Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [109]
The next day, we found ourselves in the bus station in Shangri-la, surrounded by men who flashed covetous, cunning looks at our belongings. It was here that Jack and I would part ways.
“Just break the trip down into parts,” I advised him. “A bus to Lijiang. You remember what Lijiang looked like, right? It’s full of Naxis. Then a plane to Guangzhou, and from there a train to Hong Kong. And you’ll have about forty-eight hours to do this if you want to catch your flight.”
Jack stared at me blankly.
“Do you want me to go ahead and file the missing-persons report now, or should I wait a couple of days?” I asked him.
“I think you can go ahead and do it now.”
When the bus arrived it was, as always, a scene of grim chaos as dozens of people scrambled for seats. Jack turned to me. “I don’t envy you. I’ve got some serious China fatigue.”
But I envied me. I was going to Tibet.
17
As everyone knows, Tintin in Tibet is far and away the best Tintin book ever conjured by the mind of Hergé, the Belgian writer and illustrator. As a young lad living next door in Holland, I did what all Dutch boys did: I wore wooden shoes, I put mayonnaise on my French fries, and I read Tintin. As I followed Tintin as he skipped from calamity to calamity around the world, these illustrated adventure books (do not even think of calling them comics) offered me my first glimpse of the world beyond the dikes. And Tintin in Tibet was the most outstanding book of them all. Oh sure, there are still some who claim that The Blue Lotus or even Cigars of the Pharaoh represent the apogee of Herge’s work. But they are wrong.
Tintin in Tibet begins with a plane crash. So, too, did James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. It makes you think. It made me think. It’s so easy to crash an airplane into the Himalayas, that vast mountain range stretching from Pakistan to Sichuan Province, a geological testament to the pushiness of the Indian subcontinent as it continues to slide into Asia. I’d once seen a T-shirt that said STOP CONTINENTAL DRIFT! But it cannot be stopped. Nothing can be done. The Indian subcontinent wants to be part of Asia. And we can only get out of the way. And it is all for the good—this long, interminable crashing and grinding of landmasses has given us some mighty fine mountains. Here, in the Himalayas, we have the highest mountains in the world. There is Everest, of course, coming in just a shade under 30,000 feet. But there are many, many other mountains in Tibet itself that reach up into the Death Zone, that breathless area surrounded by snow and rock where human beings are not meant to go.
I had decided to travel to Lhasa, the longtime abode of the Dalai Lama on the high Tibetan Plateau. Lhasa is the spiritual home of Tibetan Buddhism, though of course it is no longer the home of the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile when China crushed a rebellion among Tibetans in 1959. There are two ways to get to Lhasa from Zhongdian; there is the overland route that involves a 4 × 4 and a week of navigating perilous dirt roads over some of the highest mountain passes in the world. Or one can fly. I’d considered the overland route, but after the short drive from Tiger Leaping Gorge to Qiaotou, I’d abandoned the thought. The prospect simply combined too many fears I had in China involving driving and heights. And so I’d fly to Lhasa.
I waited at the Tibet Café for a ride to the airport. Technically, only foreigners in tour groups could get permits for Tibet. But there was a local fixer at the café who had helped me obtain a permit from the Office For Granting Permits For Tibet To People Who Really Should Be Part Of A Tour Group But Aren’t. Soon, I was joined by familiar faces.
“Look who’s here.