Hitchhiking In Tibet
“Do you realise that normal people prepare for months for a trip like this?” remarks my friend Lee as we stand knee deep in snow on a 5000 meter high mountain, trying to get the car back on the road.
They do? I feel I have prepared well for our hitch-hiking trip by packing winter clothes and by reading the section on Tibet in my road map book of China: “Avoid discussing politics, religion and other sensitive subjects. Bring sunglasses and -cream.” Besides, pick a location, pack and go has always been our travelling style.
But yes, I can see now that it’s certainly going to take more than two days two get from Lhasa to Kunming overland, and that we should have believed the German guy with the frost-bitten lips who’d just driven from Shanghai to Lhasa on a motorbike. He said hitch-hiking in Tibet was impossible and the roads very, very bad: Snowy, rock-strewn and treacherous. This man, we decide in our insane optimism based on the road map, must be lying. .
For political reasons I’ve always been reluctant to go to Tibet, but when I start seeing photos from the new train thundering across the grasslands of Qinghai and northern Tibet, I cave in.
Of course those pictures were taken in summer or early autumn, not in April. In April it’s pretty much: Can’t see a thing because of blizzards.
On the train we meet a Chinese cook eager to educate us about Tibetan history, and learn that before the Chinese liberated Tibet, Lhasa was just a swamp. Also: Potala Palace was built by a Chinese king.
Ah, yes, the Potala Palace, object of a hundred documentaries and scourge of Michael Palin. As usual with world famous monuments it looks much smaller than in the pictures and, it turns out, isn’t the real tourist attraction in liberated Lhasa.
No, what all the red baseball cap-wearing hordes with their shrieking guides have come to see is in fact Potala Square; a veritable Tiananmen in miniature and home of a gigantic phallic monument celebrating the everlasting friendship between Tibetans and Chinese. Around it stand statues of rifle-thrusting workers and peasants, all staring grimly and with much clenching of eyebrows at the Chinese flag in the middle of the square.
In the morning, thousands of Tibetans shuffle round and round Potala Palace in prayer, many prostrating themselves for hours in front of the holy site. In their Tibetan garb and long braids intertwined with red cloth they look startlingly out of place as they lie face down on the wide, Parisian boulevard-style pavement while Han Chinese sporting the latest fashions saunter forth. Shiny cars with black windows zip by on the four-lane highway dominating the square, built to celebrate twenty years of successful liberation.
When the new Qinghai – Lhasa railway was built, many people were concerned about increased masses of mainland and foreign tourists further destroying the Tibetan culture. These people should worry no more – there’s not much left to destroy. At least not architectonically. Apart from some traditional buildings and piss-stinking old winding streets around another site for much prostrating, the Jokhang Temple, Lhasa looks like any Chinese city with green glass-tiled monster houses, badly built apartment blocks and total absence of connection with the past. It seems to be Han Chinese running most businesses. We ask ten or 12 shop keepers how to say “hello” in Tibetan, but nobody knows.
When we discover by leafing through a bunch of old postcards that Potala Palace used to be mirrored by a large, smiling lake lined with weeping willows and traditional Tibetan houses, it all gets too depressing, and in a hurling blizzard we start our hitch-hiking trip back to Hong Kong. The driver is a man we met in a bar the night before and he is a professional. Effortlessly he thunders down the road at 140 km/h in the grey weather while wearing sunglasses, talking on his mobile and watching a movie on the little TV monitor thoughtfully placed on the inside of the windshield.
I have to say I feel some pangs of nervousness several times on that journey as we hurtle through the yak-dotted scenery, and have to laugh in retrospect. Nervous – nothing! That road was paved, and wider than the car! But it is certainly a cause for concern that after an eight hour drive we are just a few millimeters out of Lhasa, according to the map.
The next morning we are immediately picked up, by an official in charge of bringing Guangdong technology to the hinterland. To accommodate him and other investors, a spanking new city, Zhilin, has been plonked down, last week it seems, in the middle of the mountains. I suppose “downtown Shenzhen” doesn’t look more incongruous among these towering snowy ranges than “Tiananmen Square, Shenzhen” does in the middle of Lhasa.
The kind official doesn’t really get our explanation about hitch hiking in Tibet but with unfailing Chinese hospitality he drives us to the next village, immediately turning back the way we’ve come. We catch another lift with some Tibetans who also turn back after dropping us – and that’s the end of private cars in Tibet. We have no choice but to start walking… and continue walking. Not only aren’t there any private cars; there are no vehicles at all.
According to our plans we should be making the descent into Kunming by now; instead here we are with a bottle of water between us, three hours’ walk from the nearest town. Adventurous! We are very happy to pay the next driver 100 yuan each to take us across the next mountain range, scarily high and covered in snow. From then on we realise we are basically travelling across Tibet by taxi.
The road soon becomes a narrow gravelly track hacked out of the vertical mountain face. One centimeter too far to the right and we will plunge scenically into the gully several hundred meters below. Far above there’s a movement, a furious flapping of wings: Vultures. A sky burial! The map book warns against unauthorised visits to these too. But when we pass the feather-flying spot on our way up and forever up, we see they are only feasting on a dead yak.
Our driver on this, what turns out to be a 17 hour, non-stop drive, has just popped out in the morning to get some fags when we shanghai him. He is wearing slippers and a thin jacket. That’s why Lee and I with our superior footwear and clothes have to get out again and again to push the car out of snowdrifts every time it gets stuck, which is often.
When it starts getting dark and we’re pushing the car, waterless and foodless, across yet another endless expanse of snow, we start thinking that distrusting the words of Germans isn’t always a good idea. And neither is trusting the words of certain locals: The next town turns out to have no cash point although everybody said it does. After paying the driver and the hotel we thus have 100 yuan for the journey to Kunming, still well over two days away.
This is what real adventure is all about. Not your boring, predictable “Hitch-hiking through Tibet in a couple of days” but real, concrete fear of death, first from plunging, then from exposure and finally from starvation.
Back in Hong Kong I now have a Zen-like indifference to the minor irritations in life such as being burgled and being told I will soon lose my house. What’s that compared to tumbling down a ravine, broke and really, really hungry?
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cecilie_Gamst_Berg
Related posts
Tags: about tibet, china, go to tibet, hotel, lhasa, lhasa railway, potala palace, tibet, tibetan, tibetan culture, tibetans, to lhasa, to tibet, travel