I have got back to the smog of Beijing this afternoon and already the memories of Tibet have a sharp colourful quality. The country is basically a high mountainous desert with some large and wide river valleys where irrigation allows cropping and fruit trees over the summer, which is just starting The biggest of these valleys starts in the west from Mt Kailash and when it reaches the sea after flowing eastwards is known as the Ganges. Right now out in the villages it is sowing time and I didn’t see any tractors but there were a few of those two wheel rotary hoe things as well as yaks and horses pulling ploughs. After that all the work is done by hand with shovels and hoes, men and women and plenty of traditional dress as well as sitting around drinking tea.
According to my main source of information Tibetans are now a minority in their land but I can’t check that here and I will report on this and other similar matters when home. In the villages they are the locals and having a wander around these places is a bit like going back in time apart from mobile phones, motor bikes, solar water heaters and TV. The houses all have a walled courtyard in the front where animals are kept and the bottom floor is also theirs. Wood is stacked about as well as dung patties for the fires. A couple of cows are mandatory and right now the yaks are all out grazing. Yaks are the Tibetan equivalent of the palm tree in the Pacific. Everything they produce is used as well as providing reasonable meat. The people are very indulgent to children and readily swap a smile, and in marked contrast to the other lot they speak quietly. However when they are on a mission at some religious site you can get moved sideways pretty forcefully.
I got to do some wandering because of the Nepal earthquake which also had a serious effect in southern and western Tibet. I was supposed to go to the Tibetan Everest base camp which I was looking forward to because if you say you went to an Everest base camp everyone thinks you have done some hard tramping. In Tibet you can get there by bus. But it was not to be because the area was wrecked as was the road in and that lead to a rearrangement of the itinerary. Then a couple of days later when the scale of the problems became known the Chinese government stopped all travel to the cities in the south because of possible road damage due to ongoing aftershocks, but also because they took over all the hotels for refugees. We were now on itinerary three and I took the chance to get a bit of village wandering built in.
The two main things that strike on Tibet are firstly the effects of the altitude and secondly the Tibetan culture. Lhasa is 3650 m and I topped out at 5050m on a pass. There were several 7000m peaks sticking out above the brown foot hills – more like foot mountains, and a general feeling of being up high.. I was somewhat concerned about how it would affect me and dutifully started the pills the day before. As long as I was not in a hurry I coped really well and gave my 30 year old smoker guide a run for his money, as it were, but never actually running, more climbing very steep steps and stairs in monasteries. I thought getting to 5050m was pretty good and it is a pb, however at the top of this pass it was like a circus with bus loads of people and souvenir sellers all over the place. When I got to 5000m on the wonderfully named Ecuadorian mountain, Chimborazo, there were about six very tired people including Kay and it felt like an achievement.
The big thing about Tibet despite all the amazing physical stuff is that the locals’ culture is their religion and it is a very colourful, esoteric, complicated deal. And I am an expert after innumerable monasteries, temples, chapels, stupas and all sorts of other things that are holy. This is not the place to even try and explain Tibetan Buddhism so I will cruelly simplify and say it is all about getting enough points on the board so you don’t go to hell, don’t get reincarnated as something nasty and do try to end up in nirvana. You achieve this by living a good life and doing stuff that the multitude of gods will look favourably on. Tibetans like to go and visit holy places and do choras (clockwise walking around), on the inner chora in the chapels they have a word to each effigy, which are statues of past religious leaders, and put yak butter in the candle burning places, and place small denomination notes where they think it will work best. The piles of money are astounding even if the notes are only a few cents – in one room where counting was going on there was a pyramid of notes a metre high. If your knees are up to it you might duck walk under the shelves of scriptures so the accumulated wisdom falls on you. Mine weren’t. The number of times you do these choras helps but there is also the middle chora which is around the main building and then the exterior one around the outside boundaries. Some of these places a very large. The most famous big one is around Mt Kailash which takes about 10 days in an inhospitable place.
Not only do you walk around, clockwise, you can also prostrate yourself onto the ground whenever you want. In front of the most important monastery in Lhasa there are people doing this for hours on end using wooden sliding bits on their hands and most have a thin little mattress. Those really trying just have an apron and the hand things and do the prostrating all the way instead of walking a chora. All this stuff is not isolated to a few nutters, although there are degrees, as this is what people do in their holiday times and days off work. My guide and driver who one would not see as innocents got quite excited about the placers we visited and did most of the stuff described above. I had great mana because I have seen and listened to the present exiled big boss of all things religious, even though we couldn’t understand a word he said.
Where I stayed in Lhasa was close to the important place and I had to walk by it to get to restaurants so every time I had to go the long way there and back because I was too scared to try going the short way which was anti-clockwise. Most pilgrims carry a personal prayer wheel which with no visible effort they keep rotating (guess which way) and I decided I had to have one as my only souvenir, and after much getting my eye in I finally found one that was pretty much like most of the ones I had seen. Bargaining took place by pressing buttons on a calculator and the deal was done. When I got back to my room I had a go at making it turn, and I damned if I know how they can make it look so effortless.
Food was not a highlight but in most places you could get something that didn’t worry one too much. The first thing I saw on the first menu I looked at said “Fried mutton lung”. Yak sizzler was my favourite and I also tried yak butter tea, once. The more rustic places don’t have tables you can get your knees under, instead they have a chest you can’t even get your toes under and they are quite low which is fine for Tibetans who generally are shortish. I usually ended up with a small pile of escaped food on the floor. Tibetans don’t eat fish because one of their burial options is to be put in a river and eaten by fish, known very logically as water burial. An alternative is sky burial which is to be left on a mountain for the big birds, just like the Jains who use towers. The guide who talked about this on the way to another monastery showed me a photo there of a large number of vultures doing exactly that and I bet he thought my hurried walk away was very western.
Our driver liked to hang over the middle lane just in case some unnecessary option appeared and when it didn’t, lean long on the horn. He was like all the other local drivers and a lot better than the ones from the mainland who happily stop for photos on skinny mountain roads expecting everyone else to wait. No wonder a few of them come to grief in NZ.
It is hard to give a meaningful description and explanation of this country. For me it was plan B when a tour to North Korea had to be cancelled and I had not given much thought about what I would be doing because it was organised in a bit of a hurry. I can say it is right up there on my list of top places I have been to. It is memorable and if you get the chance to visit you must do so.
Tomorrow Kay arrives along with Colin and June and we are off touristing in mainland China.
Dennis