The road to Lhasa (2)
LHATSE, TIBET. 1 June 2005
Much to my surprise I am still alive despite Fong Dong Bung's best efforts.
The guy is the Worst Driver in the Whole World. On the flats, he hammers the pedals, and the ancient, brake-losing Land Cruiser (LC) bounces and slams, drifting across from ditch to pothole to waterbar. Uphills, he simply forgets to shift until the engine sputters, and then he shakes the whole vehicle by shifting from fourth to first and then wondering why the other cruisers in our convoy pass us. When he is overdoing the speed we yell at him and he slows for five minutes, wondeirng what the problem is, then hanmmers again. LIFE, man, LIFE! I HAVE it and I want to KEEP it.
A sign reads "STAY ON ROAD. DO NOT DAMAGE GRASSLANDS" so Fong Dong Bung naturally drives off the road to short cut. While doing so the other five trucks in our convoy pass us. In Lhatse, Fong Dong Bung first drives into a tiny parkign lot and makes it impossible for the other ten vehicles there to move. Cowboy Hat Man yells at him and he double parks in the street. Thirty trucks honk him away. He then parks in the intersection of an alley and the main street, blocking TWO streets (there being a parking spot five meters away), and we bail, leaving him to deal with the vehicle.
We stop for a dance festival. Several hundred people are sitting in the dirt sipping butter tea and chang (barley beer you sip through a metal straw). A man in brown wool pants, a blue striped blazer, a wool cowboy hat and wearing huge Fitover sunglasses (the kind that 75 year old WInnebago drivers from Alabama, or me when sending 5.12 routes, wear) hands me his baby and gestures for me to take it. The baby is drooling and snot leaks from its nose. I pass it to a nearby woman. A young drunk guy and his friend offer me some chang. Tastes like a mix of lemonade piss vodka and pasta. The band is a couple of guys playing the cham-nheh, an instrument that sounds vaguely like a lower banjo and has two pairs and one lone string. The music is jangly and beat-heavy, and groups of kids and adults take turns doing dances in the fierce sunlight and dirt. Everybody is smoking and spitting and coughing. Everybody wants to chat but Tibetan is the third language I will probably fail to master this trip and I havnt yet started failing to learn it.
In Lhatse I toss my stuff onto my dorm bed and go wander through this hybrid Tibetan-Chinese town. The Chinese contribution to Tibetan society is good cheap food, wide clean streets and really stupid boring horrible architecture. Also snottiness-- Chinese here in my experience are arrogant and cold-- they seem to regard the rest of the world as barbarians. The Tibetans contribute wierd quirky homemade architecture (stone walls will yak horns in them, flowerpots, rows of yakshit and wood topping walls, prayer flags, etc), friendly smiles and hellos, endlessly curious children, and using tractors with trailers to move everythign from heaps of live chickens to heaps of live people.
At Tingri, we see the North Face of Everest and eat Chinese food. Later Macke and I hear the sounds of a cham-nheh being tuned and-- what the hell-- walk into a Tibetan house uninvited. There four guys are munching tsampa-- roasted barley flour mixed with a bit of water-- and we gesture at them and get to try the cham-nheh. It's tuned to something like an open dropped D and sounds like a mix between a banjo and a dobro steel-stringed buiter. Blues sounds good on it but the lack of frets really makes you pay attention. I belt out white-boy's version of "Mannish Boy" and the Tibetans are psyched. The Tibetans show us some riffs-- the guy can finger pick pretty well, and when he uses a pick he makes somwthing that sounds very vaguely like arhythmic bluegrass.
2 June XIGATSE.
We are staying at the Shambala. My stomach and ass are combat operations areas. This situation is not made any better by the stink of mold on the cheap-room third floor, where the toilet is, once again, literally overflowing with shit. What's WITH the CHinese? These guys invented gunpowder, writing, the printing press, distance earthquake detection devices, catapults, Taoism and bureaucracy, yet they can't build toilets you can flush or urinals that drain somewhere other than the floor. I can get it when Tibetans in farmhouses have open-pit toilets but this on the third floor of a hotel? The good news is, our room is 40 meters from the toilet. The Bad news is, our room is 40 meters from the toilet.
I pass out for an hour and then walk to Khumbu chorten whose insides are a spiralling set of rooms full of Buddhas and protector deities-- several hundred-- and whose walls are painted with thousands more Buddhas.
In TIbet you need to learn your Mandarin and your Tibetan. I'm too sick to really bother right now (even tho I usually quite enjoy figuring out new languages) so I'm reduced to pointing and waving and making faces when I buy bread and fruit for the next day. Tibetan seems manageable-- although where English or Nepali use 4 words to say "what is your name?", Tibetan uses way more: "Kirang tse la kari shugi yena?". Mandarin is grammatically a lot easier (no verb tenses, noun genders, verb conjugations, articles, etc) but the tones are a bitch. You think you're saying "thanks" but you're REALLY saying "my shoes are purple."
4 June Lhasa.
Today we get up at 4:00 a.m. to get to the La Tso (amazing turquoise lake) before they close the road for its daily dose of construction. AN older Brit is a nurse. I've seen her doing reiki ("energy healing") and she surprisngly tells me "use your Trinidazole for your guts" instead of recommended some bullshit homeopathic medicine. I submit and take the pills. I'm too weak not to. WHatever is in my gut is stronger than my own bacteria.
It takes the drivers another forty minutes to get organised-- one guy didnt' wake up; another lost his keys-- and Macke and I get all angry with the hurry-up-and-wait situation. Mercifully it's too dark for me to actually see how close to death Bong Dong Bung is takling us as we drive toward the lake.
WHen we get to the 4800 m viewpoint for the turqoise lake, it's cloudy and the light is flat. Macke cusses a bit, we wrap ourselves in all the clothes we own, and Bong Gung Bung points it downhill to Lhasa. He gets one last chance to kill us as the Landcruiser's marginal brakes fail while he is doing the three-way pass on a crowded road.
In Lhasa I flee the group and check into the Kirey where I am alone in a triple. At the local restaurant, Yangdun, a young Tibetan lady, and I agree to trade language lessons. I meet a couple of Chinese who've cycled from Chengdu-- 2200 km. I meet a human rights activist who is 22 years old. She is suing ExxonMobil for polluting a town in Oklahoma. She has been sent threatening letters from the U.S. government (Patriot Act-- tax dollars hard at work) telling her that she has been officially labelled "subversive" after her Amnesty International work took her to investigate the deaths of hundreds of women in Juarez, Mexico, in which the police and U.S. customs are implicated. She is here investigating the h*m*n r*ghts situation of orphans here in T*bet and shows me emails which she tries to send home but which have been c*nsored by the Ch*nese g*vernment.
As I write this I note that I can publish these entries but I can't actually SEE them-- the g*vernment has blocked blogspot.com.
More later.
Much to my surprise I am still alive despite Fong Dong Bung's best efforts.
The guy is the Worst Driver in the Whole World. On the flats, he hammers the pedals, and the ancient, brake-losing Land Cruiser (LC) bounces and slams, drifting across from ditch to pothole to waterbar. Uphills, he simply forgets to shift until the engine sputters, and then he shakes the whole vehicle by shifting from fourth to first and then wondering why the other cruisers in our convoy pass us. When he is overdoing the speed we yell at him and he slows for five minutes, wondeirng what the problem is, then hanmmers again. LIFE, man, LIFE! I HAVE it and I want to KEEP it.
A sign reads "STAY ON ROAD. DO NOT DAMAGE GRASSLANDS" so Fong Dong Bung naturally drives off the road to short cut. While doing so the other five trucks in our convoy pass us. In Lhatse, Fong Dong Bung first drives into a tiny parkign lot and makes it impossible for the other ten vehicles there to move. Cowboy Hat Man yells at him and he double parks in the street. Thirty trucks honk him away. He then parks in the intersection of an alley and the main street, blocking TWO streets (there being a parking spot five meters away), and we bail, leaving him to deal with the vehicle.
We stop for a dance festival. Several hundred people are sitting in the dirt sipping butter tea and chang (barley beer you sip through a metal straw). A man in brown wool pants, a blue striped blazer, a wool cowboy hat and wearing huge Fitover sunglasses (the kind that 75 year old WInnebago drivers from Alabama, or me when sending 5.12 routes, wear) hands me his baby and gestures for me to take it. The baby is drooling and snot leaks from its nose. I pass it to a nearby woman. A young drunk guy and his friend offer me some chang. Tastes like a mix of lemonade piss vodka and pasta. The band is a couple of guys playing the cham-nheh, an instrument that sounds vaguely like a lower banjo and has two pairs and one lone string. The music is jangly and beat-heavy, and groups of kids and adults take turns doing dances in the fierce sunlight and dirt. Everybody is smoking and spitting and coughing. Everybody wants to chat but Tibetan is the third language I will probably fail to master this trip and I havnt yet started failing to learn it.
In Lhatse I toss my stuff onto my dorm bed and go wander through this hybrid Tibetan-Chinese town. The Chinese contribution to Tibetan society is good cheap food, wide clean streets and really stupid boring horrible architecture. Also snottiness-- Chinese here in my experience are arrogant and cold-- they seem to regard the rest of the world as barbarians. The Tibetans contribute wierd quirky homemade architecture (stone walls will yak horns in them, flowerpots, rows of yakshit and wood topping walls, prayer flags, etc), friendly smiles and hellos, endlessly curious children, and using tractors with trailers to move everythign from heaps of live chickens to heaps of live people.
At Tingri, we see the North Face of Everest and eat Chinese food. Later Macke and I hear the sounds of a cham-nheh being tuned and-- what the hell-- walk into a Tibetan house uninvited. There four guys are munching tsampa-- roasted barley flour mixed with a bit of water-- and we gesture at them and get to try the cham-nheh. It's tuned to something like an open dropped D and sounds like a mix between a banjo and a dobro steel-stringed buiter. Blues sounds good on it but the lack of frets really makes you pay attention. I belt out white-boy's version of "Mannish Boy" and the Tibetans are psyched. The Tibetans show us some riffs-- the guy can finger pick pretty well, and when he uses a pick he makes somwthing that sounds very vaguely like arhythmic bluegrass.
2 June XIGATSE.
We are staying at the Shambala. My stomach and ass are combat operations areas. This situation is not made any better by the stink of mold on the cheap-room third floor, where the toilet is, once again, literally overflowing with shit. What's WITH the CHinese? These guys invented gunpowder, writing, the printing press, distance earthquake detection devices, catapults, Taoism and bureaucracy, yet they can't build toilets you can flush or urinals that drain somewhere other than the floor. I can get it when Tibetans in farmhouses have open-pit toilets but this on the third floor of a hotel? The good news is, our room is 40 meters from the toilet. The Bad news is, our room is 40 meters from the toilet.
I pass out for an hour and then walk to Khumbu chorten whose insides are a spiralling set of rooms full of Buddhas and protector deities-- several hundred-- and whose walls are painted with thousands more Buddhas.
In TIbet you need to learn your Mandarin and your Tibetan. I'm too sick to really bother right now (even tho I usually quite enjoy figuring out new languages) so I'm reduced to pointing and waving and making faces when I buy bread and fruit for the next day. Tibetan seems manageable-- although where English or Nepali use 4 words to say "what is your name?", Tibetan uses way more: "Kirang tse la kari shugi yena?". Mandarin is grammatically a lot easier (no verb tenses, noun genders, verb conjugations, articles, etc) but the tones are a bitch. You think you're saying "thanks" but you're REALLY saying "my shoes are purple."
4 June Lhasa.
Today we get up at 4:00 a.m. to get to the La Tso (amazing turquoise lake) before they close the road for its daily dose of construction. AN older Brit is a nurse. I've seen her doing reiki ("energy healing") and she surprisngly tells me "use your Trinidazole for your guts" instead of recommended some bullshit homeopathic medicine. I submit and take the pills. I'm too weak not to. WHatever is in my gut is stronger than my own bacteria.
It takes the drivers another forty minutes to get organised-- one guy didnt' wake up; another lost his keys-- and Macke and I get all angry with the hurry-up-and-wait situation. Mercifully it's too dark for me to actually see how close to death Bong Dong Bung is takling us as we drive toward the lake.
WHen we get to the 4800 m viewpoint for the turqoise lake, it's cloudy and the light is flat. Macke cusses a bit, we wrap ourselves in all the clothes we own, and Bong Gung Bung points it downhill to Lhasa. He gets one last chance to kill us as the Landcruiser's marginal brakes fail while he is doing the three-way pass on a crowded road.
In Lhasa I flee the group and check into the Kirey where I am alone in a triple. At the local restaurant, Yangdun, a young Tibetan lady, and I agree to trade language lessons. I meet a couple of Chinese who've cycled from Chengdu-- 2200 km. I meet a human rights activist who is 22 years old. She is suing ExxonMobil for polluting a town in Oklahoma. She has been sent threatening letters from the U.S. government (Patriot Act-- tax dollars hard at work) telling her that she has been officially labelled "subversive" after her Amnesty International work took her to investigate the deaths of hundreds of women in Juarez, Mexico, in which the police and U.S. customs are implicated. She is here investigating the h*m*n r*ghts situation of orphans here in T*bet and shows me emails which she tries to send home but which have been c*nsored by the Ch*nese g*vernment.
As I write this I note that I can publish these entries but I can't actually SEE them-- the g*vernment has blocked blogspot.com.
More later.
posted by Butch at 9:01 AM
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