‘Tibetan people never tired,’ he reassures us.
North of Lhasa, the trans-Tibetan Highway 109 runs alongside extensive railway construction. A billboard not far from the road depicts a speeding, white, high-speed train, the Potala Palace and a joyful group of ethnic minorities dancing and celebrating. Below runs the slogan, ‘The Tibet-Qinghai railway benefits all the peoples of China’. It’s a little disingenuous, as 91 per cent of the peoples of China are from the same ethnic group, the Han. But the fact remains that the railway is likely to change Tibet as much as anything in its history.
By 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, a 700-mile (1120 km) high-speed line across the Tibetan plateau will connect Lhasa, for the first time ever, to the Chinese rail network. It’s a fair bet that farmers and nomads, who make up 80 per cent of the indigenous people of the TAR, will find this less useful than the millions living in overcrowded conditions in the heart of China, for whom it will offer the chance of a new life, out west.
We pass two prostrating pilgrims, pulling themselves along the side of the road towards Lhasa, from which they must be several weeks away. The railway taking shape beside them will cross the entire plateau, one quarter of the land area of China, in 15 hours.
At Yangbajing a side road leads to a hot springs complex, where, in addition to storage tanks and a treatment plant that converts the geothermal power into energy for Lhasa, there is a lido with an open-air, Olympic-size pool. Immersed in the sulphurous water at 14,104 feet (4300 m) above sea level, surrounded by tundra and gaunt, grey hills, my body is, for the first time since arriving in Tibet, truly, unequivocally and luxuriantly warm.
Seventy miles further on, a town springs out of nowhere. A casual mess of a place called Damxung, where rubbish blows round and round in tight circles and hard men with pinched faces and red braids in their hair squat on the steps and watch us go by. Turning off here, we follow an unmade road up to Lhachen La, a 16,700-foot (5090 m) pass where the wind tears at the prayer flags and the sky looks ready for a storm.
This is the last pass before Namtso Chukmo, a sacred saltwater lake with great significance for pilgrims from all over Tibet.
First views of Namtso are dramatic. It lies, gun-metal grey and fringed with snow-dusted mountains. On a day like today it seems to discourage company. Yet down by the lakeside, near a cave hermitage called Tashidor, is a small town of tents and vehicles. The cliffs and rocks are festooned with flags and white scarves cling to a tall promontory like candle wax. A pile of mani stones (stones with mantras on) rises at one end of the shingle beach and despite the appalling conditions, people are out walking their koras or mini-koras, and a number of people are not even walking, but dragging themselves face first through the grit and gravel.
There are men in balaclavas and women with babies on their backs and scarves tied tight across their faces against the penetrating dust. There are figures whose big fur hats and robes of leopard-skin trim show them to have come from Amdo in the east. There are young men who weigh down their katags (white scarves) with stones from the shore, swing them round their heads and send them sailing up onto the cliff. The higher they go and the more firmly they stick the more merit for the thrower.
The hundreds, no, probably thousands of pilgrims who have defied the elements to come here and worship a lake, are largely poor, rural people. I don’t know quite what to make of their tenacious dedication. My rational, enlightened, Western self recoils from the tackiness of it all, the parade of plodding, vacant faces. Another, more instinctual side of me is fascinated by and even a little envious of the deep belief that can bring them all this way and turn this remote and unforgiving lakeshore into a sanctuary.
Day Seventy One : Near Yushu, Qinghai Province
Keep going due north from Lhasa, across the Tibetan plateau that makes up a quarter of the land area of China, and you will come to Qinghai, the largest of China’s 22 provinces.
It is not one of the world’s great tourist destinations. The Rough Guide is, uncharacteristically, lost for words: ‘Qinghai for the most part comprises a great emptiness.’ The Penguin Encyclopaedia of Places (which has 12 lines on Grantham alone) doesn’t mention it at all. Even when it does rate a few lines, as in Jan Wong’s China, there’s little to set the pulses racing. ‘Qinghai,’ she writes, ‘was the heart of China’s notorious gulag. Mention the place to ordinary Chinese and they shuddered.’
This morning in Qinghai it’s raining, but, aside from that, this land of prison camps and nuclear weapons laboratories looks dour, but not depressing. We’re running along a road not far from the town of Yushu, in a glacial valley 14,500 feet (4420 m) above sea level, hoping to meet up with a yak farmer called Sonam.
A sulky, grey sky sits low on the surrounding mountain tops as we pull off the road and bounce across rutted meadowland dotted with horses and cattle. In the centre of the herd is a black yak-skin tent with a motorbike outside.
Sonam greets us and Duker Tsering, the young Tibetan fixer who’s brought us here. Sonam is slim, around 30 I should think, and not at all what I’d expect a yak farmer to look like. His face is oval, quite unlike the broad, squarer features of Duker, and with soft, sleepy eyes and delicate, almost feminine features, he looks like the model for a Renaissance Madonna. He’s turned out in a smart brown suit, with a designer label sewn on the outside of the sleeve, and a natty pair of imitation crocodile-skin shoes. It crosses my mind that he might not be a yak farmer at all but an actor brought in to play the part.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt I follow him into the tent. It’s surprisingly spacious, some 30 by 20 feet inside. Sacks of grain and flour fill one corner, a milk churn and a pile of dried yak dung fill another. There are three beds, all piled with brightly patterned rugs, blankets and bolsters. The only light, spilling down from a hole in the roof, falls around the handsome head of Sonam’s wife. Tall, with a straw hat, woollen shawl, striped belt with red tassels and a big sand-coloured sweater, she’s stirring a bubbling bowl of yak cheese at a stove built from turf and topped with dried mud. Two of their three small children run in and out. The eldest girl, Sonam tells me, has just started school.
We sit down on one of the three beds. Salty tea is poured for me from a big, blackened kettle, and in lieu of sugar, a rarity on the plateau, Sonam adds a small slab of butter, which liquefies into a greasy scum across the top. It tastes, well, not bad, just different. As someone wisely said, if they called it soup rather than tea we’d have no trouble drinking it at all.
Sonam doesn’t speak much English and I don’t speak Tibetan but we sit there quite happily without saying much, listening to the spitting gurgle of the cheese and the yaks feeding outside. Not that yaks make much noise either, beyond the occasional low, respiratory grunt, like old men dozing in a library.
I offer to help Sonam’s various relatives herd the yaks and I walk beside an old lady who moves them along with sharp, chirruping cries and the occasional clod of earth thrown in the direction of any that step out of line. A grid of woven yak-hair ropes is laid out by the tent, to which the animals are tethered for milking. With Sonam’s encouragement I have a go, leaning in, head up against the rear quarters, catching the toasty smell of the thick fur, hands groping about wondering where the udders are and what I should do with them when I find them.
By the time Sonam returns to check on my progress I have coaxed out about enough milk for a cup of cappuccino. He’s far too nice a man to tell me off, but his laugh says it all. I must be much firmer with the udders, he says. I shall remember that next time I milk a yak. Sorry, a dri. (See yak sexing notes, Day Sixty Two.)