Category Archives: Tibet

The road to Everest

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Hillsides with gleaming white stone Hollywood-style inscriptions in Chinese; tiny grey nomadic stone huts nestled amid flocks of shivering sheep; wide open valleys with dry river basins the size of the Thames waiting to be filled with the spring torrent of snowmelt; and high mountain passes strewn with colourful prayer flags looking down on cloud-filled valleys and a panorama of towering white peaks. This is the land of the Himilayas.

That’s my best Michael Palin impression – but this truely feels like an epic journey. We’ve been on the bus since 6:30 this morning, and should get to Everest Base Camp (Tibet side) late afternoon. We’ve had the sun rise behind us and are now progressively gawping at a landscape that switches between passes covered with a dusting of snow and green valleys with small villages nestled between rocky outcrops.

Every now an again the bus slows to a shuddering halt as the driver navigates a section of road where the water has washed the surface away and the potholes outnumber the tarmac. Occasionally we’re passed by a high speed convoy of white four wheel drive vehicles, led by police.

We’ve stayed at various towns along the way from Lhasa, all unfortunately fairly lacking in charm thanks to concrete block buildings and identikit tibetan/chinese/western combo restaurants. Fortunately the landscape, monasteries and colourful and friendly local people more than make up for the residential architecture.

I think it’s fair to say that we have temple fatigue. Each day we’ve seen one or two temples or monasteries, each unique but also with very much in common – or to use the Asian phrase, ‘same same but different’. They are stunning, and I think we’ve learnt quite a bit, but they do tend to all roll into one in the mind.

The entrance doors – big, sturdy and red, surrounded by the four guardians, either statues or paintings. Facing south, because evil spirits come from the north. Inside, a yellow glowing light from hundreds of yak butter candles, being topped up by pilgrims from flasks. Then the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, lined up and decorated with all manner of colours and gold. We’ve seen: the largest sandalwood buddha in the world (27m high, apparently from a single piece of wood), a massive copper Buddha (26m), laughing Buddhas, past, present and future Buddhas, those with 11 heads, 1000 arms, and pretty much anything your imagination can think of. Plus the tombs of all the Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas. Pilgrims often leave money, and so the area around each statue is littered with notes – entertainingly with some of the foreign ones on prominent display.

Some of the temples – and certainly the monasteries – we’ve been to have a protector temple, in which a devotee chants scripture while continually beating a drum to ward off evil spirits. And of course there are large brass prayer wheels everywhere, lining corridors, entrances and pathways.

Oh, and before I forget – Mandalas. Amazing artwork representations of the Buddhist universe in the form of sand paintings made by monks sprinkling coloured sand in an intricate design, forming a textured large piece. We saw some monks making one, with face masks in case they sneezed and ruined the whole thing!
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It’s been interesting to see how these places of worship and living deal with tourists like us. Lonely Planet informs us that the Chinese authorities take the hefty entrance fee for each venue, and so the monasteries and temples are left seeking donations to survive. It’s no wonder then that almost everywhere we went there was a charge to take photos inside – normally 25 yuan, or £2.50. It did seem somewhat amazing though that a monastery we went to yesterday had a fee of 1500 yuan for video cameras – that would be £150!

It’s against this (understandable) backdrop of tourism for revenue that our impromptu and self-organised visit to a Nunnery yesterday was so refreshing. Guideless (and hence languageless), we made our own way into the assembly hall, walking round clockwise while a dozen or so nuns were chanting, sitting on their carpeted benches in the middle. As we were about to smile our goodbyes and leave, they invited us to sit with them, gesturing and laughing a welcoming greeting. We sat and they sang, they looked at our photos, and we all took photos together, with the nuns excitedly reviewing other places people in the group had been and particularly loving some photos of alligators. It actually felt like we’d shared something with them; a world apart from the monasteries.

The road to Everest is nearly complete, we’ve been going 9 hours now and in theory we should be able to see it shortly – if it wasn’t for the clouds. The final 102km are the ‘bad road’, which is basically a dirt track over the mountains, with tight hairpin bends and fords through riverbeds. That has taken us 3 hours so far, punctuated by the occasional Chinese checkpoint where we all have to line up in visa order and have our passports checked.

The final 8km to base camp is on foot, which we’re looking forward to greatly after being coupes up all day. Here’s hoping for blue skies!

Simon

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Greening the giant

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One of the stereotypes about China I’ve heard many times is that of a smoke belching, coal guzzling giant. Its massive need for electricity following rapid industrialisation, and the plentiful supply of fossil fuels from it’s vast natural resources means that it is a huge polluter – and one that has an image of being reluctant to adapt to the growing concerns around climate change. Like many other nations, China plays the development deficit card – if the west was allowed to use so much carbon dioxide in getting to its current level of wealth, surely it’s fair to do the same in playing catch-up. Cue a discussion involving modern technology being vastly more efficient, questionable phrases like ‘clean coal’, ‘carbon capture and storage’, and what fairness really means in a world that is currently consuming at twice the rate that is globally sustainable – but where most of that consumption is being done by a small proportion of the population.

In that context, it’s been interesting to see a surprising number of green shoots of renewables on our journey. Almost everywhere we’ve been, rooftops are decorated with solar water heating, the distinctive cylinders above a slanted set of pipes producing a pretty pattern in a panorama across the roofs of Lhasa. On our train journey across the interior, we passed wind farm after wind farm, with huge turbines lying on the ground in places ready for assembly.

In Tibet, it’s been fascinating to see the streets frequented by solar kettles alongside the motorbike shops and smoke belching tractors. Our guide was telling us that the parabolic mirrors with a kettle suspended in the middle used to be made of cement and take a few people to move around, but recent innovations mean they’re a simple aluminium dish on a portable frame. 20 minutes to boil a large kettle in the high altitude sun – not bad for free energy!

Oh, and Laura reminds me – electric vehicles. The alleyways and side streets here are disarmingly quiet (certainly compared to the cacophony of horns and engines on the main roads). Almost everyone seems to be using electric bikes – from your electric motor-assisted regular cycle, to pimped-up motorbike-sized things. And all absolutely silent. A few times we’ve nearly walked into the path of them (on the pavement, I should point out) because you just can’t hear them coming. I know electric bikes are becoming more common on the streets of Britain, but it’s us playing catch-up here.

I’m sure renewables remain a drop in the (rising) ocean – and many of the pressures to adopt these technologies are financial rather than environmental – but in a land where even in the fresh mountain air of Tibet the locals wear face masks for fear of pollutants, it’s easy to over-apply a single stereotype.

Simon

Reaching for the sky

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20110910-065005.jpgYou don’t need to travel here to realise that modern China is about growth and immense scale – but seeing it for yourself really does bring it home.

The Great Wall seems to have set the tempo. If a book ‘The Great Wall for dummies’ existed, the first fact it would tell you is that it was not one contiguous wall, but many individual sections, broken up by mountains and other impassable landscape. (The second thing it would tell you is that it’s only as visible from space as motorways, which are wider – and there’s no chance of seeing it unaided from the moon, as has been claimed.) However, saying that The Wall doesn’t go over mountains somewhat understates the effort involved in constructing it. Remember, this is the land of Everest – the sheer, near-vertical rocky ascenders would certainly be called mountains back home. The gentle stroll we were expecting up to and along the wall was anything but – see the photo for a sample of it.

It feels a bit like there’s an attempt to prove that humankind owns and hence dominates the natural world no matter what nature has thrown at us. Take electricity pylons for example. Conventionally you’d expect them to follow the path of least resistance – alongside the rivers that cut valleys through the rock. Not here. Some planner has taken a contourless map and a ruler, and just gone for it, meaning that certainly around the major cities the surrounding mountains have glistening silver monuments to modernity adorning their peaks. I pity the construction workers; nothing short of a helicopter could have been used to shift the materials into place.

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Even in calm, prayer flag laced Lhasa, the scale of construction is huge. Opposite the hotel where we were staying is a mammoth building site, where they’re constructing the latest shopping mall in China’s enthusiastic embrace of capitalism. Laura thinks I’ve become obsessed by what I’m about to tell you – but let me assure you, it’s nowhere near her addiction to bells (and fountains).

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My fascination? They’re using A LOT of water. I don’t mean ‘oh, I left the tap on’, or even ‘let’s run the industrial sprinklers for hours every night’. This is an order of magnitude above: install a whole new set of water mains running above ground for miles across town from at least two different sources. These mains are massive – six or eight welded steel pipes of say eight inches in diameter, running into the distance along the pavement, complete with car-ramps, troughs in the roads so they can cross – and, being spot welded around us while we were there, pedestrian-friendly steps over them. This maze of pipes ends up in four huge water towers, one at each corner of the construction site, into which we could see torrents of water gushing day and night, only to mysteriously vanish again through a network of pipes into the ground around the construction site.

Perhaps they’re creating the world’s largest underground swimming pool? Who knows. This wasn’t what I was thinking of when I said that migration and modernisation was diluting the local culture!

Even the Great Wall has its accoutrement to modernity – a toboggan run from the top down to the car park in the valley below, which we dutifully took in the name of research.

I’m not even going to mention the Ilisu Dam.

The irony is that as I write this, the busy road from Lhasa has turned into a bmx-style dirt track, with our bus becoming a temporary rollercoaster. For all the prosperity in modern China, it remains a country with extreme contrasts – gleaming urban skyscrapers against a backdrop of massive rural poverty. It may well be the world’s next superpower, but it is one whose GDP is the same as that of Namibia, at $6,000 a year. Multiply that up by 1.4 billion people and you have something colossal – but then when you think of a landscape that stretches from the Himalayas to the Straights of Japan, you realise just how spread out everything is and in reality just how little has been tamed let alone dominated by humankind.

Simon

The bus

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The wheels on the bus go round and round, but the people on the bus go squish and sweat. We have bus envy. Yesterday’s bus had seats with pockets, leg room, and – the holy grail of sunny travel – air conditioning. Today’s is a little more rustic, and the bad news is that this is our transport for the next week all the way to Kathmandu. We won’t quite have the ordeal being experienced by some cyclists we passed while ascending a pass at 4600m, but it’s fair to say we’re underwhelmed by the comfort. Of course this is more than made up for by the adrenaline thrill of hairpin bends and blind corners. I won’t go into a vivid description of the safety conditions on the roads in Tibet for fear of alarming relatives back home. We’ll be ok!

Today’s journey has seen us trundle through the Lhasa valley, following the river downstream to where it joins another and heads off to India. We stopped at a ‘water burial’ site, where the tradition is for the dead to be cast into the river, much like we’ll see at Varanasi in India. Amid the usual prayer flags, an interesting sight on the cliffs alongside the water – white paintings of ladders, to indicate that the dead should climb up to a heaven. Our Norweigen friend Gardar points out that ladders are of course bidirectional, and so an arrow would be a worthy addition!

On we go, past farmers baling their barley into lots of neat little stacks – like a small teepee, with the barley on top fanning out in a cone to keep the rain off. They must make lovely temporary housing for passing wildlife. The bus screeches to a halt as we’re surrounded by Yaks being herded down the valley by a nomad – and later a flock of sheep with their shepherd.

As we reach the pass, a gorgeous turquoise lake comes into view, glistening in the sunshine as far as the eye can see – and reflected in it’s surface, we can see snow capped peaks of a mountain range. Not the Himilayas yet though, we’re told. This lake is a mere 640 square kilometres in size, 240km long.

At each photo stop, there’s an assortment of locals – nomadic peoples who rely on passing tourism to supplement the meagre income they get from farming. Photogenic mothers, dogs with red fluffy scarves around their necks, and of course at least one yak. All, understandably for inclusion in a photo for a fee. We went through a pass at 5020m next to a stunning glacier, and found probably the highest outdoor pool table in the world, with a few locals playing a tournament on it. Amazing!

One last thing for today – prayer flags. It has to be seen to believed. I’m sure you’ve seen the photos of some colourful prayer flags draped across some rooftop, but I’d never realised quite how extreme they get. Every accessible mountaintop, electricity pylon, and pass has thousands of them, in places so dense that they look like a giant fluttering patchwork quilt hanging in the sky. And along with the flags, prayer confetti to release in the wind – oh, and along with that, all manner of rubbish from passing visitors. Beautiful from a distance, up close it can seem somewhat like legal littering, with more manmade rubbish than the last day of Glastonbury (which is bad, if you haven’t seen it!)

One day of the road trip down, five to go. Only a few hours tomorrow, compared to the seven we’ve done today.

Simon

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Lhasa and the versatility of the yak

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Lhasa and the versatility of the yak

I’m writing this on the winding mountain road from Lhasa to Gyantse. It’s a seven hour journey and we’re only a couple of hours in but have already seen some stunning lake views and prayer flag strewn mountains.

During our stay in Lhasa we visited the Potala palace, the Jokhang temple, the Sera monastery and attempted some more geocaching (unsuccessfully-too many people around).

The Potala palace, former home of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government, is a stunning 13 storey red and white building set in the hillside overlooking Lhasa. Tours around the palace are time-limited due to the number of visitors but inside you can see endless rooms of Buddhist statues and the tombs of the 5th-13th Dalai Lamas.

The Jokhang temple in the centre of Lhasa is the most revered temple in Tibet. Around the temple is a pilgrim circuit known as the Barkhor. Buddhist pilgrims walk this market stall-lined circuit with prayer beads or perpetually spinning prayer wheels in hand. Prayer wheels come in a variety of shapes and sizes, all containing a scroll with a prayer written on. The idea is that the spinning of the wheel releases the prayer into the world. Whilst most pilgrims walk the Barkhor circuit some, wearing aprons and with paddles strapped to their hands, launch themselves to the ground in an act of prostration with every step.

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At the Sera monastery you can watch monks debating the finer points of Buddhist philosophy. On our visit, rather than the usual debating, some young monks were being examined. This appeared to consist of (from what we could gather since we don’t speak Tibetan) the young monk stepping up to a microphone in the middle of a hall of seated monks and answering the questions posed by three elders. The young monk paces back and forth in constant motion while answering and clapping his hands together in an exaggerated manner after every few words, presumably to strengthen his point. Occasionally when the young monk is taking too long to answer or has perhaps said something controversial the watching monks all jeer in unison. Not all that unlike the houses of parliament. All I can say is I’m glad my viva wasn’t like that!

All of the Bhuddhist sights are beautifully decorated with colourful fabrics covering walls and ceilings and thousands of statues of different Buddhist deities and their various manifestations. They are also filled with the atmospheric burning incense and yak butter candles.

Yak butter is an incredibly versatile thing; being used for candles, yak butter tea, and probably all of the things you would usually use butter for. Yaks themselves in fact appear to be used for everything, I can tell you now that yak steak, curry, stew and enchiladas are all very tasty, as are yak cheese and yoghurt. Yak wool is also in common use, or failing that you can buy a nice warm looking yak skin jacket or hat. Yak dung can be dried in the sun (complete with hand print if you so desire) then used on walls or roofs for insulation/structural integrity/decoration. Yak dung can also be used as fuel for your stove. I think it’s safe to say that no part of the yak goes unused – as James on our tour (who even ate yak lung) said “the yak is the Swiss army knife of the bovine world”.

We ended our time in Lhasa with a visit to the local nightclub. It was actually a pretty good club, it appears that the done thing is to buy your beer in bulk at the beginning of the night, I’m talking about 30 bottles to be shared by the group, and find yourselves a table as a base for the night. Occasionally in clubs or restaurants in the UK you may get people trying to sell you a rose. Well in Tibetan nightclubs you can buy electric glowing roses and hearts, giant stuffed teddy bears or even candyfloss! What was quite nice was the tier of fruit we had for the table. I also managed to make friends with a Tibetan girl who made it her task for the evening to keep taking me (and sometimes the others in our group) to the dance floor. The only dodgy thing about the place were the squat toilets with mirror doors…