The Emperor Far Away (21 page)

Next morning, it was cold and wet again as I shouldered my pack for what would be the hardest leg of the Kora. There were more than twenty kilometres to cover, and most of them would be above 5,000 metres. Straightaway, I began ascending on a narrow track made slippery by the rain, stumbling and taking far shorter steps than I would lower down, my breathing shallow and quick. The first hour was agonising, as I struggled to get my protesting legs moving after a night of inactivity.

At 5,200 metres, we reached the snowline and the rain was replaced by a sky of high clouds broken up by patches of blue. For a brief, glorious period we trudged along on the flat, winding slowly right as Kailash’s north face began to give way to the east, through a plain of rocks covered in ice and snow and interspersed with countless little streams running down from the summit of the mountain.

Those insignificant brooks are the source of four of Asia’s major rivers. The Indus, Sutlej, Brahmaputra and Karnali, the largest tributary of the Ganges, begin on or near Kailash, feeding vast swathes of the subcontinent. The Indus crosses into India, before running the full length of Pakistan and into the Arabian Sea. Its easternmost tributary is the Sutlej, which flows into the Punjab in northern India and Pakistan. Nepal is watered by the Karnali, before it enters Bangladesh and India, as does the Brahmaputra, and becomes the Ganges, the lifeblood for the 400 million people who live in the surrounding river basin.

Perhaps it was some unconscious realisation that Kailash was giving them life that made Hindus and Buddhists, as well as the Bon adherents and Jainists before them, pinpoint the mountain as the heart of the world millennia prior to the region being identified as the source of the four rivers. By the nineteenth century, Europeans were vying to discover where they started from but it took them another 100 years actually to do so.

Sven Hedin, a dogged, driven Swedish explorer who criss-crossed central Asia, Xinjiang and Tibet repeatedly, is credited with discovering the origins of the Indus, Sutlej, Karnali and Brahmaputra on his 1905–8 expedition to the area. But it was the Englishman Bailey, during his unauthorised 1913 foray into southern Tibet, who confirmed that the Yarlung Tsangpo turns into the Brahmaputra.

Harnessing the hydroelectric potential of the rivers that flow from Kailash is a long-held dream of Beijing’s, as is diverting them to help water inland China’s increasingly parched landscape. In the 1990s, there was talk of building a dam in the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge, the deepest canyon in the world, which would have dwarfed the giant Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Soon after I visited Kailash, Beijing was forced to abandon plans to re-route water from the gorge north to Xinjiang, after vehement protests from New Delhi over the impact it might have on the people living downstream in India and Bangladesh.

China is going ahead with building a smaller dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo, one of twenty-eight proposed hydroelectric projects on the river, despite India’s opposition and fears of the effect it will have on the rare and fragile ecosystems dependent on it. With water an increasingly scarce and valuable commodity, the prospect of an environmental war between India and China is rather more likely than future clashes over their unresolved frontier.

Musing over geopolitics, as well as raising my eyes from the treacherous track occasionally to glimpse the snow and rock of the east face, helped distract me from thinking about the pain I knew was about to come. A second wind was pushing me across the all too short flat plain, but ahead I could see the start of the final climb up to the Dolma La Pass, the highest point of the Kora. The path rose dramatically, a near-vertical series of what were almost ledges cut into the rock. It was steep enough to make even the Tibetans slow down and the trail was choked with pilgrims bunched close together.

Walk, stop, go became my mantra as I hauled myself step by twisting step up to the pass, gulping air greedily. I could manage only twenty to thirty metres at a time, before being forced to pause, both leg-weary and short of breath. A yak train came through, pushing everyone to the side of the track. The shaggy-haired beasts were loaded with boxes and stumbling for grip as their handlers drove them upwards. Despite their size and horns, they were alarmed at being near so many humans, their eyes startled and wide open, and they veered hurriedly away from anyone who got too close.

Finally, after what seemed like an age but was actually about an hour, I was standing on the Dolma La at the heady height of 5,650 metres. Draped in prayer flags, so many I had to lift up the ropes they flew from to get to a position where I could take a photo of the mountain, it was narrow and crowded with pilgrims praying and resting. There were whole families up here, including grandparents and children – three generations united on the Kora.

Staying long was not an option. Close up, Kailash’s east face is less impressive and sinister than its counterpart to the north. It looks more like a conventional peak from this angle, lacking the elemental magnetism that had made it so hard to tear my eyes away from the north face. The Dolma La was exposed too, windswept and cold, and although Tenzin muttered an incantation under his breath, I wasn’t here to make merit like the pilgrims. We headed down, with deep snow on either side of the track, already more than halfway back to Darchen.

Any exultation in knowing that the climbing part of the Kora was over didn’t last long. A fifteen-minute scramble at speed down a near-sheer slope of shifting rock, which Tenzin said would be quicker than following the path hugging the contours of the east face, proved fatal for my left boot. The outer sole was almost completely ripped off by the descent and soon I was walking on just the inner sole. Having thought I could be at our destination for the day in a couple of hours, I realised I would have to go slowly to ensure I didn’t end up walking in my sock alone.

While Tenzin moved ahead, I limped along putting my weight on my right boot and constantly scanning the track for the water I thought would seep into my left boot. It was a dull ten kilometres to Zutrulphuk, a Dirapuk-like hamlet with a monastery and a few brick houses. Kailash was mostly hidden from view and the hike was enlivened only by the marmots popping their heads up from behind rocks to look at the people passing by, before swiftly ducking out of sight again. By the time I got to Zutrulphuk, I had blisters on both my big toes, and my right boot was showing signs of distress too.

Trekking slowly back on the final day, dipping down the track in bright sunshine, until finally rounding the east face to meet the southern side of Kailash, gave me time to contemplate the meaning of the journey I was about to complete. I struggled, though, to comprehend the true significance of the mountain for those who treat the Kora as a spiritual rite of passage, rather than a mere physical challenge in one of the world’s remotest spots.

But as I walked the final few metres down Darchen’s main street, while a convoy of land cruisers loaded with Indian pilgrims drove past, I thought at least I had done the Kora the way it has been done for thousands of years. More than that, I had come to the one part of Tibet still free of real Chinese influence. Kailash stands as an unchanging testament not only to the power of belief but to its supremacy over the diktats of the CCP – just another of the dynasties that have risen and fallen throughout Chinese history.

14

Going Down

There is a unique intensity to travelling in Tibet, at odds with the empty landscape and a people who subscribe to the fatalism inherent in Buddhism. Just being on the move all the time, shifting huge distances between towns that appear far more significant on the map than they are in reality, is wearing. And every day of the journey seemed to bring some new drama, whether it was incorrect permits, misunderstandings or an incident as insignificant yet vital as the disintegration of my walking boots. After almost a month in Tibet, I needed a holiday.

Tenzin suggested a rest cure of sorts: a drive further west along 219, where few travellers venture. It would take me as close to the Indian frontier as I could get, and there was the tantalising prospect of visiting a rare Bon monastery. After a hot shower in a public bathhouse, my first since Shigatse, and with the sky a commanding blue I felt more relaxed as we set off down the deserted 219, accompanied by herds of antelope running parallel to us on either side of the road.

To the right, there were tremendous views of Kailash’s south face, its ridges so extreme that I doubted any climber could make it across them. Then, on the left, the western Himalayas appeared, dominated by the unmistakable, double-peaked Nanda Devi, the highest mountain in India. Despite being so visible, Nanda Devi is also sufficiently secluded that it took decades before a route through the valleys on the Indian–Tibet border to the starting point for its ascent was discovered. The men who achieved that feat were the intrepid explorers H. W. Tilman and Eric Shipton, long before their adventures in Xinjiang.

Speeding on, the land cruiser savouring the smooth tarmac of 219, the only properly paved road in western Tibet, we reached the hamlet of Tirthapuri. Wu Jing jeeps were parked up, checking trucks coming in the opposite direction from Xinjiang. A local bus sat waiting for passengers. I asked where it was going. ‘Ali,’ replied the driver, the last town of any size before the disputed region of Aksai Chin. He gestured at me to get aboard. I smiled and shook my head, tempted as I was by the prospect of travelling on.

Turning off 219, a rutted track took us into the Garuda Valley, once the capital of the ancient Bon kingdom of Shang Shung which ruled western Tibet – with Kailash at its heart – more than 2,000 years ago. A solitary village marked by a cairn of white stones and yak horns and surrounded by barley fields, irrigated by the Sutlej flowing down from Kailash towards India, occupied the valley plain. But the hills overlooking it were austere and lunar-like, a hint of the extreme landscape that lies further north in Aksai Chin. Shaded a dirty yellow, they were pockmarked with caves and strewn with stray rocks, many of them pure quartz.

High up on the far hillsides, ruined monasteries were visible, a reminder that much of what is now Tibetan Buddhist culture originated in Shang Shung. Stretching north towards Xinjiang and west into Nepal, it was so powerful a state that even King Songtsen Gampo, who united Tibet briefly in the seventh century, had been obliged to offer his sister as a bride to the kingdom’s then monarch.

A sole Bon monastery survives still in Shang Shung. It is one of the few functioning ones left in Tibet, although there are others in western Nepal and Bhutan. Fewer than 10 per cent of Tibetans have stayed loyal to the Bon religion, most of them Ngari people. But, initially, nothing distinguished the monastery from its Buddhist counterparts. Prayer wheels ran around the exterior, a giant spider’s web of prayer flags covered the hill behind it and a swastika adorned the entrance to the prayer hall – all symbols appropriated by Tibetan Buddhism after King Songtsen Gampo imposed it as the country’s primary faith.

Inside, though, the prayer hall was far less ornate than its Buddhist equivalents with fewer statues and
thangka
, or paintings, of deities. The skins of a leopard and wolf hung prominently, a legacy of the animist origins of Bon. Early Tibetan Buddhists traduced Bon adherents as members of a wrathful cult, known for bloody rituals and sacrifices, despite it also being a faith ultimately centred on the search for enlightenment.

Those distinctions made no difference to the Han, who sacked both Buddhist and Bon monasteries during the Cultural Revolution, according to the middle-aged monk, his close-cropped scalp bare in places from alopecia, guiding us around. ‘I think the Chinese see Buddhists and Bon as the same essentially, except that they sometimes refer to our religion as “primitive”. They don’t understand us,’ he said.

The second stage of Tenzin’s post-Kora relaxation plan was still to come. A few days at Lake Manasarovar – the opportunity for a break from both trekking and the interminable hours we spent in the land cruiser. Two hours east of Darchen, Manasarovar is one of the highest freshwater lakes in the world, a body of water ninety kilometres round sitting just above 4,500 metres. As we descended towards it, the lake was cobalt blue in the sunshine, its shores gently sloping grassland. Behind us, the distinctive diamond shape of Kailash stood out like a beacon amid the mountains ranged around it.

Manasarovar is almost as sacred a spot as Kailash and is linked inextricably to it. Buddhists identify it as Lake Anotatta, where Maya, the mother of Buddha, was brought by the spirits to bathe in its waters before giving birth. Along with Kailash, Manasarovar is the only place in Tibet the Buddha is said to have visited. Some of Gandhi’s ashes were scattered here, and for Hindus the lake signifies ultimate purity. Bathing in it to cleanse themselves of sin, as well as sometimes drinking its waters, is an essential part of their Kailash journey.

Indian pilgrims were walking back from the lakeshore as we arrived in Chiu, Manasarovar’s main settlement, a line of low white-stone houses sited right by the lake and overlooked by a small monastery on a craggy hill. A tall man with a ponytail, moustache and dark-brown face emerged from one of them and shook Tenzin’s hand. Tashi was a former monk from a nomad family. After the death of his parents, he sold their herd of yaks and settled by Manasarovar to run a guesthouse with his wife, who looked almost Native American with her broad, high-cheekboned face, pulled-back hair and fingers covered in silver rings.

An erudite man, Tashi spent much of the day in his study where the walls were lined with the
thangka
he painted. He liked to tell stories of his time as a monk, picking precise holes in the arguments the CCP employ to justify their role in selecting the most senior
tulku
. In addition, he was a welcoming host who brewed the finest
chang
I drank in Tibet. His wife, too, still had some yak meat left to liven up the fried rice I ate twice a day. My room was the usual concrete box, but I could reach the shores of Manasarovar from it in less than a minute.