Na granicy: Tybet/Nepal

 

 

   Hey y’all, what’s happening? I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever. I just arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal and I’ve got a pocket full of monopoly money that’s eager to get spent on something with cheese in it. Last we spoke I was in Chengdu hanging out with a bunch of pandas. Soon after I boarded a two-day train headed for Lhasa, Tibet.

 

Entering Tibet is a highly bureaucratic process. China controls everything that happens there; who enters, who leaves, what people talk about, even down to what you’re allowed to wear. Come into Lhasa wearing a “Free Tibet” shirt and you can get yourself arrested by any of the hundreds of Chinese soldiers that are patrolling the streets twenty-four hours a day with machine guns and rifles. The same will happen if you are seen photographing them. Either that or they’ll confiscate your camera and destroy it. Tibetans are not allowed to have passports, they can’t leave, their phone calls are monitored, and I witnessed one Tibetan worrying over whether there could be a mic hidden somewhere when he wanted to say simply that he would like to be allowed to leave and see other parts of the world someday. China has got massive mind control going over Tibet, and they make it difficult (expensive) for visitors to come in. You have to be part of a tour, with your permits and papers being carried from place to place by a Tibetan guide.

The tour I booked took me through Tibet for seven days, via Everest Base Camp, finally dropping me off at the Tibet / Nepal border. I became one in a group of six people, all of us leaving from the same hostel in Chengdu; two Dutch girls, two Israeli guys, one Spaniard, and me. Luckily we were all in the same carriage on the train and we had two days to get to know each other, talking, sharing snacks, and playing Flying Pigs (an invention from a friend of the Israeli guys).

The route the train takes is in no way direct. It first goes north hundreds of miles before turning south and heading to Lhasa. The change in landscape was surreal. There was a huge mirror at the end of the train where all the passengers go to wash up and get presentable. In the mornings I would stand there brushing my teeth while magnificent scenery went flashing by, reflected from the windows behind me. Waterfalls and trains snaking through tunnels set into solid mountains, lacing through jagged cliffs covered in green end of summer trees. It’s not a bad way to get your teeth clean. On the second morning I woke at about 6:30, before the lights in the cabin came on. The world outside was a soft and gentle haze of blue morning skies touched in only slight contrast by the deep drifts of white snow covering the giant mountains we were gliding through. In moments like these I suffer from episodes of indecision. Do I go get the camera and hopefully capture an image worthy of sharing, or do I enjoy the moment unfettered by equipment? I tried to do a bit of both, and by the time I dug the camera out of my bag the lights were on.

The train was full, and as the other passengers woke up and went through their morning routines. I was serenaded by a chorus of throat clearing, spitting, and noodle slurping. Packed tight as we were there was plenty of opportunity to get to know everyone. The boys organized a Flying Pigs tournament and some of the other passengers, attracted by all of our whooping exclamations, were crowding around the cabin door as spectators. The language barrier never allows for simple chitchat, so we were attempting to make small talk with our limited means; maps, iPhones, sign language, giggles, and smiles.

The few that were most interested in peeking into our cabin had rosy red cheeks that are characteristic of most of the Mongolians I’ve met. I wondered if that was where they were from, then the Dutch girls said they had told them they were in fact from Mongolia. The Mongolians got out their camera and started sharing family photos, and videos of battling yaks. In Ulaanbaatar I had downloaded a Mongolian language application that speaks. We were holding it up to his ear and trying to ask about his family, his home, did he like to dance… Our Spaniard, Iván, imaginative and effervescent, began unintentionally fabricating a complete history of his life. “This is his mother, and there, these are his children, but he has no wife. There is his home in Mongolia.” We pulled out my Mongolian road map so he could point out where he was from, and he seemed really confused. It was in English so I figured maybe it was hard for him to read without the Mongolian Cyrillic script. He kept waving the map away and we would persist by saying things like, “Ulaanbaatar? Hohhot?” while pointing to them on the map. Finally our friend Olivia, who is half Chinese and speaks it well, figured out that he also spoke Chinese. He was not Mongolian, but from Tibet, the photos were not of his children, but his siblings, and we had been making my phone say things to him in Mongolian for the last half hour even though he speaks Tibetan. All along he had been very politely agreeing to the gibberish he heard coming out of my phone, and allowing us to create a life for him that only exists in another dimension. This has become a popular story to retell between the Israelis, Dor and Nir, and they add to it every time Iván misunderstands something and runs with it. Like when he started talking about the bull hats that were actually wool hats.

It’s interesting to be a native English speaker in a world full of people who speak it as a second language. Between everyone, travelers and locals, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German, whomever, English is the language everyone uses to communicate if they’re not from the same place. The accents and vocabulary usage vary widely from culture to culture, and oddly, I seem to be the one that everyone understands the least. Swedes are talking to Spanish and nodding their heads in agreement, Germans are having pleasant conversations with Chinese, smiling and laughing, Swiss are chatting up the French and getting all the facts straight, then I chime in and look into a sea of blank faces. Even when their English is great there are words and phrases that just don’t make sense, so you either need to speak very simply or not at all. When I came home from living in France after a year my English had declined to a third grade level. Maybe at the end of two years all I’ll be able to say is gaa-gaa-goo-goo.

Traveling with this group has been a lot of fun. Dor and Nir are carrying a guitar and melodica with them and playing at bars we stop in along the way, charming the owners and patrons with music, and earning free beers. We met an especially enthusiastic host in Lhasa. I don’t know how to write his name properly but it sounds something like Jackmay. He sang Beyonce, proclaiming, “I’m a single lady!” and doing the single lady dance, as well as doing a rap about Obama. The guys found out that he’s actually supposed to be a pretty well known rapper in Tibet. When I get the link to his videos I’ll share it. I wish I had a video of his single lady dance.

Tibet is kind of a blur, as we were hurried through and spent a lot of time on the bus just getting from one place to the next. The tour wasn’t planned very well and our guide was more interested in taking us to places where prices where tripled for tourists than taking us to the places listed on our itinerary, so my impressions are pretty limited, but I still found it to be amazing. It’s saturated in religion and culture in a way I haven’t experienced yet. Everyone walks around with prayer wheels constantly spinning, and there are hundreds of people in the streets doing ritual prayers where they essentially throw themselves to the ground, ending in a position on their stomach, hands clasped above their head. They do this for hours at a time. Some wear kneepads and aprons to protect their bodies and clothing. Many more people than I’ve seen so far were dressed in a traditional style, but always you would see sneakers and other contemporary styles of shoes peeking out from under their robes.

Finally, we traveled to Everest and through the Himalayas to get to the border of Nepal. It was stunning. I had just read a book my dad recommended, The Long Walk, a true story about prisoners of war escaped from a Russian camp six-hundred km south of the Arctic Circle. They walked south for a year, through Siberia, the Gobi, and climbing the Himalayas to arrive in India. Their desire and will to live through unimaginable circumstances really left an impression on me. Seeing these landscapes with the story still fresh was mind blowing.

Once over the border in Nepal we were instantly transported into another world. We had walked just two hundred meters, but suddenly everything changed. Women wrapped up in bright sparkling saris, small children with charcoal rimmed eyes, streets filled with the thick smoke and smell of incense, and for the first time in a long time, bright and smiling faces! All six of us were instantly smitten. We boarded a bus to Kathmandu, packed tight on the inside, and loaded up with people on top and hanging from the sides. Before long Iván and I both had a small child on our lap, heating us up in our already steamy bus, and clearly uncomfortable with the seating arrangement despite the huge smiles of encouragement their mothers wore. The pattern that’s been following me through Asia, of people puking on bus rides, is still in effect. We watched chunks fly by our window as the woman in front of us, and some on the roof expelled their last meals. Iván said a small prayer asking that the child in his lap wouldn’t catch a whiff of it and start a chain reaction. I still have vivid memories of a puking extravaganza that happened on my elementary school bus. One kid had a runny nose and licked it up with his tongue. The kid next to him saw it and barfed, and once the scent spread there were vomiting children everywhere. Luckily Iván’s prayer was answered.

So I’m here Kathmandu! Bye-bye China! The day we left everything I had purchased in China finally broke; it’s some kind of omen. I’m in the midst of planning some teahouse trekking and getting my Indian visa sorted out. On Friday I’ll go pick it up and then hopefully set out on a two-week Annapurna trek.

That’s it for now. I’ve been missing people and places and thinking about you all, hoping you’re fat and happy. Big hugs. Big kisses. Talk to you soon.