Tibet
Day Fifty Nine : Xangmu to Tingri
Xangmu high street, quiet as the grave when we arrived, erupts into life at night. Sounds of shouting, drilling, thumping and banging drift, unhampered, through tightly closed windows and into my head. I pull all the blankets off the unoccupied bed next to me, curl up in a foetal ball and hope it will all just go away. It doesn’t. It gets worse. The hissing, clunking, industrial sounds seem to be augmented by flashes and crackles. Can someone really be spot-welding out there at 12.15? The prospect of how exhausted I’ll feel in the morning keeps me awake for at least another hour.
Wake at eight, but it’s still pitch dark. In fact, it doesn’t begin to get light for another half-hour. The government of China, in their wisdom, decreed that the whole country, wider than the United States, should have only one time zone. The further west you are the later daybreak comes.
The street outside, apart from the frequent clearing of throats and whistling of spittle, is quiet again this morning. I can find no satisfactory explanation for the nocturnal activity other than that Xangmu is a frontier town and frontier towns have a life of their own. We walk down the hill to resume the customs procedures.
A truck marked ‘Four Friends Transport. Live Long Friendship Nepal, India, China, Bhutan’ is at the head of a long queue of vehicles heading towards Nepal. There isn’t much room at the customs, and trucks, individuals, a bewildered-looking tour group and a flock of sheep are all trying to get through at the same time. Young, officious border guards in slack uniforms either push people around or ignore them completely. High up on the wall, and conveniently inaccessible, is a small box marked ‘Complaints about Immigration’.
By the time all the formalities have been completed - and to be fair, a British film crew is a very rare sight in Tibet - it’s early afternoon. Our final departure is marked by a small ceremony at which the manager of the Bai Ma Hotel gives us each a white scarf to bring us good luck on our journey. He seems a decent man, doing his best, though I notice he doesn’t have a complaints box.
As we drive out of Xangmu (with few regrets, in my case) the squash of white-tiled buildings eases and we can see the wooded gorge we climbed yesterday, plunging picturesquely down to Nepal. The road to Lhasa (now, inevitably, re-christened the Friendship Highway) continues to climb steeply, through forested slopes and past tumbling waterfalls, until it brings us at last to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. The Roof of the World was once a seabed. What lay beneath the ancient Sea of Tethys was heaved up onto the top of the world by the same collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates that built the Himalaya. It now rests at an average height of 13,100 feet (4000 m) and from its steep sides stream some of the world’s greatest rivers: the Indus, Salween, Yangtze, Irrawaddy, Yellow River and Brahmaputra.
In the relatively short distance from Xangmu, we’ve made dramatic progress, vertically, if not horizontally. We’re only 20 miles from the Bai Ma Hotel, but 5000 feet (1520 m) above it. Apart from a few poplar groves, the tree cover has gone and on the mountainsides bare rock shows through tight, tussocky cover. At a cold, exposed little town called Nyalam we stop to have papers checked before entering a new administrative zone. Women in masks sweep the street, outside a modern building a prosperous-looking man makes two of his employees unroll a length of carpet, which he proceeds to examine with great care. Recently completed terraced housing runs along the side of the road, an early indication of Beijing’s plans to make Tibet a new frontier. This is a cheerless place, though J-P, never daunted, manages to find a shop selling wine and we roll across the River Matsang two bottles of Dynasty Red to the better.
The road continues upwards, over long, undulating, brown hills, until we reach the prayer flag-bedecked pass of Tong La, over 17,000 feet (5180 m) above sea level and the highest place I’ve ever been on earth (coming in well ahead of my previous record, the hot springs in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile at 14,700 feet (4480 m)).
Everything is bewildering, strange and wonderful. Running the length of the southern horizon is a chain of towering, white peaks and on the grassland below us a herd of yak, short-legged creatures, bodies close to the ground, their thick, black hair standing out against greeny-brown hills behind them.
We stop and walk a little way from the car, every step feeling like 20 at this altitude.
But that doesn’t dampen the exhilaration.
It’s dark when we reach the town of Tingri and, after some initial confusion, find our way off the highway and into a capacious courtyard, which looks like that of a monastery, but in fact belongs to the Snow Leopard Hotel. Life centres around a big, low, woody room with painted beams and a brick parqueted floor, largely lit by the glow from a stove of burning yak dung in the centre of the room. This is what was lacking in those inhospitable Annapurna cabins: a fire, so simple and so intensely welcoming. We cluster round it and a lady with braided hair and rubicund, muddied face offers us yak butter tea. Nigel describes the taste as ‘liquid gorgonzola’, which is absolutely spot on. The rancid smell of the tea and the sharp aroma of yak dung smoke is not as horrible as it sounds. I find it odd, yes, but interestingly strange and unfamiliar, quintessentially Tibetan and proof that north of the Himalaya everything is very different.
In the dim recesses of the room we’re served a very good meal of noodles with mushroom, pork, green peppers and lumps of soft, white, doughy Tibetan bread.
We’re advised to break out the sleeping bags tonight. It will be below zero in our un-heated rooms.
Leaving the fire is the hardest thing, but once across the yard, beneath a bracingly clear night sky, I’m into a pretty little room, so different from last night. Proper curtains, a colourful wall with a frieze of painted flowers. Beside the bed I have a wooden cabinet, also very charmingly painted. By the light of a very dim bulb I can make out leering gods, dragons, clouds, waves and what look very much like flying teeth.
The only setback tonight is that the bottles of wine from Nyalam proved undrinkable.
Day Sixty : Tingri to Rongbuk
Though perfectly comfortable in my congenial little room, sleep was light and fleeting and broken by twinges of headache and nausea. The zero temperatures with which Mr Tse Xiu threatened us didn’t materialize and when I should have been sleeping I was engaged in an energy-consuming nocturnal striptease, peeling off the various layers of clothing I’d gone to bed in and dropping them out of my sleeping bag one by one.
Open the curtains to find a yak calf helping itself to a bowl of water which has been put outside my room.
Wash in what’s left of it and join the others for breakfast. On the way there I notice a big satellite dish in one corner of the courtyard. There’s no evidence of a television anywhere about the place.
This is my first chance to have some time with Migmar, who has so far been preoccupied with getting us into China. He’s 27, the son of Tibetan nomads who were enlightened enough to send him to school, from where he won a place at Lhasa University. He read Chinese (the Dalai Lama would have approved) and English, which, despite the fact he’s never left Tibet, he speaks pretty well.
I’m impressed by the richness of the decoration on almost every inch of the timber columns, beams and ceiling boards, and Migmar explains that in the 9th century a Tibetan warlord tried to eradicate Buddhism and the only way that the culture survived was through a pictorial code. The Buddhist heroes were depicted as animals: dragons, tigers, even sheep. What began as a cipher developed into a rich tradition of imaginative painting, a particular target during the Cultural Revolution, when a renewed and virulent attempt was made to destroy Tibet’s Buddhist past.