The Emperor Far Away (19 page)

Soon the fertile fields were gone and the hills grew more severe. We drove on over 5,000-metre passes, and the towering mountains in the distance began to draw nearer. Nomad tents dotted the grassland and their occupants could be seen astride horses tending the herds of yaks, rather than the cows I’d seen around Gyantse and Shigatse, grazing near by. Marmots and mountain goats scampered away at the sound of our engine, but for most of the time we had the road to ourselves, passing only a few solitary trucks and tractors towing trailers loaded with passengers swathed in headscarves against the sun and wind.

From here on, we were in the real Wild West. After Lhatse, there are no more conventional hotels, just shared rooms with dirty, damp beds, concrete floors and no heating. The electricity comes and goes and showers are scarce; in most settlements the only way to wash is with a thermos of hot water. During my time in Ngari, I got to shower just once and grew used to matted hair, a week’s worth of stubble and clothes stained with mud and dust. Smoking furiously in the pit toilets in an effort to disguise their stink became second nature.

Only the food defeated me. China’s cuisines are as diverse as its people and most are superb. Tibet is the exception.
Tsampa
,
thugpa
(a noodle soup) and
momo
(yak-meat dumplings) are the principal national dishes, all accompanied by endless glasses of yak-butter tea. Every morning, Tenzin and the driver Lopa would happily pull out the cloth bags which contained their
tsampa
, before mixing it with butter tea or water and, sometimes, yak cheese. It was a breakfast I tried just once, and the remorseless meals of
momo
and
thugpa
soon began to pall.

I had been spoiled for choice in Lhasa, where there are Nepali places and Tibetan ones that cater to westerners; the finest meal I ate in Tibet was a spicy yak-meat pizza with a yak-cheese base. I was able to vary my diet in Gyantse and Shigatse too, thanks to the restaurants run by migrants from Sichuan. Eating Chinese food induced feelings of guilt, given the way Han culture is encroaching in Tibet, but I blamed Tibetan chefs for their lack of innovation rather than admit my own hypocrisy.

Those meals were a distant memory now. The higher we climbed, the worse the food got. For much of the time, only basic fried rice or
thugpa
was on offer. Fruit became scarcer and much more expensive. Along with vegetables, it has to be transported down 219 from Xinjiang, and it is common in Ngari to see Uighurs selling bruised apples from the back of a truck. Even yak meat is hard to find, as the animals are slaughtered only at a certain time of the year and the meat has to last for months.

One advantage of being so far from Lhasa was that Tenzin was no longer coiled as tight as he had been when we first met. By nature anxious, he began to relax the further we travelled, even offering his opinion on why most Tibetans inside Tibet, as opposed to the still rebellious borderlands, seemed so subdued and inured to the ever-increasing Han presence. He blamed it on the Chinese response to the March 2008 demonstrations. ‘Things are much worse in Tibet since then,’ he said. ‘Many more army and police have come and they are like animals. People are scared of them. That’s why there are no protests now. People don’t want to go to jail.’

Monks alone retained their pugnacious spirit, as demonstrated by the ongoing self-immolations in eastern Tibet. ‘They are the angriest of all. They’re not free to celebrate all the festivals or to worship as they want,’ said Tenzin. In Dharamsala, he had met the Dalai Lama and he told me he thought he might return to Tibet one day, a statement that could get him locked up if a zealous Han official heard him saying it. ‘All Tibetans want the chance to see him here. I hope it will happen and I think it might now that he has resigned from politics. It is his involvement in politics which the Chinese don’t like.’

In the summer of 2011, the Dalai Lama stepped down from his role as the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile. I didn’t share Tenzin’s optimism that giving up political power would alter Beijing’s attitude towards him. It is his position as the spiritual leader of the Tibetans that the CCP fears far more. Tibet is a country which has never been especially cohesive and only the Dalai Lama can unite its people. He will retain that authority as long as he lives.

Kailash was slowly drawing us closer as we sped west and always upwards on 219. Saga was over 4,600 metres and from now on we would not descend below that height until we started the trip towards the Nepalese border after the Kailash Kora. We were running parallel to the frontier already. Just forty kilometres away over the mountains on our left was Mustang, a region in Nepal long associated with Tibet.

Jutting into Tibet, so that the borderline is forced to curve around it, Mustang’s proximity to Ngari made it the natural base for the armed Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule that carried on after the PLA crushed the 1956–9 uprising. Backed by the CIA, who took some of the Tibetans to train in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, the guerrillas raided across the border, ambushing army convoys travelling 219. Around 2,000 Tibetans, many from Kham, carried on fighting sporadically until the early 1970s, when the Americans stopped funding them after Nixon and Mao met in Beijing in 1972.

Beyond Zhongba, a tiny town dominated by the nearby PLA base, we entered a new, far more otherworldly land. Giant sand dunes appeared, bizarrely sited next to grassland and icy lakes, while serrated peaks sat off on the horizon. This was high-altitude desert, stern yet seductive in the way its extreme contrasts make it so compelling a vista. There were hardly any villages now – only a few nomad settlements surrounded by their animals.

Three hundred-odd kilometres past Saga, we were halted by a Wu Jing checkpoint. I got twitchy every time I was required to show my permits and passport, wondering if Beijing had perhaps discovered I was in Tibet and had sent through instructions for my arrest. My second passport would be glaring proof that I was not a journalist but some sort of English spy, a throwback to the Indian Raj and the time when the pundits, the British officials who acted as undercover explorers, penetrated into Tibet secretly from India.

This time, my anxiety deepened as it became clear Tenzin had a problem. The first hint came when he called Lopa over, while telling me to stay in the car. As the trucks behind were waved through, I had no idea what was going on. When Tenzin returned, after almost two hours of negotiating, he bore an apologetic smile that I knew could only mean trouble. ‘The agency in Lhasa has made a mistake. We haven’t got the right stamp on our permits to carry on. I’ve called them and they’ll try and fax the correct ones through. But we’ll have to go back to Paryang to do that.’

Paryang was 100 kilometres behind us, a miserable village we had thankfully raced through. Highway 219 was its main street, and off it were unpaved alleys lined with one-storey mudbrick houses behind walls. Everywhere was strewn with rubbish, which the wind blew high into the air as if it was being sucked skyward by heaven’s garbage men. I doubted there was a fax machine in Paryang. As we drove through its backstreets, though, I spotted the Chinese characters for an internet café. It was just a shop run by Han migrants, with one computer and a deadly slow internet connection. But they did have a fax.

By now, it was 7 p.m. and I would have to stay the night. Leaving Lopa and Tenzin, who was juggling phone calls to Lhasa and faxes with an increasingly desperate air, I set off for the one hotel I had seen. Named after Shishapangma, the only 8,000-metre mountain solely inside Tibet, it was a series of cramped and dark rooms set around a gravel courtyard, where there were a couple of cold-water taps.

Its owner was a youngish, bearded Han from Guizhou Province in the south-west. ‘I moved here because I have bad lungs,’ he said, offering me a smoke. ‘I’ve been here five years now.’ While haggling over the price of a room, I contemplated the horror of being stuck in Paryang for so long. He wanted far more than his lodgings were worth, claiming that his currently deserted establishment would be teeming with Indian pilgrims returning from Kailash later that night.

After peeking into the kitchen and being offered the inevitable fried rice, I decided to look for a more sophisticated dinner. To my surprise, I found a restaurant run by a genial middle-aged Sichuan couple. It was the most popular place in the village and locals, including a few nomads, were crowded around the tables. The fiery dishes and a succession of beers helped dull the disappointment of the day. When I returned to the Shishapangma, the courtyard was jammed with land cruisers and there was a newly pitched tent in the middle of it. The Indian pilgrims had arrived.

Next morning, there was hardly space to move. Tall, distinguished-looking gents, small and fat Indian matrons and younger men and women who were clearly their sons and daughters bustled between the cold-water taps, the filthy toilets and the tent which was serving breakfast. The fastidious Indians travelled with their own food and cooks. They were a group of 120, all of whom had come to Kailash under the auspices of their guru. His photo adorned the identity cards they wore around their necks and the rear windows of their land cruisers.

The guru had a beatific expression, a beard and a firm hold on his followers, who mostly lived in the States. ‘We didn’t do the full Kora,’ said one young man from California, for whom the pilgrimage was part-celebration of his college graduation. ‘We trekked to the north face of Kailash and stayed there. Our guru said there was no need to go further because we wouldn’t be able to see the other faces of the mountain clearly.’ Before that, they had gone to Lake Manasarovar, the most holy stretch of water in Tibet. ‘Our guru said Kailash would be more receptive to us if we went in the lake first.’ I asked if it was cold. ‘Fucking freezing,’ he replied.

While the Indians packed up and prepared to leave, their duty as Hindus done, I hung around waiting for Tenzin. He didn’t turn up and called instead. He had been on the road back to Shigatse all night and wouldn’t return with the correctly stamped permits until the following morning. I faced another day and night in Paryang. For the first time on the trip I lost my temper, growling futile curses at the walls of my grim room. When I calmed down, I reminded myself of my desire to escape Tibet’s tourist trail. Now I had my chance – another twenty-four hours in a place no traveller in their right mind would stay in.

I tried hard to make the most of Paryang. I walked the alleys, passing the dogs fighting over the freshly dumped intestines of some animal and the houses with yak skulls hanging over their doors. I visited the nomads outside town, shouting ‘
Tashi Delek
’ repeatedly as I approached to avoid being savaged by their wild hounds. I found the village temple, a fascinating little shrine with a giant prayer wheel inside and smaller ones around the outside which people circled constantly. I drank butter tea in a tent run by a tall and striking woman with a bronzed face, high cheekbones and braided waist-length hair.

But by the late afternoon I had exhausted Paryang’s possibilities. I sat smoking in the once more deserted courtyard of the Shishapangma. It was going to rain. In Tibet’s high, empty summer sky, you can see the weather coming hours before it arrives. The approaching clouds were jellyfish-like: dark and bulging, with the rain falling from them in near vertical lines their tendrils. It rained all night, and Paryang looked and felt like the last place on earth.

Early in the morning Tenzin returned, with bags under his eyes and a fistful of permits. ‘We can go now,’ he smiled. I was already packed; I couldn’t wait to leave. An hour later, we were back at the Wu Jing checkpoint and this time we were allowed to proceed. Lopa stamped on the accelerator and we started to climb up to the 5,200-metre Mayum La Pass. As we descended on the other side, skittish herds of wild antelope raced across the road ahead of us.

Darchen was a few hours on, another one-yak town with worn prayer flags flying over buildings which looked like they were never intended to last longer than a season. This was the starting point for the Kailash Kora, the last place to stock up on whatever the shops could provide before we set off around the mountain. The clouds had followed us from Paryang and hung low and dirty grey over Darchen, shrouding Kailash from view and making me nervous about the weather conditions that awaited us.

More alarming was the sight of the Russian in the room next to me in the hotel, an almost exact copy of the Shishapangma in Paryang. I heard him before I saw him, coughing and gasping for air as his lungs slowly filled with liquid. His name was Mikhail and he was suffering from severe altitude sickness. He had been left behind by his party while they went on the Kora. The Tibetans who ran the hotel told me he needed to descend to a lower height as quickly as possible, the only real cure for his condition.

In a mix of pidgin Russian and English, I passed on their diagnosis. But at first he refused to leave or to take any medication, saying he was determined to survive naturally. Amazingly, he still thought he might attempt the Kora. He changed his story subsequently, saying his friends hadn’t left him any cash to buy medicine or the mini oxygen cylinders sold in Darchen. Some Italians staying in the hotel took pity on him and gave him their unused oxygen, but he was still wheezing in bed when I left.

That night, I found a half-decent Tibetan restaurant and gorged myself, not sure what food I would find on the mountain. Later, I drank tea with Sili, a young Tibetan from Lhasa. Her family were Khampa originally and had come to Darchen to sell jewellery to tourists. ‘I don’t like it here, there’s nothing to do, but business is good,’ she said. Sili was eighteen but looked older, a result of the cruel effect living at altitude has on the skin. I had given up looking in the rare mirrors I encountered, shocked by my dry, red, wind- and sun-burned face.