The Tibetan Plateau 7/05
We have finally left Kunming and have now been on the road for about two weeks. Thanks to the “Guanxi” (connections) of a friend, we avoided having to return to Hanoi for our visas, and instead were awarded new ones from the immigration police for the small price of 160 yuan ($20)and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. We began by heading north to Lijiang, an ancient town of canals and traditional architecture inhabited by the Naxi people.
The Naxi are a matriarchal society in which women control all of the finances, business, and do all of the hard labor. The men raise the children and contribute to the community’s arts and crafts. We stayed in a small Naxi guesthouse in a pleasantly quiet part of the old city. Sadly, much of Lijiang was in chaos when we were there, as the Chinese government had called and impromptu holiday in celebration of some economic summit being held in Kunming. This resulted in mobs of cowboy hat-wearing, bellowing Chinese tourists, armed with video cameras , stampeding through the narrow cobblestone streets in their matching tee-shirts. As usual we (Pierre) were a major attraction, and many people cackled and pointed at us and snapped pictures of us while we were eating. Our friend Daisy in Kunming taught us some Mandarin phrases that could be quite handy in these situations, including “fuck you and your ancestors backwards and forwards for 18 generations.” I felt that maybe this phrase was a bit too severe of a reaction, so I instead reciprocated the photo-frenzy and laughter, which proved to be effective. The collective mentality of the tourists we encountered in Lijiang seemed to be that of a spastic free-for-all in which they were purely spectators, on a different plane of existence than us. This is a common experience for us in China – in personal dealings we are treated with kindness and hospitality, but at large we might as well be flipper girl and bobo the dog faced boy.
After some aggressive bargaining, we took a minibus out to Baisha, which is a traditional Naxi village and former capital of the ancient Naxi kingdom. There we observed life as it has existed for centuries,save the few tourist stalls that have erupted in the town center. Not wanting to go through the bargaining process again, we decided to walk the 15km back to Lijiang, through a spectacular valley encircled by immense mountains. As we walked, we at first thought the valley was merely a grazing area comprised of old farm fields filled with strange looking craters. We later learned that the area was actually a gigantic airstrip used by the Flying Tigers during WWII.
Before we left Lijiang for Zhongdian, the people at the Naxi guesthouse we’d been staying at gave us bags of herbs to wear around our necks for health and good luck. Driving north into the upper Yunnan province away from Lijiang was like entering an entirely different country – the Naxi villages transformed into small Tibetan towns, surrounded by fields of yellow rapeseed and barley. Flustered Yaks trotted across the street in front of our bus, and torn prayer flags were strung from poles on every hilltop. Arriving in Zhongdian we were relieved to be in a place where the locals outnumbered the tourists, and were given our first glimpse into Tibetan life in China.
It is very yak-oriented; yak meat, yak cheese, and yak butter tea are served at meals on yak fur table cloths. The city is overlooked by a giant golden prayer wheel that takes the hard work of several people to spin. On the outskirts is a huge Tibetan Lamistry and temple complex with 780 monks in residence. We encountered a forceful 16-year-old monk in a temple who screamed at us “SIT DOWN!” He then aggressively questioned us on our age, nationality and height, and then commanded Pierre to help him drag a huge tank of water across the temple floor so he could change the water bowls on the alter.
Back in town we visited an old man who inhabited a 16th century traditional Tibetan home. He had been imprisoned and his home partially destroyed (ancient Buddhist murals scratched off by soldiers and replaced by political slogans) during the Cultural Revolution.
Somehow the man had managed to hide some priceless artifacts from the Lamistry in his home, saving them from certain destruction. He showed us all around the house, including the spectacular family alter, spouting his disapproval for the regime who had destroyed his home all the while. He was quite different from any other old men I’ve met in this country, as he seemed to have no reservations about kissing me all over my face and grabbed me on my butt. At night in the town square a giant celebration was held in which hundreds of people danced in a giant circle around a single flute player. A local told us that it was a covert celebration of the birthday of a certain exiled Tibetan religious leader, whom I won’t mention by name lest this email be mysteriously deleted. Zhongdian is at an elevation of 3200m, and the next day we tried to prepare ourselves for the long journey up onto the Tibetan Plateau.
The trip is done in two legs which adds up to about 17 hours of bus riding. The first leg, to Xiangcheng was on entirely unpaved mountain roads. Luckily our driver was cautious (an unusual quality here) and the trip took us by towering mountain peaks and through countless interesting Tibetan villages, and to a marijuana farm where we had lunch (but we didn’t get to eat any marijuana).
Xiangcheng, while surrounded by beautiful mountains, has mostly been converted to mud from 200 simultaneous construction projects, and the one road through town is in a perpetual horn-blaring traffic jam.. We stayed in a spectacularly ornate traditional Tibetan family home and watched a violent thunderstorm over the mountains (which incidentally knocked out all the electricity and made venturing down three flights of ladder-like stairs to the outhouse quite treacherous – Pierre ended up peeing in a bottle to avoid this trip.)
The next day, armed with altitude sickness medicine, but not being able to find anything to eat except crackers, we got on a Litang-bound bus and braced ourselves for the climb to nearly 4700m (almost 1000 m higher than Lhasa). The first leg of the trip took us around hairpin turns on guardrail-free roads that overlooked drops of several thousand feet. Slowly the ride became less frightening as we entered the other-worldly landscape of the Tibetan Plateau. Covered in glacial rocks and completely devoid of trees, only grass, tiny yellow flowers, yaks, marmots and nomadic Tibetan people exist here. At one point the air seemed so thin that the engine of the bus could no longer drive at normal speed, and we chugged along the winding roads, dizzy and confused. The bus overheated and we ended up having to siphon water out of a nearby stream to get it going again.
Litang is one of our favorite places that we’ve visited in Asia. The town has largely been reborn in a mass of bathroom tile clad communist blocks with Tibetan style roofs and murals. Many of the Tibetan men here are tall and intense, clad in yak skins and Tibetan cowboy hats with wide grills of gold teeth, dreadlocks and gigantic knives in their belts. The women all wear traditional wrap-around dresses called chupas, and have intricately braided hair and rosy cheeks. Curious crowds formed around us on the street and followed behind us as we explored the town.
People yelled “tashi dele” (hello in Tibetan) from nearly every doorway, and burgundy robed monks cruised by us on gigantic Harley Davidson style motorcycles covered in plastic flowers with ghetto blasters strapped to the backs. We shared a yak-noodle lunch with a group of Tibetan cowboys who went crazy playing with our digital and video cameras. we then all proceeded to watch a gory propaganda movie about “the war of Japanese aggression’ together.
The food in Litang is simple and good, although we were not always so lucky to have such charming companions at our meals. As we ate boiled eggs and tea for breakfast at an open-air restaurant one morning, a small boy squatted down directly in front of our table and proceeded to defecate right on the ground. Children doing “#2″ in public is not a completely uncommon sight in China, but never had I experienced such a graphic and technical demonstration. He completed his mission and stood up, while his mother dutifully jogged over to sweep it into a dustpan. To our dismay, what we had witnessed could not be so easily erased from our minds.
We were a little worried about our ascent to 4700m, as the altitude can quickly become a big problem. We met some travelers who had gotten so sick that they had to be evacuated to a lower altitude. Armed with some herbal medicine, we thought that our gradual ascent via Zhongdian and Xiangcheng would save us from serious problems. The first day and a half we felt relatively ok – out of breath, fatigued,
and awakening in the middle of the night gasping for air and with a splitting headache, but still able to function.
By the last day, Pierre was incapacitated in the bed with a high fever, and I barely able to make it to the pharmacy to buy him aspirin. We knew we had to leave , and at 6:00 am the following morning we dragged ourselves to a bus headed for the lowlands (2500m). As the bus rolled over the seemingly endless grasslands, we waited with great anticipation for the oxygen that would make us no longer feel like we were slowly dying. But instead of descending, the bus began to climb hundreds of meters into yet another set of high rolling hills. As we reached the top, the bus driver suddenly turned of the ignition and coasted to a stop in the middle of the road. Both the rear tires on one side were flat, and we could see the downward slope of the deserted road in front of us. It began to snow. One of the passengers lit a fire in the wheel well of the bus because two of the bolts had melted into the wheel and could not be removed (and he thought somehow this would help). A construction truck stopped to help us , but their giant wrench could not get the bolts off. The driver got back into the bus, shut the door, and stared off into the distance for a while, before deciding to make the best of the situation and pulling a giant ball of yak cheese and a knife out of his pocket. The only thing to do was wait for another bus to make the 4 hour trip from Litang and pick us up. Pierre and I pulled our bags off the bus and decided to take our chances on the road. It was freezing cold, there was no air to speak of, and a leaky water tank in the bus had soaked our shoes. Luckily two Tibetan guys drove by in a minibus and picked us up. From there we took an extremely roundabout trip, from tiny Tibetan village to village to pick up different people and cargo to bring to Kangding (our destination). During one stop, the entire village came out to the van, one by one, to check us out and make friendly sign language/broken Chinese conversation. In another town, I went to the market for a few minutes only to return and find that the men in the village had all decided to get together and lift Pierre to see how much he weighed. We’re now down off the Plateau in Chengdu, a huge city far more modern than Kunming, and we’re breathing normally. In a day or two we’ll head north, back into the Tibetan world, and then north to Xingjiang.
