The convoy of cars blazed a trail through Gansu province. It was an ugly place of occasional belching factories and isolated no-stop towns, occupied by Chinese Muslims who cycled suicidally down the middle of the road. We drove through markets with row upon row of suspended cattle carcasses and colourful fruit, the strains of Chinese music wailing from shabby shop doorways to compete with the Tibetan tape in the car. It was raining and through the drizzle I watched the landscape change. The further we got from Lanzhou, the greener it became. Melon fields spanned the valley, bordered by rocky hills peppered with scrub into which small caves had been excavated by the farmers. Avenues of poplar trees lined the road and, beyond, fields of barley rolled in the wind.
Soon the sheer scarp of mountain ranges were ahead. It was such a dramatic change in the landscape that we knew the Tibetan plateau was not far away. We began to climb through precipitous mountain valleys, dodging barren chasms and clefts of jagged rock. Then, high up between two peaks standing sentry at either side of the road, we stopped. It was the old border between China and Tibet.
As we crossed the high pass we were ecstatic. A chorten, a white and gold monument draped in prayer flags, marked the border of the area known as Hortsung by the Tibetans. There, I saw the first Tibetan man walking along the road in his tsarer, and Tibetan writing on a whitewashed wall. At the side of the road, a woman with long, plaited hair sat spinning yak wool on a finger-sized spindle. We had arrived. Before us lay the great plains of central Asia, land of the nomads, a vast panorama of flat grassland and green hills, soft and undulating, receding into the horizon. Sometimes we saw rocky crags rearing in the distance. Tsedup breathed in and told me he could smell home. I felt as if I had passed into an unknown world of solitude and mystery.
Suddenly the featureless landscape of our earlier journey was marked by curious totem-pole structures. On top of each tall mountain we passed was a collection of wooden stakes and prayer flags, spiking up into the sky. I asked Tsedup what it meant. He told me that they were holy mountains, laptse, and that these structures marked the Tibetans' offering sites to the mountain spirits. At the foot of a hill we passed a small monastery and a monk collecting water from the stream, his fuchsia robes bright in the dull afternoon.
At eleven thousand feet my ears popped. Tsedup's friend Gondi took the wheel – Sando had been driving for seven hours and needed a nap. He soon fell asleep on the back seat and began to snore gently. I was beginning to feel conspicuously underdressed in my thin, linen skirt and T-shirt beside Dolma, resplendent in full traditional costume. With her tiny frame, delicate features, leopardskin tsarer and strings of coral and turquoise, she was, without doubt, the prettiest woman I had ever seen. She smiled at me as Sando let out a loud grunt and the two of us giggled. It was strange not being able to talk: so much was left to instinct, gesticulation and facial muscles. But we played with Gonbochab, her little boy, who at first clung to his mother to escape the weird white woman next to him, then relaxed enough to let me play with the little doll that he insisted onbanging on Gondi's head as he drove.
Soon we turned off the main road and continued the last part of the journey on a winding dirt track through the mountains. We stopped to wait for the rest of the convoy beside a huge lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Tsedup told me this was a bird sanctuary. The cold wind ruffled the water towards me as I peed in a ditch. Then I slipped and ruined my skirt. My sandals were now full of muddy water as well and I sighed. Not only did I feel underdressed for meeting my in-laws, I was now cold and wet. What I had been thinking of when I chose to wear my office clothes to come to such a wilderness, I shall never know. I don't think I had grasped the concept of where I was going.
As we moved on, nomad encampments of black yak-hair tents became visible in the valleys; yaks and sheep were grazing on the slopes. In the steady drizzle of the early evening the tents seemed to offer little in the way of shelter for their inhabitants and I began to wonder if our new home would be the same. These were pitched close to the road on blackened scrub and looked considerably less attractive than I had imagined. In contrast to the breathtaking vista I had witnessed when we first arrived at the Tibetan plateau, this land was more closed in and claustrophobic. I saw a nomad woman in a sodden sheepskin tsarer shovelling yak dung into a basket and children staring at the cars as we passed. I looked forward to seeing the true splendour of the Machu landscape, as Tsedup had described it: although I had been excited at the prospect of living in a tent, I had also hoped that the beauty of the surroundings might compensate me for the loss of home comforts. This area was bleak and I couldn't conceive that somewhere like this would feel like home. I felt anxious.
After two hours of winding through the mud-sludge and mountain fog, we rounded a sharp bend at the top of a pass. The convoy stopped and Tsedup fumbled with the door handle.
This is the Wild Yak range!' he exclaimed. This is Machu soil!' Then he jumped out and ran to the cliff edge of the road. We followed and everyone stood in the pattering rain to survey their beloved homeland.
Far below, the first bend of the Yellow river meandered through the mist that shrouded the grassland. The Amnye Kula mountain range, deep green and dense with peaks and valleys, rolled into the distance. Herds of black yaks grazed on the shallow escarpments and a flock of sheep scrambled beneath us on the shale and rocks. The horizon was blurred by rainclouds, but it was an exhilarating sight and I was stunned by the power and drama of the landscape before me. It was just as Tsedup had described it.
The men climbed up to a stony ridge high above the track, where prayer flags flapped wildly from wooden stakes. Tsedup gave a wild, triumphant cry and flung his arms in the air. At last he was home, and as his voice ricocheted around the mountains, the other men began whooping and shouting, called repeatedly upon the mountain gods, giving thanks for his safe return, tossing fistfuls of long hda, 'wind horses' – small paper squares with pictures of horses – into the wind. The thin slivers of paper fluttered down into the valley and out of sight.
We descended from the high pass to the small town of Machu, which lay in the flat river basin. The car accelerated down a long, straight track of dust and stones, crunching over the gravel and spitting out shingle from the tyre grips. The last pale shades of thin light still illuminated the sky, but dusk would be swift tonight as the sun had already been snuffed out by the creeping fog. It was a race to get there before dark, and Tsedup explained that we still had another six miles to drive through increasingly rough terrain. I hoped the Santana was up to it, and wondered how my parents were faring in the car behind. Ten hours of breakneck roads and precipitous valleys had probably finished them off.
As we sped through the deserted streets, I realised that the town was not quite as I'd expected. I had often asked Tsedup what it was like and, in his search for a suitable parallel, he had told me it resembled a town in the Wild West. I had imagined sandy streets, wooden buildings, tumbleweeds and saloon brawls, but apart from the horses standing outside restaurants, it seemed like just another concrete rural town with rows of squat buildings lining the road. Everyone had shut up shop and it had the air of a ghost town. I glimpsed two streets that day, and Tsedup told me that there were only three altogether. It certainly was a small town and, as this was to be my only haven of civilisation for the next six months, I hoped I would be able to unearth its charms before too long.