Day 195: Lhasa - Debating monks

Arrival at the Potala Palace

As you've probably noticed, I was in 'Go China!' mode when I arrived in Lhasa.  The sight of clean streets, traffic that flows, female professionals and the generally high standard of living in Chengdu proved welcome relief from Delhi's open sewers trodden by the feet almost entirely of men.  Where Delhi has democracy, Chengdu has a standard of life worth living, and isn't the value of democracy that it enables you to choose the guys who you think can offer a better life to everyone?

Lhasa, like Chengdu, has new railway bridges, high rise buildings and wide streets on the outskirts of the city, but the old centre retains its narrow traffic-free lanes with line on line of white buildings coloured with reds and blues and greens and golds around the windows.  Alas, to enter the central square you have to pass through a police checkpoint manned by Chinese officers and put your bags through an x-ray machine as though boarding a plane.  Amongst the pedestrianised streets with the white glowing terraces, here was the first pause for thought.  Was I still in 'Go China!' mode?

Most Tibetan passers-by swung prayer wheels continuously as they walked.  I have never seen religious devotion so embedded in an every day action like nipping out to the shops.  When these prayer wheel-wielders leave the house do they pick them up in the same way that I pick up my mobile phone or don my coat, or are they really conscious of prayers fluttering relentlessly from their hands as they walk?  Is such continual religious fervour possible?

China's "Liberation Square"

Our first major port of call was the Potala Palace where we climbed the steep zig-zagging path with birds-eye views across the city.  Once we would have seen large areas of open space below us but a six lane road now cuts along the base of the hill that hosts the Palace.  Across the way lies a large square with a monument at one side.  "It commemorates the liberation of Tibet by the Chinese," someone told us (I think we'll dispense with names in this week's blog posts).  He was a Tibetan man and a wry smile hovered around his lips, but he left the gasps of dismay to us.  Liberation?  Is it really possible that those who rule over a province against its population's will can be so insensitive as to build a monument to their LIBERATION bang in the capital city?  Apparently so.  I later walked through another square commemorating forty years of 'liberation'.  Whatever.  (Still 'Go China'?)

Ordinary Tibetans (strangely mostly women)
encircle the palace

Inside the Potala, we entered an audience chamber that is almost recognisable from reading 'Seven Years in Tibet'.  It is a long narrow room with the Dalai Lama's 'throne' in the centre; I can imagine Heinrich Harrer's first presentation there, as he bowed and presented his white scarf, as he had been instructed.  The custom has changed little but the Dalai Lama himself is no longer present to receive the scarves; a heap of them sprouts in front of his empty chair, possibly the most poignant image of his absence of any we saw in Tibet.  Some women wept at the sight.  "They still miss the Dalai Lama," we were told.  "He left in 1959 so younger people do not miss him; they never met him.  But the older women miss him."  

The number of people visiting the Potala dwarfs the
number visiting "Liberation Square"

"Do people travel to India to see the Dalai Lama in MacLeod Ganj?" we asked.  The speaker shook his head.  

"Many people try but the authorities will not give them passports; they cannot leave Tibet."

On the walls of the palace, illustrations showed old Lhasa - a smattering of palaces with wide green spaces between them.  But the golden buddhas, visiting bodhisattvas and tombs of previous Dalai Lamas stole the show.  We are not talking about gold plating or gold paint or a gilding of gold.  We are not talking about milligrams or grams or even kilograms of the stuff.  We are talking about tons and tons of gold sprouting and flourishing and growing inside the Potala Palace.  It makes Rome look like a house of peasants; Catholicism, by comparison, is a place of moderation, even stinginess.  Tibetan Buddhism, after all, is the real home of precious metals!   

The rear of the palace is just as beautiful

The fourteenth Dalai Lama's picture is not permitted inside the palace but the thirteenth's photo sits on a chair.  Each Lama before him rests in a monument worth more, no doubt, than whole villages or entire towns.  They are adorned with turquoise and red gems, which reminded me of Ladakhi jewellery stalls (also a Tibetan society, once answering Lhasa's potala with the palace in Leh).  "They are local stones from the hills around Lhasa," we were told. "Once they were only used in the monasteries.  Now China takes them for many uses."

Modern Lhasa consists of 3/4 Han Chinese

When we stepped outside I was ready to breath the air.  The Potala Palace is beautiful but cluttered, labyrinthine; a home and public gallery and mausoleum all at once - probably many other things too that we did not see.  It was time to step into the sunshine which had finally begun cutting through the morning frost and daring us to unzip our jackets.  We walked back down the hill and returned to central Lhasa to marvel at the white buildings and the blur of prayer wheels.

In the afternoon we were taken to Drepung monastery to watch the monks debating.  I don't know what I envisaged, but I must have had something like the House of Commons in mind; one person at a time stands up to make their point then another replies (but hopefully without all the jeering).  What we saw looked more like a school playground, emitting an indecipherable babble of voices, only all the pupils wore saffron robes.  But there was order in the chaos.  The monks operated in pairs, one sitting and one standing.  The standing monk asked questions about the Buddhist scriptures; the sitting monk answered; and the standing monk clapped his hands, varying his gestures to indicate a correct or incorrect response.  "The monks are training," we were told.  "The more experienced ones test the knowledge of the apprentices."  It was a dynamic scene - the clapping looked almost aggressive compared to the stillness of Buddhist meditation - punctuated by chatter and jokes.  A general blur of sound enveloped the courtyard.

Debating monks

Back in Lhasa a more punishing form of worship was taking place.  Tibetan worshippers prostrate themselves in front of the Jokhang temple, then take a few steps forward before bending flat to the ground again.  They raise their hands to their foreheads, chests and waists in prayer between each prostration.  Then the whole devoted (weary?) sequence repeats itself until they have completed a full circuit of the temple, however many hours this takes.  

There are aids to help them (is there even a prostration industry?!); some worshippers wear padding on their elbows and knees; most cover the fronts of their hands with wooden boards so they can slide their palms along the ground without grazing the skin.  I hope the gods value their efforts, but I for one struggle to understand them.  I can think of many ways of appreciating a green and fertile planet experienced through human eyes, but bowing to the ground is not one of them.  Grow a tree, teach someone to read, study a disease, clean something that's spilled, smile - the options are plentiful.  But all this tarnishing of knees and rubbing of faces against the ground?  I have never seen a place of such fervour - a place where religion seems to be so deeply felt amongst ordinary men and women unconnected with religious institutions.

Spinning the prayers

It is an incongruous world where worshippers bow deeply while Chinese soldiers direct civilians through x-ray machines before they may pass through the streets of their own city.  As we sat in a restaurant in the evening, a Chinese military vehicle the size of a luxury tour coach pulled up in Lhasa's central square, dwarfing the prostraters and passers-by.  How did we feel about the Chinese presence now?  We passed through the security checkpoints surrounding the temple yet again (my rucksack has never before been x-rayed so many times in twenty-four hours, or indeed in a year) and reflected that in a single day we had switched from 'go China' mode to 'grrrr, China' mode.  Both are simplistic reactions, devoid of nuances, but this is only day one - a day of wide-eyed first impressions.  Our trip to Tibet is yet young.

The traditional view of the palace

Tier upon tier

Devoted

Gate guardian

Colourful gates

Entry to the palace proper

Correct!

The debate

Still time to relax 

Shrine

The assembly hall

Kitchen at the monastery 

The hillside was dotted with colour 

Autumn time

The canyon-like streets of Lhasa in the late afternoon sun

Days 193-4: Chengdu to Lhasa - All aboard

Welcome to Lhasa!

There's only so much you can say about a forty-four hour train journey.  The highlight was the medical declaration form where we had to assert that we were not suffering from any of the 'bellowing' (do you mean 'following'?) conditions: epilepsy, asthma (I'll just lie about that one) and being 'a highly dangerous pregnant woman'.  As you can imagine, signing up to the latter involved a lot of soul-searching for Guy and Chris.

Aside from this entertaining start to the journey, the pluses included comfortable beds, reading lights and power points for our laptops.  The breakfast of tasteless porridge floating in a kind of soup, on the other hand, wasn't our thing.  We jumped off the train at a station to buy bread and bananas and corn cobs, then survived the rest of the journey on pot noodles and cake that we'd brought from Chengdu.  A bottle of Great Wall wine helped (drunk in shots for longevity), along with a Glenlivet (we had counted on Chris bringing a bottle of something - that something almost certainly being whisky - from home).

But there was no complaining about the scenery.  On the first day a wide agricultural plain hosted immense viaducts and forests of tower blocks (as many fledgling ones as finished items, but no doubt if you blink a couple of times you will find them complete).  On day two we awoke to a completely different world: high Tibetan plains and golden grasslands, yaks and herders, rolling snow-covered hills.  The train line floated on permafrost and cut through frozen landscapes, climbing over mountain passes above five thousand metres high.

At last we pulled into Lhasa and the thought of monasteries and stupas brought the tune of 'om mani padme hum' to my lips.  Guy nudged me and shook his head.  Under Chinese rule, do such chants sound a bit too much like freedom songs?  We will find out over the next few days.

The scenery (the Tibetan Plateaux) was simply stunning

Dawn, day 2

Barren and beautiful

Day 192: Chengdu - Chrysanthemum tea

Wenshu monastery

Wenshu monastery is an island of antiquity in a very new city.  We wandered around the complex, admiring the synthesis of Buddhism as we know it (mostly from Nepal and Sri Lanka) and Chinese architecture.  The monks' quarters, we noticed, contained a table tennis table, presumably for a little competitive relief from states of karma.  But nobody was playing and the rest of the temples were as peaceful as if a high rise city did not grow at the gates.

Wenshu

Next we wandered down a street from a story book China, which seemed equally hard to reconcile with the spanking new world of Chengdu.   We sat down in a tea garden and ordered mugs of honeysuckle tea, jasmine tea and chrysanthemum tea.  Jasmine was a known quantity.  Chrysanthemum tasted of rank weeds.  Honeysuckle was inoffensive, tasting simply of water with flowers floating in it for decoration.  We had scored around fifty percent in the palatability stakes.

With little time left, we returned to the hostel for a final session on a version of the World Wide Web that excludes Google (which upset me little),  Facebook (likewise very bearable), and the BBC (WHAT? You have to be joking!).  However much of a cement-and-electric-motorbikes high I have been experiencing for the last three days, I have to admit that there's something a bit odd about a country that blocks the BBC but allows Fox News.  To get some context in how such a situation originated, I downloaded Jung Chang's 'The Dowager Empress' and 'Mao: The Unknown Story' from Amazon to learn a little more about China.  It only occurred to me a week and a half later, as I approached China's border guards, that both are banned material, at which point I rapidly promoted a set of inoffensive Dickens novels above my Jung Chang purchases in my kindle reading list.  (Dickens was a man of the people and must be acceptable in a socialist state?!)

Story book China

At last, we took our final seamless tube journey to the station to hand over our permits for Tibet and board our train.  No doubt we would spend the next forty-eight hours nodding and smiling at an exclusively Mandarin-speaking fourth member of our sleeper compartment?  But no, we were greeted by a lawyer from New York.  As the train pulled away, our home for the next two days was complete.

Day 191: Chengdu - OMG PANDAS!!! SOOO CUUUUUTE!!!!

An intimidating killer bear?

Visiting Chengdu without calling on the giant pandas is a bit like going to Agra without seeing the Taj Mahal.  We duly paid our respects to these ridiculous black and white slobs, who have their main earthly residence on the outskirts of Chengdu, at an early hour of the morning.

All three of us belong to the minority opinion that giant pandas have evolved themselves into such an evolutionary corner that they should simply die out; conservation efforts could then be concentrated on species that matter more to the maintenance of important ecosystems.  Some creatures just weren't meant to survive.  Giant pandas have a meat-eater's gut but devour only bamboo, which they are almost entirely unable to digest.  Their penises are so short that the males struggle to inseminate anything - even a female they have been locked up with - so there are breeding programmes to do the job artificially.  But once the survival of an entire species relies on holding electrodes to its genitals, surely it's game over?  Yes, pandas should go extinct.

Nonetheless, you have to hand it to these creatures in the cuteness stakes.  All three cynics - Guy, Chris and Susan - having railed about the uselessness of giant pandas, promptly broke into a chorus of "ahhhs" as soon as they appeared on the scene.  We were only spared from completely embarrassing ourselves by the non-existence of Facebook in China, which prevented us from sticking up photos with the caption "OMG PANDAS!!!".  Not that there was any trouble getting the animals to stay still for the photo shoot; in fact, they are not very good at doing anything but staying still.  In future, whenever I feel like a nap I'm just going to tell Guy that I'm doing a giant panda impression and no further explanation will be needed.

No... it's a vegetarian, hippie layabout.

Entertainingly, Chris told us that when British Airways initiated flights to Chengdu airport they painted a giant panda face on a plane, to mark the occasion.  Given that a plane has to sprint down a runway in order to become airborne, while a giant panda can only saunter a few steps before recuperating with a snooze, this does not seem to augur well.  Note to all air travellers: if your plane looks like a giant panda, don't board.  Giant pandas cannot sprint!

When we'd finished invading the poor creatures' privacy, along with a few hundred (or thousand?) other tourists, we were introduced to the giant pandas' more elegant cousins, the red pandas, who at least look trim enough to walk around for a few minutes without having to sleep off the exertion.  Then it was time to head to the museum to uncover some surprising giant panda facts.  Apparently Emperor Huang used giant pandas in his army, from which I can only conclude that he lacked any other weapons.  I wonder what the giant pandas did when the enemy approached; lie down for a snooze?

The much more interesting and active Red Panda 

Alex Salmond meanwhile would be shocked to discover that one of the recipient countries of Chinese pandas is England, a nation where you can see the napping beasts at Edinburgh zoo - ouch!  Barack Obama, meanwhile, must have spotted the political capital in being seen to adore a creature that looks like a cuddly toy.  He posed at Chengdu with his wife and children; was this plan dreamed up while fighting a dodgy foreign war and wishing to distract attention, I wonder?

We despaired again of the world's dedication to the panda, then ventured to the gift shop where we all proceeded to buy numerous giant panda mementoes.  Truly, there's no hope for the panda's extinction!  All it has to do is hold out its flabby black and white paws, yawn ear-splittingly, and the most hardened cynic can but swoon!

Big night last night? Doubt it...

Yum yum... bamboo!

Sleeping off a hangover

Days 189-190: Kunming and Chengdu - No Tossing!

Not much sign of Maoism in Chengdu
these days other than this statue

Kunming airport is such a swish place that the flush on the toilets disappointed me; I expected to wave at a sensor instead of having to press a lever manually.  But other than that, the airport was the sleekest creature I could have imagined after Kathmandu's chaos.  We looked down the baggage collection hall and imagined the Magrathians using it as a planet-manufacturing workshop (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe reference alert); dozens of baggage carousels marched into the distance even though the only one in current use was busily spitting out our baggage.  The rest, presumably, are for when capacity doubles, triples, doubles again.  This is an airport that believes in its future.

We blagged our way through immigration - "no of course we aren't going to Tibet; we're going to Chengdu to see the pandas" - then wandered to the taxi rank where a succession of drivers gave us a reason in Mandarin why they could not take us to our hotel.  The words "can I help you?" have never been more welcome.  The speaker even accompanied us to our hotel in a taxi to make sure we reached our destination.  "Do you travel often on business?" I asked him.  He held up an image on his smartphone.  "Here is a map of my journeys this year; this line shows the one I have just taken."  An answer in mere words would not have sufficed; this is the new high-tech China.  A treacle of coloured lights flowed downwards from high-rise buildings and we said goodbye.

Stepping off the plane in Chengdu the next morning, the air was grey - not the grey of thunder clouds or dusk or passing showers but a tangible grey, like a wall.  This is the famed air pollution.  But aside from the murk, everything in Chengdu was squeaky clean and ran without a hitch.  The underground system did not exist four years ago but already it is an embedded part of city life.  (Perhaps the Chinese could come and build HS2 for us?)  High rises dripped red lights like those in Kunming.  Some of the best-dressed women I have ever seen rode noiseless motorcycles or crossed six-lane roads at pedestrian crossings (isn't road crossing about weaving between rickshaws and holding your breath?  Or is that only in the world I have just come from?).  They wore knee-high boots and short skirts, jeans, patterned tights, very high heeled shoes.  I looked down at my baggy Indian travellers' trousers.  Oh dear, they simply will not cut it here.

Can't quite believe this one!

But seeing women in public life was one of the most exciting experiences of our Asian odyssey.  Never mind gargantuan gold buddhas and elephant rides; after male-dominated India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, the sight of women commuting to work was an unparalleled excitement.  Almost as welcome was the total lack of interest in our presence; no hassle, no "I give you good price", no "please look, just look".  China suddenly seemed like an amazing destination and we had not even visited any of the sights yet.

The sights must be seen though.  First stop, Mao.  His statue stands high over the city's central square and Guy decided it was time to make his contribution to the many inappropriate selfies stored on iPhones all over the world: Guy Molyneux and Mao Tse-Tung.  Perhaps the city's burgeoning capitalism - the fashion shops and the high-heeled shoe shops and the computer shops and the camera shops - are all fine so long as that statue of Mao continues to preside over the city?  Perhaps the country still remains communist with its guardian thus revered?

Speaking of rampant consumerism, we wandered down to the 'camera mall' which really was just that - an entire mall full of cameras.  We had met up with our friend Chris Watt when we checked into the hostel and he now joined Guy in drooling over camera lenses the length of my forearm and three times as thick.  Together, the two of them generated enough saliva to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool; they were like a pair of teenaged boys encountering a girl for the first time.  I spent most of the time looking at my toes in embarrassment.

To replace Chris and Guy's fluids, we headed to the more traditional hangout of the tea garden.   We drank the poetic-sounding 'jasmine flowers on snow lake tea' while looking across a Chinese bridge and a lake overhung with trees.  The only interruption to the peace was a man holding what looked like instruments of torture who offered to clean Chris and Guy's ears.  They politely declined.

Susan (having eaten almost all the vegetarian food presented to her)

Back at the hostel we searched on The Happy Cow website for the nearest vegetarian restaurant, joking that they should add as a search criteria 'how far are you willing to travel?' and suggesting that we would enter a value around four thousand miles.  Amazingly, the website revealed that a vegetarian restaurant awaited us just around the corner.  Having had to resort to chips for breakfast to avoid pork, we could not have been more overjoyed.

Ah, China.  You have electric motorcycles and a smooth-running underground system, roads that can be crossed without a traffic accident, and women in public life.  And now you even have vegetarian food.  What more could two tired travellers ask for?

Days 187-188: Dolpo days 18-19 - Get Me Outta Here

A Twin Otter arrives at Juphal...

The peace of Dunai was disturbed the next morning by police loudspeakers.  "It's the fifty-ninth anniversary of their presence in Dunai," Uttam translated for us.  "There's a procession to celebrate."  As we left the village we watched hordes of military uniforms file past.  Sixty-four, we counted.  I wonder how that compares to the number of teachers in Dolpo?  Or the number of doctors?  If only they too totalled sixty-four!

...and leaves again... but we're not onboard!

A donkey raided a boy's apple stall and Guy asked a policeman to arrest it for theft, but nobody giggled in reply.  One does not joke with policemen.

If our humour had reached its lowest point, we were hoping the footpath hadn't.  The end of a trek should lead downwards into a valley - no more straining up hillsides, no more ragged breath - but this trek had other ideas.  Remembering the airstrip high on the hillside, we sweated our way 200m back up to Juphal, showing ever less interest in the cries of "hello, pen".  We had photographed this area at the start of the trek, but on the way back we just wanted to get home again.

We lined up eagerly at the airport check-in desk the next morning (a table next to a pile of building debris almost its own height).  I visited the airport toilets while awaiting the plane (a patch of weeds behind the terminal) and we all put our baggage through the high-tech security system (a line of police glancing through our tents and smelly t-shirts, speaking the single word "open").

The Tara Air check-in desk at Dolpo airport.
Someone get them a broom!

A plane arrived, picked up yesterday's stranded passengers (there was a backlog after the storm) and then departed.  We picked up our boarding cards and awaited its return, only to be told a few minutes later that weather conditions had deteriorated and no further flights would take place.  The other airline that operates out of Juphal nonetheless continued to fly for the next four hours.  Were weather conditions really the problem or did Nepalganj lack enough Juphal-bound passengers to make another flight economic?  More cynicism.


More dal bhat was eaten, more rounds of cards were played.  Dilli and the crew deferred their departure (a week's journey on foot and by bus to Kathmandu) so they could cook for us.  (I hope they received an extra day's pay.)  Then we had another crack at leaving Juphal.  This time we climbed the hill to the airport at six am, arriving before the police.  Our baggage was not even inspected as it had been checked the previous day and clearly we could not have added anything to it in the twenty-four hour interim!  But we did not mind.  We just wanted to get to Kathmandu.

If you thought the check-in desk was bad, here are the
baggage handling facilities!

Finally, we found ourselves in one of Tara Airline's few remaining Twin Otters, praying we would make it into the air before the runway ran out and ditched us off the waiting precipice.  The flight was as exhilarating as before, with each frond of each leaf on the pass below us revealed in close-up.  But we made it - made it onto a ten am flight in Nepalganj (goodness knows what strings were pulled to get the tickets), and made it to Kathmandu in time to catch afternoon flights to our various international destinations.  Dolpo had relinquished us.  Next stop China!

The plod up to Juphal tool us through some of the most intensively worked fields in Dolpo.

A Tara Air Twin Otter is dwarfed by the surrounding mountains

We finally manage to leave...

The mountains look fabulous in the morning light

Just before arriving at Nepalganj the pilot executes a neat 90 degree turn to line us up for landing

A blurred Annapurna I seen from the plane from Nepalganj to Kathmandu

A cloud-shrouded Manaslu from the KTM flight

Final night "porter party"... but where are the porters?!?

The local lady who hung around the campsite with her pet goat!

Days 185-186: Dolpo days 16-17 - Storms on the Road to Nowhere

No photos of the rain but here is the result!

At midnight it continued to rain.  The same at three am and again at six am.  There was no chance of drying our tents the next morning, we just squelched down the valley to the next camp where it continued to rain almost until nightfall.  A twenty-four hour downpour outside the monsoon season is a freak event in these parts.  We discovered, when we next had access to mobile reception, in Dunai, that the same storm had killed dozens of trekkers and porters in the Annapurna region and left many more missing.  This is the greatest loss of life in the mountains in Nepal in many years.

Not knowing about the disaster, we took the opportunity to play our three thousand five hundred and sixty-sixth game of cards (no, I didn't really count) and joke about the road we had walked down that day.  It began where we emerged from the gorge (a location lacking so much as a house) and proceeded towards our night's campsite, often hiding under falls of rock, or accepting an immovable boulder in its midst, even if this would prevent a four by four from ever passing that way.  In many places, the road went missing, its rocks presumably lost long before in the river.  Who would ever use this road, we wondered?  It surely could not pass the gorge we had spent two days descending, and reach Dho-Tarap?  Who had built it?  And for whom?  It looked like a road to nowhere.

Pamela wows the local kids with her
1974 Olympus OM-1

The next day the road continued for a while, then sputtered, fizzled, died, and held out for resurrection.  We followed until we reached Dunai, the capital of Dolpo.  A line of shops offered beer, pairs of shoes to replenish those discarded in the valley of lost shoes, biscuits.  The word chocolate no longer denoted Chinese chewing gum but Mars Bars and Dairy Milk.

We dried our gear and discarded our down jackets at last; from high camps at minus ten degrees, the night time temperature here would remain well above zero.  It was warm enough to sit out in the garden in the evening and laugh and joke.  The Nepali army thought so too.  Five of them came and sat in our camp site with their rifles on their laps.  I thought this rather aggressive (a Quaker upbringing has that affect).  "Don't worry," Tony said, "this is Nepal.  Their guns probably don't even work."  We laughed, but it wasn't our first joke about the disfunctionality of life in Nepal.  And when cynicism sets in, it's probably time for the trek to end.

Morning smoke and light at Tarakot