The Road Warrior Meets the Buddha, naming humans, Macke the Knife!
It all comes down to the Environment. I just finished reading Jared Diamond's GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL. In this book Diamond argues that it was local geo-ecological and climatic conditions which allowed first those in the Fertile Crescent and then Europeans and Chinese to dominate world history, rather than inherent superiorities in culture, IQ, genetics, etc. A fascinating read.
In Tibet, most of which is at or over 12,000 feet (3700m), agriculture and livestock keeping are not very productive, which is why there are fewer Tibetans (per area of land) than Chinese in China, which is relatively quite productive agriculturally.
Tibet's vast emptinesses mean fewer and smaller towns, which means ways less public transport, which means that Macke and I have to charter a Land Cruiser AND a driver (it is illegal for whiteys to drive in the, uhh, "Tibet Autonomous Region"), as well as rounding up a couple of chicks to make it all fun (and cheaper). The chicks are Suni, a Japanese-American student of Chinese who gets the nod cos of her language skills, and Die Blume, a German woman who's spent the past years kicking corporate Italian ass and now is a quester, fleeing the grind and the gear and the rest of it.
We get a LC for Y$1800 (about $250 for four days). We insist on signing a contract with the renter guys. They've obviously done this before. The contract has 15 items. The first ten involve costs, mileage, hassles, etc. The final ones include the following:
-- "Clients will determine music to be played on stereo."
-- "The driver will not drink, even when he is not driving."
-- "The driver will not smoke in the vehicle."
-- "If guide is provided, he will sit in the [horribly small and uncomfortable child] seats at the back of the vehicle."
-- "Clients will decide when and where to stop."
These guys have clearly had some experience with customer-driver conflict.
At 5 a.m. Macke is pounding on my door for departure. Our first stop is Nam-Tso Lake. We drive over a 5300m (17500 ft) pass and stop to look into the widest valley you ever saw. A Chinese tourist takes videos of us and I tell him that my video fee is Y$50. Tibetan dropka (herders) show up.
You want to style? Try their outfits: imitation Harley-Davidson bike, with two-foot leather fringes on handlebars, and flying a flag. Dead goat strapped to rack. Your outfit? Well start with a leather trenchcoat and a wool blzer. Tie your four-foot long hair up in red braids, and add some aviator sunglasses. Shoes-- anything goes. On your waist, a woven belt and a meter-long sword. Where your front tooth isn't, put a smoke. Scarves are good, too. Cowboy hats work, but better are felt fedoras.
"Hey," I tell one guy, pointing at his sword, "you show me yours and I'll shwo you mine..." and he laughs when I show him my wussy kukhri knife.
These are the coolest people I have ever met. They're like the Road Warrior meets Buddha.
Nam-tso is a horribly tacky Chinese hotel (is there any other kind?) which Macke and Suni, the first of the chicks we rent the Cruiser with, stay at. Blume, the Kraut chick, and I opt for digs in a tent in the next place.
You never saw such emptiness. I flee the group and get lost on the lake's penninsula. The lake stretches twenty kilometers across and lengthwise it disappears into the distance. The air is still. On two sides of the vast valley are 7000m (23,000 foot) peaks covered in snow and gleaming icy blue above the green brown dry hills. The Lake is the colour of a blue dream and the sky is a deep electric purplish stillness. My feet crunch gravel as I climb onto low hills and the valley unfolds into air so clear that your eyes fail with the distance. Way away a road crew of thirty psychedelic Tibetans fiddles with shovels in a ditch. Mastiffs bark at yaks. I dive into the liquid blue ice of the lake and then bake on the rocks in the sun. Sunset gives only minutes of good light, but for thirty seconds it seems liek the whole world is glowing quiet orange.
Dinner in the Chinese Cheese Palace sees Macke working on Suni, Blume chattering with a mothertongue-famished Italian and me watching Tibetans doing group circle dances to really slow Tibetan folk-disco. I eat a bowl of noodles with this weird mouth-numbing spice the Chinese use and add chillies. My mouth is simultaneously burning and numb.
The next morning Macke reports zero progress with Suni.
"Hang in there," I tell him, and our conversation then becomes un-reportable guy talk.
The next day we drive to Reting Monastery. At Jophong, a hundred pool tables are scattered outside around the square, along with snotty-nosed kids, dropka fashionistas in their leather coats and swords, yaks, women in wide-brimmed hats and billions of beer bottles. At Reting the monks put us up in a dorm and I take off to explore.
First I meet a monk who wants to practice his English. This English consists of him pointing at me and saying "big dick!" and then at himself and his buddy and saying "small dick!" He then asks me what my Tibetan name is and tells me his English name is Billy.
Well, I'd gotten "named" in the Jhokang in Lhasa. Talkign with monk, he told me my name was to be Theshi (or Tashi)-- pronounced "tay-shee," and meaning "good." Billy's friend didn't have an English name. SO I sat awhile and then it came to me. The guy was a Fred. "Fred!" he said, beaming, then said "small dick!" First human I've ever named.
Above Reting I wander through the green meadows and stupas of what looks like Buddha Park. In the gompa there's a mural of the current Dalai Lama and the monks are away, munching on tsampa and drinking tea.
We eat in the dining room, where the monks have a Little Red Telephone that rings quite a bit, and beer, and Pepsi. Macke wonders if the monastery has a contract with Pepsi-- all of the gompas we've seen so far sell only Pepsi. Claudia tells me that the monks have pronounced us married-- Macke and Suni, and Blume and I. The monks then name everybody else.
Macke-- "Tun Drop"-- "will succeed"
Suni-- "Yen Ji"-- they don't explain this one
Blume-- "Drama"-- a goddess of philosophy
We spend the evening shit-talking travelling stories in our rooom with candles, and Macke creates the usual charas joints which I'm the only one to refuse. Much later, during a piss break, Macke and Kumi take half an hour and I grin-- Macke has scored. GO MACKE! On his return, Blume and I crawl into our respective beds and MAcke drunkenly announces that "I'm sleeping with my new WIFE" and hops into the sack with Kumi.
The next morning Tsering, our amiable driver, wants to go get blessed by the monatery's lama (headmonk). Given that the Dalai Lama is officially a traitor and bad news to the Chinese, this lama has been appointed (approved) by the Chinese. At his compound we sign over bags and passports and are read the rules: no photos, no writing, and, oh yeah, don't make fun of the Lama.
On the way in, Macke whispers at me. "Dude. I got the bluest balls in the world. You may see me behind a bush soon." I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Macke has kept it in his pants.
Inside the compound we are first charged by a pet deer. A Chinese marionette gestures us forward. I ask him if I can see his gun and ask him what calibre it is but he's not having any.
The Lama is a ten year old child. There is a strangely drugged feel to his eyes. The others give him white scarves and get blessed. I stand in front of him and pull out my Grown Up Voice and tell him to take care of himself, cos nobody else will, really. The kid ought to be out screwing around with his friends, or going to school, and having a family. Instead he serves karma, and the Chinese.
Outside, Blume says "they fake EVERYTHING here! Clothes, labels, cars, bikes, and spiritual leaders."
We drive to Tidrum Nunnery. Macke and Suni look for their own space and Blume and I share the most decrepit hotel I've ever seen. There is no lock and the walls are cracked and separating. The toilets are from hell-- piles of shit and puddles of piss, that National Park Outhouse stink everywhere, dim bulb and vague slippery piles of anonymous waste. The place is fifty years old and it's never been cleaned. The main attraction here are the hotsprings, which are full of naked fat flabby Chinese tourists and skinny ripped Tibetans playing with their kids and their balls. Later, Blume tells me that the nuns in the women's pool spent their time comparing ass sizes and feeling Blume's arm-hair-- Tibetans don't have body hair.
Dinner is horrible fried rice eaten among staring pie-eyed Tibetan men in a filthy dim cavern of a restaurant filled with people but still somehow empty, and the blasting of Tibetan disco music.
On the last day Blume and I wander up the canyon to have fantasies about first-routing trad lines in the canyon and we then hang out with the nuns, who are like small children. One wants to take photos with Blume's digital, another mischeivously tries to divert a hose and spray Blume, and another vogues for us.
On this morning, Macke makes no comment about the colour of his balls so I'm assuming the best.
We head back to Lhasa. Macke and Suni do their best to keep the phsycial affection under Tibetan wraps. Tsering pulls over every half hour or so to vomit-- he at some Chinese boiled noodles yesterday. We eat in a Chinese Muslim restaurant, and get the usual-- thupka yaksha (noodle and yak-meat) and beef and fried peppers. On the TV is a Governator movie, both dubbed into, and subtitled in, Chinese.
"Tsung wa," says Arnie, then his lips move, and then he smashes some guy's head. I get it-- Hollywood makes retarded simple movies cos anybody can follow the plot without knowing the language. The implied audience is obviously ADHD highschool boys with too much texting time on their plans, and foreigners.
We tip Tsering Y$100, a deck of Prides, a box of matches, and Macke gives him a Tibetan music tape-- so now Tsering has two tapes.
We get rooms at the Kirey and soon enough Macke, irrepressible, is AGAIN making plans. "DUDE! We gotta see Everest Basecamp! And start trekking!" We agree to meet tomorrow and then it's time to chill out.
In Tibet, most of which is at or over 12,000 feet (3700m), agriculture and livestock keeping are not very productive, which is why there are fewer Tibetans (per area of land) than Chinese in China, which is relatively quite productive agriculturally.
Tibet's vast emptinesses mean fewer and smaller towns, which means ways less public transport, which means that Macke and I have to charter a Land Cruiser AND a driver (it is illegal for whiteys to drive in the, uhh, "Tibet Autonomous Region"), as well as rounding up a couple of chicks to make it all fun (and cheaper). The chicks are Suni, a Japanese-American student of Chinese who gets the nod cos of her language skills, and Die Blume, a German woman who's spent the past years kicking corporate Italian ass and now is a quester, fleeing the grind and the gear and the rest of it.
We get a LC for Y$1800 (about $250 for four days). We insist on signing a contract with the renter guys. They've obviously done this before. The contract has 15 items. The first ten involve costs, mileage, hassles, etc. The final ones include the following:
-- "Clients will determine music to be played on stereo."
-- "The driver will not drink, even when he is not driving."
-- "The driver will not smoke in the vehicle."
-- "If guide is provided, he will sit in the [horribly small and uncomfortable child] seats at the back of the vehicle."
-- "Clients will decide when and where to stop."
These guys have clearly had some experience with customer-driver conflict.
At 5 a.m. Macke is pounding on my door for departure. Our first stop is Nam-Tso Lake. We drive over a 5300m (17500 ft) pass and stop to look into the widest valley you ever saw. A Chinese tourist takes videos of us and I tell him that my video fee is Y$50. Tibetan dropka (herders) show up.
You want to style? Try their outfits: imitation Harley-Davidson bike, with two-foot leather fringes on handlebars, and flying a flag. Dead goat strapped to rack. Your outfit? Well start with a leather trenchcoat and a wool blzer. Tie your four-foot long hair up in red braids, and add some aviator sunglasses. Shoes-- anything goes. On your waist, a woven belt and a meter-long sword. Where your front tooth isn't, put a smoke. Scarves are good, too. Cowboy hats work, but better are felt fedoras.
"Hey," I tell one guy, pointing at his sword, "you show me yours and I'll shwo you mine..." and he laughs when I show him my wussy kukhri knife.
These are the coolest people I have ever met. They're like the Road Warrior meets Buddha.
Nam-tso is a horribly tacky Chinese hotel (is there any other kind?) which Macke and Suni, the first of the chicks we rent the Cruiser with, stay at. Blume, the Kraut chick, and I opt for digs in a tent in the next place.
You never saw such emptiness. I flee the group and get lost on the lake's penninsula. The lake stretches twenty kilometers across and lengthwise it disappears into the distance. The air is still. On two sides of the vast valley are 7000m (23,000 foot) peaks covered in snow and gleaming icy blue above the green brown dry hills. The Lake is the colour of a blue dream and the sky is a deep electric purplish stillness. My feet crunch gravel as I climb onto low hills and the valley unfolds into air so clear that your eyes fail with the distance. Way away a road crew of thirty psychedelic Tibetans fiddles with shovels in a ditch. Mastiffs bark at yaks. I dive into the liquid blue ice of the lake and then bake on the rocks in the sun. Sunset gives only minutes of good light, but for thirty seconds it seems liek the whole world is glowing quiet orange.
Dinner in the Chinese Cheese Palace sees Macke working on Suni, Blume chattering with a mothertongue-famished Italian and me watching Tibetans doing group circle dances to really slow Tibetan folk-disco. I eat a bowl of noodles with this weird mouth-numbing spice the Chinese use and add chillies. My mouth is simultaneously burning and numb.
The next morning Macke reports zero progress with Suni.
"Hang in there," I tell him, and our conversation then becomes un-reportable guy talk.
The next day we drive to Reting Monastery. At Jophong, a hundred pool tables are scattered outside around the square, along with snotty-nosed kids, dropka fashionistas in their leather coats and swords, yaks, women in wide-brimmed hats and billions of beer bottles. At Reting the monks put us up in a dorm and I take off to explore.
First I meet a monk who wants to practice his English. This English consists of him pointing at me and saying "big dick!" and then at himself and his buddy and saying "small dick!" He then asks me what my Tibetan name is and tells me his English name is Billy.
Well, I'd gotten "named" in the Jhokang in Lhasa. Talkign with monk, he told me my name was to be Theshi (or Tashi)-- pronounced "tay-shee," and meaning "good." Billy's friend didn't have an English name. SO I sat awhile and then it came to me. The guy was a Fred. "Fred!" he said, beaming, then said "small dick!" First human I've ever named.
Above Reting I wander through the green meadows and stupas of what looks like Buddha Park. In the gompa there's a mural of the current Dalai Lama and the monks are away, munching on tsampa and drinking tea.
We eat in the dining room, where the monks have a Little Red Telephone that rings quite a bit, and beer, and Pepsi. Macke wonders if the monastery has a contract with Pepsi-- all of the gompas we've seen so far sell only Pepsi. Claudia tells me that the monks have pronounced us married-- Macke and Suni, and Blume and I. The monks then name everybody else.
Macke-- "Tun Drop"-- "will succeed"
Suni-- "Yen Ji"-- they don't explain this one
Blume-- "Drama"-- a goddess of philosophy
We spend the evening shit-talking travelling stories in our rooom with candles, and Macke creates the usual charas joints which I'm the only one to refuse. Much later, during a piss break, Macke and Kumi take half an hour and I grin-- Macke has scored. GO MACKE! On his return, Blume and I crawl into our respective beds and MAcke drunkenly announces that "I'm sleeping with my new WIFE" and hops into the sack with Kumi.
The next morning Tsering, our amiable driver, wants to go get blessed by the monatery's lama (headmonk). Given that the Dalai Lama is officially a traitor and bad news to the Chinese, this lama has been appointed (approved) by the Chinese. At his compound we sign over bags and passports and are read the rules: no photos, no writing, and, oh yeah, don't make fun of the Lama.
On the way in, Macke whispers at me. "Dude. I got the bluest balls in the world. You may see me behind a bush soon." I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Macke has kept it in his pants.
Inside the compound we are first charged by a pet deer. A Chinese marionette gestures us forward. I ask him if I can see his gun and ask him what calibre it is but he's not having any.
The Lama is a ten year old child. There is a strangely drugged feel to his eyes. The others give him white scarves and get blessed. I stand in front of him and pull out my Grown Up Voice and tell him to take care of himself, cos nobody else will, really. The kid ought to be out screwing around with his friends, or going to school, and having a family. Instead he serves karma, and the Chinese.
Outside, Blume says "they fake EVERYTHING here! Clothes, labels, cars, bikes, and spiritual leaders."
We drive to Tidrum Nunnery. Macke and Suni look for their own space and Blume and I share the most decrepit hotel I've ever seen. There is no lock and the walls are cracked and separating. The toilets are from hell-- piles of shit and puddles of piss, that National Park Outhouse stink everywhere, dim bulb and vague slippery piles of anonymous waste. The place is fifty years old and it's never been cleaned. The main attraction here are the hotsprings, which are full of naked fat flabby Chinese tourists and skinny ripped Tibetans playing with their kids and their balls. Later, Blume tells me that the nuns in the women's pool spent their time comparing ass sizes and feeling Blume's arm-hair-- Tibetans don't have body hair.
Dinner is horrible fried rice eaten among staring pie-eyed Tibetan men in a filthy dim cavern of a restaurant filled with people but still somehow empty, and the blasting of Tibetan disco music.
On the last day Blume and I wander up the canyon to have fantasies about first-routing trad lines in the canyon and we then hang out with the nuns, who are like small children. One wants to take photos with Blume's digital, another mischeivously tries to divert a hose and spray Blume, and another vogues for us.
On this morning, Macke makes no comment about the colour of his balls so I'm assuming the best.
We head back to Lhasa. Macke and Suni do their best to keep the phsycial affection under Tibetan wraps. Tsering pulls over every half hour or so to vomit-- he at some Chinese boiled noodles yesterday. We eat in a Chinese Muslim restaurant, and get the usual-- thupka yaksha (noodle and yak-meat) and beef and fried peppers. On the TV is a Governator movie, both dubbed into, and subtitled in, Chinese.
"Tsung wa," says Arnie, then his lips move, and then he smashes some guy's head. I get it-- Hollywood makes retarded simple movies cos anybody can follow the plot without knowing the language. The implied audience is obviously ADHD highschool boys with too much texting time on their plans, and foreigners.
We tip Tsering Y$100, a deck of Prides, a box of matches, and Macke gives him a Tibetan music tape-- so now Tsering has two tapes.
We get rooms at the Kirey and soon enough Macke, irrepressible, is AGAIN making plans. "DUDE! We gotta see Everest Basecamp! And start trekking!" We agree to meet tomorrow and then it's time to chill out.
posted by Butch at 9:49 AM
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