After almost two months on the road, I was now halfway through my trip, just another 1500 miles across Western Tibet to Kashgar. Tingra marked the last place for me to pick up any supplies before I headed out to the high altitude desert that makes up Western Tibet. While I ate my dinner and wrote a couple of postcards, two Americans who I had met in Lhasa showed up. The frigid temperatures of evening had cut through their clothing. They both looked a bit shaken. We all ordered bowls of ramen noodles and tea to get warmed up. They told me how they had taken off a week or so back to hike to the Everest base camp. It is a strenuous hike up to the 15,000-foot [4573 meter] main base camp, which takes a couple of days of walking or a single day in a jeep. At the base camp they met an American climbing team from the Seattle area that had just come down off the mountain. Days before, the peak had claimed the life of one of their expedition members. My friends wanted to get down to Tingra, so they asked the climbers if they could ride in the back of one of the expedition trucks. There were two trucks that had a single seat open in the cab, but they decided to ride together in the back of a single truck. During the descent down the jeep track, the other truck that had the open seat lost its brakes and tumbled down the mountain out of control destroying all the cargo in the back of the vehicle. Fortunately the driver had jumped out of the truck before it started accelerating too fast. The tumble banged him up and sent him into shock, but he was still alive. When the convoy got to the main Tingra road, they told the two Americans that they could not take them any farther. They would have to walk the last six miles. By the time they arrived at the “Everest View Hotel” in Tingra the sun had already set two hours earlier. They could not get over the fact that if they had picked the other truck to ride in they would be dead, that the fact that they were alive came down to such a simple, random and almost mindless act of picking which vehicle to ride in.
When I first noticed this couple back in Lhasa, I sat next to them in Tashi’s. I could not help but overhear their conversation. Their voices sounded full of energy and excitement about their first trip to Tibet. They had both recently arrived from Kathmandu. Neither had previously known the other, but they quickly found that they had similar visions of what they wanted to do in Tibet. They were filled with enthusiasm about all the different treks they could do in this desolate and mystical country. When I saw them in Tingra fatigue showed in their eyes, the harshness of travel and life in Tibet had taken its toll on their bodies and their minds. They were returning to Kathmandu for some rest, relaxation and recuperation.
As I walked back to my room I took a moment to look up at the brilliant night sky above me. Since I spent most every hour of the day and night outdoors I became keenly aware of the heavens above me. I always knew the current phase of the moon and how many more days remained until the next full moon. During the day I could tell the time by the position of the sun in the sky. Without the light pollution from big cities, the stars and the Milky Way shown with an intensity that is difficult to ever see in the USA. A brilliant flash of light from the south side of the Himalaya created a fantastic silhouette of Mt. Everest and the entire Himalaya. A few moments later there was another flash and another. Back in India and Nepal the monsoon season had rolled in. Apparently a lightning storm raged back on the south side of the mountains. For the next couple of nights I was treated to images of lightning storms illuminating the highest peaks in the world.
The Road To Mt.Kailash
“The Abode of Gods,
King of Mountains,
Himalaya you bound the oceans from east to west,
A northern yardstick to measure the Earth”
– Kalidasa (Kumara Sambhava)
In Tibetan Buddhism there is a mountain called Mt. Meru at the center of the universe, the center of the Buddhist mandala. It is the connection between the physical world that we live in and the spirit world. Tibetans believe that the mountain called Kang Rimpoche, or Mt. Kailash, in Western Tibet is Mt. Meru. An arduous 32-mile path encircles the mountain. It is said that if you walk this circuit 108 times you will achieve nirvana or enlightenment. To make a pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash and walk just one kora is a once-in-a-lifetime event that every Tibetan wishes to do.
Two roads cross Western Tibet, the “north road” and the “south road.” In 1992 I hitchhiked and walked on the north road to reach Mt. Kailash in mid-October. I struggled through a cold and brutal, month-long trip. Sitting in the back of Chinese cargo trucks day and night, the metal frame of the trucks pounded against my bones for days on end. At least on the bike I could decide when to stop and rest. I would no longer be at the mercy of a crazy Khampa truck driver. On this trip I started out for Mt. Kailash on neither the “north road” nor the “south road.” I traveled on a track that marked a shortcut between the road to Kathmandu and the “south road” to Kailash. During my research, I had looked for the track, some maps showed it, some had nothing. In 1992 I had cycled the road from Lhasa to Kathmandu. I remembered seeing the turnoff for the path at the time. I just thought to myself, “I think that I am in the middle of nowhere, that path REALLY goes out into the middle of nowhere.” This time I did not cycle past the turnoff. A few yards off the main road, a young Tibetan boy on horseback looked at me as if I had most certainly taken a wrong turn. No one in their right mind would leave the main road and head northwest into nowhere.
I lost the track a half dozen times. I knew that I had to go west toward Paiku Tso Lake, so I would just head cross-country until I hit the braided path again. On the hard surface of the stony desert the difference between riding ‘on the road’ and ‘off road’ disappeared. The track would split into two and three different paths. My mind raced with thoughts of which one to take. The last thing in the world I needed was to spend a day riding in the wrong direction. West, west toward Paiku Tso Lake, I checked the US military maps, the Chinese government maps and my compass. By late afternoon, I spotted the turquoise blue waters of a large lake. I knew that I had made the right choice. From where I stood, I could follow a line up the north ridge to the top of the 26,397-foot [8047 meter] summit of Mt. Shishapangma. I watched the massive moisture-laden monsoon clouds of India and Nepal push up over the tops of the Himalaya. Back in San Francisco I used to watch clouds similarly push over the forest green tops of the Santa Cruz Mountains. I climbed inside my sleeping bag, listened to the short-wave for a couple minutes, ate a piece of chocolate, and laid down to sleep. This evening I knew that everything that I had ever done in my life, every bike ride, every book and map I read, every trip, had led up to this exact day, to this exact moment. Everything I had done before was just preparation for this ride across nowhere, for a dinner of ramen noodles and flat bread by myself in front of the biggest peaks in the world.
The Buddha’s first noble truth states that “Life is suffering.” On this day I started to come to my own understanding of the first noble truth, “Everyday is a struggle.” The day started easily, I cranked out six miles with no problems. The next 12 miles took eight hours of pushing, pulling and hauling my bike through fine yellow and white sand speckled with small tufts of green grass. When I tried to push the bike from behind, the front wheel would plow into the sand, when I tried to carry it, I could only get about ten feet [3 meters] before exhaustion prevented me from going on. Fellow travelers had informed me that there would be many more miles of thick sand on the south road to Kailash. On days like these I was Sisyphus, the figure in Greek mythology burdened with the task of pushing a large boulder up a steep mountain hillside everyday, at the end of the day the rock would roll back down the hill and he would have to repeat his struggle once again the following morning. I knew that everyday I continued moving closer and closer to Mt. Kailash, but on days like this the mountain seemed an interminable ways off.