Footloose Scot (7 page)

1987 was a good year to visit Tibet. Access from Nepal was possible and visas were easily obtainable from the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu. There was regular bus service from the Nepal/China border to Lhasa. This route was much shorter than travelling overland from Beijing.

But when I crossed into China from Nepal I found no bus. There had been a landslide, and this meant two hours of walking across a boulder-strewn mountain slope to where the road resumed. The bus, nothing luxurious, was waiting there, the driver smoking a cigarette. We were about fifteen passengers, including a handful of Western tourists and a couple of military officers; the rest were local people.

We drove for three days at elevations from 12,000 to 16,000 feet across a barren landscape. Snow-capped mountains lined the horizon; in the foreground the land was rocky and barren. It was late spring, but there was no sign of life in the countryside we passed through. We passed through occasional non-descript towns, sometimes stopping for fuel or for a meal in a restaurant. Traffic was light, mainly trucks, army vehicles and a few cars. When we broke down, the driver fixed the problem.

We stopped one night at the town of Gyantse; I started to climb up a hill to visit the fortress overlooking the town, but a pack of wild dogs caused me to reconsider.

We duly arrived in Lhasa, where the excitement in the bus among the local Tibetans became palpable. When we got the first glimpse of Potala Palace which dominated the city, they gasped and pointed with excitement. They were pilgrims.

I had read
Seven Years in Tibet,
written in the 1950s by Heinrich Harrer, and carried a Lonely Planet guidebook so I had some idea of the previous history of Tibet and what to expect. Lhasa, "Land of Gods" (the population is half a million and increasing because of Han Chinese immigration), is spread along a high valley. The initial impression was of a Chinese city with long, straight streets with featureless modern buildings. The old city, where the Tibetans live, was elsewhere. We passed a dentist with his chair out in the street, treating a patient. We tourists all headed to the Flying Dragon guest house, which was geared for westerners.

I had a gift to deliver. The guidebook had suggested taking a picture of the Dalai Lama and to give it to an ordinary Tibetan. I saw some workmen digging a drain in the street. Picking out one of the younger ones, I beckoned him to come forward and I handed him the picture. The reaction was instant and powerful. His dirty face broke into a broad grin, he pressed the picture to his shirt; he showed it briefly to the others who also got excited, he bowed repeatedly to me and loosed a torrent of Tibetan on me, presumably thanking me.

I took a bus into the country to the Ganden monastery. Built high on a mountain ridge, it must have been an impressive sight in its heyday. Now it lay in ruins, ransacked and blown up by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Buddhist monks had recently been allowed to reoccupy their monasteries, and this one was being repaired piece by piece. The destruction had been tremendous, and many of the buildings were without roofs. It was going to take a long time to rebuild. A charming monk with a ready smile stood in the doorway of one of the restored buildings. If only we could talk to him, I thought.

In downtown Lhasa I saw the depth and strength of Tibetan religious belief. At the Jokhang Palace there was almost always a line of Tibetans, in worn clothing and with lined, weather-beaten faces, circumambulating the holy site. This meant prostratting themselves fully on the stomach, then standing up, and then repeating the process, moving forward a few feet at a time. If you think this is something, consider that Tibetan pilgrims do this around a whole mountain, Mt. Kailas, a holy mountain in western Tibet.

Towering over the city is Potala Palace, the heart and soul of Lhasa for Buddhists. A monumental structure perched on a hill near the city center, it rises thirteen stories and contains 1,000 rooms, supported by sloping stone walls sixteen feet thick at the base. The present structure, built on top of a previous palace dating to the 7
^th
century, was constructed in 1645. As well as being a place of worship, it was home to previous Dalai Lamas, of whom five are buried there, and it was also a temple.

The 19
^th
Dalai Lama, fearing for his life, fled in 1959 and lives in northern India. The Chinese, unable to ignore 1,200 years of Tibetan history, treat the Palace as a museum. This was the sort of place which demanded a good tour guide, and tourists fit and ready for a comprehensive tour. The guidebook was of minimal help. Also I was suffering from a stomach upset and I was also cold, and unfortunately had little inclination to appreciate the scope, detail and history of the enormous building.

At the Flying Dragon guest house I noticed a handwritten poster. The writer wanted a companion to trek to Everest base camp. This turned out to be a 40-year old German from Hamburg, in the tea business. We agreed to travel together. He looked fit and said he had sausage to contribute to our food kitty: I had teabags, also a stove. Heading back towards the Nepali border, we detoured from the main highway and found a bus to a town close to the mountain which Tibetans call
Chomolungma
or "Saint Mother." From there we would walk. We had a map of sorts, and no one could miss the towering mountain ahead. On the bus we met a Swiss mailman and two English girls and we agreed we would all travel together.

We spent three days hiking to Everest base camp, following a dirt road across a stony plateau starting at around 15,000 feet. On the first night, close to the road where we got off the bus, we slept in an abandoned house near a village. Dogs barked and we barricaded the door from the inside with our backpacks. On the second night we found lodging in a village house where the grinning, villainous-looking owner insisted we drink yak butter tea which he churned for us. The concoction of black tea, salt and yak butter added was tangy, greasy and warming. We took comfort in the fact that Tibetans drank it the whole time, and hoped it would give us strength since we didn't like the slightly rancid taste. We ate some of the snacks we had brought with us and spread our sleeping bags out on the floor of the one-room stone house.

We spent a warm but smoky night in this room which had no ventilation. The following morning our host showed us two yaks which he indicated would carry our bags, and a boy to accompany us. We agreed on a price and from then on made better progress. The weather was dry, and the altitude did not seem to affect us too much. We stopped and brewed tea two or three times.

On the third day we arrived at the Rombuk Monastery, the highest monastery on earth at 16,700 feet, famous in the accounts of all early Everest expeditions, but now half destroyed thanks to the Red Guards. The monks were unwelcoming, but let us use two small unused rooms. With no heating, it was a very cold night, even wearing all the clothing we had. We were so fat we could hardly get into sleeping bags. Still, we had enough food, no one was feeling sick and morale was high. We were within a few hours of reaching base camp.

We resumed our hike the next day, carrying our packs again since the yak rental was only as far as the monastery. We could now easily see the huge triangle of Everest's north face, and knew we had not far to go. Sure enough, we rounded a bend in the road a couple of hours after leaving the monastery and we came upon a surprising scene of great activity.

There were tents everywhere, some with Swedish flags on top, piles of stores, 4-wheel drive vehicles, radio antennas, and climbers strolling around, talking with each other or unpacking supplies. Four different national teams were on or about to start up Everest. What an anti-climax for us footsloggers!

We were dead tired, surprised and unsettled by all the activity. I hadn't thought about the possibility of mountaineering expeditions being on Everest. I had wanted to relish the experience of a close-up of Everest with my hiking companions. Instead of a quiet and private experience we seemed to have arrived at a climbers' convention.

There was little to do except watch the activity, and talk with some of the climbers. They were focused on the climb ahead and did not have a lot of time or interest in us sightseers. They kept shouting questions to each other, like where are the batteries stored? I felt like a superfluous intruder, of no use to the climbers and likely to waste their time. We negotiated a ride back to the main road in the valley where we started from. No one wanted to hike back, so we paid a steep price and climbed into a Toyota 4-wheel drive. It took five hours to reach the main road, and the following day we caught a bus which took us to the Nepal border.

KASHGAR & THE KARAKORAM HIGHWAY

I flew to Gilgit (4,796 feet), the administrative center of Baltistan, the northernmost region of Pakistan. I came there from Rawalpindi on the plains, and now I was deep in the mountains. The flight route took us straight past the 26,660 foot peak, Nanga Parbat, known for its immense ice walls. In those days, you could get into the aircraft cockpit by asking nicely. I gazed in fascination at the 14,700 foot rock face, so close to the aircraft, first climbed in 1953 by the Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl. Close to the summit Buhl's companions turned back and Buhl climbed on alone to the top. On the way down he became stranded in the dark. He stood high on the mountain through a long night and survived to climb down.

I stayed several days in Gilgit at a guest house near the airport from where I made several one-day hiking trips into the nearby mountains. There were plenty of wild-looking tribesmen in the streets, but there was also a good choice of restaurants and hotels. Gilgit reminds me of a Wild West town with plenty of comfort but with dangerous territory nearby. Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor lies due north, the Chinese border is to the northeast, and the volatile region of Kashmir is southeast. I watched a polo match. Nothing can show better the dashing spirit and bravado of these mountain people than the thundering hooves of the horses and wild cries of the spectators during a polo game.

I was heading north across the mountains to China, a two-day trip by bus over a 15,397 foot pass. I had obtained a Chinese visa in Islamabad, and I was planning to take the recently opened Karakoram Highway to Kashgar (sometimes called Kashi), a major city of the Silk Route in the far west of China close to the border with Tajikistan. The route had opened only the year before, after twenty years of construction and almost 900 deaths. Now there was a regular bus service.

My bus, elaborately painted in bright colors like all Pakistani buses, was filled with local merchants with things to sell in China and a few western tourists. We left Gilgit early and drove steeply uphill on a winding, two-lane road, passing evidence of landslides and the occasional vehicle lying at the bottom of the ravine. At stops, if they were of any length, the merchants would start an impromptu cricket game by the roadside.

We were now well into the Karakoram range and soon, on our left, we could see its best known mountain, Rakaposhi, a beautiful peak known as "Shining Light" locally. We stopped in a village where the bank's safe was outside of the bank in the main street. "That's the best spot for it, much more visible, and therefore safe," said one of the Pakistani passengers.

On top of the Khunjerab Pass (three miles high), a bleak, treeless place, was the Chinese border entry post. Impassive guards in padded uniforms and blank faces stood around. All the passengers had visas, so we did not spend much time. We resumed our journey and later spent the night in a nondescript Chinese tourist hotel. Fortunately there was a restaurant and the rooms had heating.

By late afternoon on the next day we had dropped down steadily and the weather turned warmer. Cultivated fields and orchards lined the road. The road was in the process of being straightened and widened, but this had not yet happened. Instead, we bumped along on temporary detours around unfinished culverts.

We arrived in Kashgar in the early evening. A steady stream of trucks, cars and buses shared the streets with carts pushed by men or pulled by donkeys. We saw Chinese faces on sidewalks, but the majority of the people were shaven-headed Uyghurs with broad noses and dark complexions. The older men wore skull caps, and some had wispy beards. Many of the women wore brown veils.

The city of 170,000 (1980 statistics) is rimmed by mountain ranges; the Tien Shan to the north, the Pamir to the west, and Kunlun Shan range to the south. Kashi was the last town on the Silk Route and the hub where the northern and southern arms of the Silk Road converged on their way to the Mediterranean. From Kashi caravans travelled northwest towards Russia or southwest towards Pakistan.

The new city was an unfortunate mix of box-like new buildings (department stores, hotels and government offices) put up by the Chinese along broad, tree-lined avenues. An enormous statue of Mao stood in the middle of a public park, pointing south towards Pakistan - perhaps a statement about the Karakoram highway we had just arrived on. It had been designed and built with Chinese money and labor, with many fatalities during construction. In the old city, a mud-brick labyrinth of alleys of artisans' shops and small houses one sees the remains of an Islamic city. One also sees street life along these lanes as shoppers haggle with vendors, and hears periodic prayer calls from the two mosques. The larger one, the yellow-tiled Id Kah Mosque, dates back to 1442 and can house 20,000 worshippers. But for how much longer will the old city survive as the Chinese modernization juggernaut encroaches?

Kashgar is in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region of the People's Republic of China which occupies one sixth of China's land mass. Like Tibet, Xinjiang was being colonized with Han Chinese. It is mainly desert, the biggest being The Taklamakan Desert which measures 600 by 250 miles. The name means in Uyghur the No Return desert. Peter Fleming, brother of the more famous Ian Fleming who created James Bond, wrote a book about this area in 1936 called
News from Tartary.

He describes a 3,500 mile journey from Peking to India with a Swiss woman journalist, including crossing the Taklamakan desert. With classic understatement typical of many British travel writers, he makes light of the extreme discomfort and some life-threatening incidents. Finally he arrives in Kashi and introduces himself at the British Consulate. This area of Central Asia was the site of what was called The Great Game, a clash of wits and diplomatic maneuvers between Britain, protecting its empire in India, and Imperial Russia, always looking to expand southwards.