontier in the 19th century cost the native americans on the order of 5 to 10 million), by a greedy government. and so history repeats itself. can you hate the irish immigrant, the russian, the pole, who came to the US fleeing poverty, perhaps repression, and gained something at the cost of a slaughter they were ignorant of, likely didnt grasp or understand? there is a racist ideology that has to operate in both cases, bred in ignorance, and the conscious product of greedy men running the show, spreading it on down the line. of course there is individual culpability and responsibility, but the difficulty for me is to reconcile the warm feelings i have for the chinese people now living in tibet, and the cultural destruction it portends.

from shigatse the road was quite good to lhatse, a much smaller town about halfway from lhasa to the nepali border. there is a checkpoint outside of lhatse, so after grabbing a lunch, i headed out, walked around it into the surrounding fields, and rejoined my road, now heading south toward the gyaltso la and nepal. the pass climb was miserably windy, and the next morning it took me half the day to make 20km to the top, forced to walk the final 4km since i couldnt ride in the wind. this was the highest point on the friendship highway: one more and downhill to nepal. i struggled all afternoon to make the remaining 50km to the junction town near shegar, passing the signs for the qomolangma nature reserve ("qomolangma" is the tibetan name for mt everest, "sagarmatha" on the nepali side), and catching a very fleeting glimpse of the worlds highest peak from the pass, well over 200km away. the wind was incredibly strong down the valley, hurling pebbles at me as it raked the ground, stirring up huge clouds of dust as it stopped me dead in my tracks, bent over, eyes closed,
struggling sometimes even to stand. whatever one may say, winter is probably not the ideal time to travel southward on the friendship highway, at least by bicycle. that night, with another checkpoint to run, i lingered in baibo, a small junction with a few tourist hotels, a gas station, and several "chengdu restaurant"s, testifying to the place where the han come from. i stopped in a hui muslim restaurant, and ordered gan ben (a plate of noodles with a vegetable sauce - no meat since i asked for it "su de" ie vegetarian).

a young guy said "hello". i responded, and so began a very interesting talk. the man was tibetan, from northeastern qinghai (the tibetan region of amdo), here to help a friend. as the conversation progressed, it turned out he was helping a friend escape to nepal. this, he said, was often the starting point for tibetans fleeing china for nepal, the beginning of a 20 or 30 day trek over the himalaya. he said he was stuck here now for 3 days, waiting to find a driver to take him to shigatse. i had seen a bus heading there just outside the restaurant. "why not that one?" i asked.

the reason was that the police usually asked passengers in this part of tibet for their identity papers, and if you came from northern or eastern tibet, you could very well land in jail, since ostensibly the reason you were here was to enter or (more likely) leave china via nepal. so here he was, looking for a ride, staying in a hui restaurant because the police raid the tibetan restaurants, but not the chinese. the hui were watching us intently, ignorant of our conversation's topic. i asked if he was worried these people might inform the police. he was dismissive: "they are ignorant, they only want the money". i asked the hui where they were from. it turned out they were from linxia district in gansu, which i had cycled through on my first day cycling in august. the place had been deeply impoverished, and oddly, i had seen an english language program on the area on the tv in shigatse a few days before, describing the crushing poverty of the region. once again, the push and pull of emotions,
sympathies. it seems easy to say something without entering on the human scale, but things are blurry in real life.

i ran the checkpoint by moonlight, skating easily under the barrier as laughter floated out from the room the guards were stationed in. i had lunch the next day at "the ritz" (really! - written in english and everything), a tibetan tea house at the roadside where i had what was hopefully my last bowl of thugpa (yak meat stew) and the woman giggle each time she said "good" with a smile. i climbed the toward the lalung la, the final pass in tibet before the downhill to nepal, but stopped some ways short of the top, seeing inclement weather on the horizon and it being relatively late anyway. the next morning i finished the climb - i had only been 5km from the pass, which was flat - in the snow. the southern side became a giant snowfield, and soon i couldnt see much in the snowfall. by the time i reached nyalam, the last town before the border, a thick blanket of snow covered the road and everything else. i stopped for lunch, and as i set out, even the trucks equipped with snow chains were stopped. i was alone on the road, 10cm deep in snow and growing, with drifts driven by the wind thighdeep as i plunged into them and had to put my feet down. the wind howled, and my eyes squinted as i plowed on into the whiteout. this was the largest descent on a road in the world, and i was doing it in a blizzard, unable to see what i had been looking forward to: the transition from the plateau, high and dry, to the subtropics. night fell, and i pressed on, partly to avoid a last police checkpoint, and partly because my visa expired the next day. i had little choice in the matter. but when i stopped, i could tell things were getting warmer as i dropped down a small canyon which became soon a giant gap in the mountains, with the river dropping away far beyond sight. all around me was the sound of water melting, running, pouring, jumping. and in the very dim light, i could make out trees, something that had been absent from my presence, save for towns, for a very long time. the snow stopped, and then the rain stopped, and a half moon came out from the clouds overhead. the dim blue light, the rushing of water, the smell of green: in some ways i didnt mind greeting the subcontinent like this, mostly deprived of sight, but full of the other senses. mud caked my feet, my legs, my bicycle, ground my brakes down. finally, the lights of zhangmu, the border town, ran down the hillside, a very verticle settlement ranging several hundred meters down along the mountain, switchbacking to another country, another culture.

i managed to get two flats 1km from the town, one in each tire, so i walked the last bit, finding a hui restaurant to sleep in (heeding my friend's advice from two nights before). i had my last chinese muslim meal, tossed out some garbage, and went to sleep on a pallet in the back.

the next morning i crossed the border. zhangmu was already a mix, with over half of the establishments appearing to be nepali, trucks lining the streets definitely not chinese, the rounded sounds of the subcontinent contrasting with the more staccato chinese. it was snowing in zhangmu, and raining - pouring - in nepal. i wandered into the nepali immigration office, which was a cold concrete block with a handpainted sign, in marked contrast to the chinese post, which had die-cut signs and golden
characters set into the stone, a granite marker telling "the story of the friendship bridge". the officer was wearing a track suit and a fake nike wool cap. he said it was cold; i said it was relatively warm for me...the visa was a sticker cut from a page with scissors. i asked where i might change money, and he offered to change some for me. i had no idea of the rate, so i just changed a bit of chinese money (and later found he had actually given me a very reasonable rate). the road was almost a running river, stoney and muddy. 25 year old toyota two-door cars plied the road intermittently. people walked around in flip-flops, wrapped in saris. banana palms clung to cliffs over the river. i could smell masala from every small cafe i passed. the place looked very much like southern yunnan province in china, or the northern parts of laos or interior vietnam. further down, terraces scaled to impossible heights. my shiter cable broke in the downpour, something that had never happened to me before. i shrugged, sheltered under a cliff overhand, and pulled out a spare, glad i had one. i carried on, through several military checkpoints (i was never stopped, just a smile and a wave), reminding me that i knew there was an armed rebellion of some sort carrying on nearby.

i reached blacktop, and a bit further down reached a town. i stopped at the opposite edge to check on my map where i was in relationship to kathmandu, my journey's end. a man approached me and asked if i wanted to stay at his guesthouse. i asked how far it was to kathmandu, and found it was about 80km, probably too far to make it that afternoon. so i accepted his invitation. his name was rajinder, and he spoke wonderful english, which was good for me, since i spoke not a word of nepali. we stayed up into the night discussing the situation in nepal, the tourist trade, the mores of our respective societies, and food.

i slept well, and was ready for the final ride into kathmandu. the rain had stopped, though it was a bit cool, and i rode in the morning sun, happy to be somewhere well above freezing, looking into pastures at water buffalo, or into houses at chickens, passing stalls selling bananas, milk tea, sweets. distinctly not chinese. the place was considerably poorer than china, everything seemed old, crumbling, rusting, but this is also a result of the tropical weather, which which china, and tibet particularly, doesnt have to contend. i began the climb to the kathmandu valley, after passing monkeys in trees and men breaking stones on the beach of the now large river i was following.

my tube was leaking slowly, so i stopped to patch it for the 13th time (literally). when this was done, i inflated the tire, and it exploded, unmendable. my ride was over. i grinned to myself: after all of this struggle, after holding together the bike and its parts (and neglecting more serious maintenance when i should have attended to it), i was going to take a bus into kathmandu. i shrugged, walked back to the nearest village 10 minutes away, and was almost immediately picked up by a passing bus. i and my bicycle were taken up top, and i enjoyed the scenery the rest of the way on the luggage rack, 4m above the road's surface, as we climbed into the valley kathmandu lies in.

the pollution, in spite of the recent rain, was horrible. cows and chickens vied with vehicles and pedestrians on the road. everything looked like it was ready to crumble. the government ministries looked disheveled, untended. weeds, green, grew everywhere. there was washing hanging from a window of the supreme court of nepal. the pavement was cracked, broken, uneven. large muddy ditches lay in front of presumeably middle-class homes. the airport was in the middle of the city. NGOs plied the streets in their new landcruisers. men without legs craned their heads about on the sidewalk to beg alms. there was energy, though it was lethargic, bundled up due to the (relative) cold.

i got down from the bus, and asked directions for "thamel", the only placename i knew in kathmandu, and the main tourist district. it was easy enough to find, since the bus driver assumed correctly that that was where i was going. i was unprepared for what waited for me: a district that went on and on, english signs everywhere, hotels, shops, internet cafes, men asking if i wanted hash, marijuana, herion - "brother?". i walked one street and just decided it was hopeless to distinguish between them. i chose lhasa guesthouse, thinking i would like to support the tibetan expat community as part of a parting with tibet. the folks were tibetan, and the room was cheap, and had running water, so the deal was made.

i washed off 2 weeks of grit, cold, snow, sweat, and had a look around. rickshaws pestered, more offers of drugs, and few white faces. the place was on hold, waiting for the tourists that werent coming. over the last few days i have discussed and read up on the situation in nepal, which is quite volatile and unlikely to get better. the maoists rebels control an entire swath of nepal in the west near the indian border (where the movement began), and there is continuous fighting along several fronts with the security forces. both sides kill civilians consistently. boys and girls are pressed into service and then killed by either side. the country's economy, never robust, is falling apart, the fault of a massively corrupt government where the king disbanded parliament years ago, the military smuggles across the indian border, the us supplies the security forces with weapons that they immediately lose when the maoists overrun their outposts, there are bandh's (general strikes) called in some part of the country, or several, every day. it is an interesting situation to look at, but tragic for the people. it is a place where the king has the support of 6% of the population, and the maoists 14% (their program most closely resembles that of the sendero luminoso, "the shining path", of peru, another mountainous, desperately poor country with a military dictatorship, wracked by civil war for two decades where the peasants are caught in the crossfire, and western "democracies" prop up a dictatorship which arbitrarily detains and executes people regularly).

it was a good trip, a long one, and one that continually (last paragraph notwithstanding) affirmed my faith in people, even in the face of the ugly things we manage to do to one another.