Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [115]
“I thought I’d head for the Gamden Monastery in eastern Tibet. It was destroyed by the Chinese, but I read that they’re rebuilding it. What about you?”
Cat took a deep drag from her cigarette. “We’re planning on biking to Everest Base Camp.”
“Biking as on a bicycle.”
She nodded. “Should be a bit of an adventure.”
“Aren’t some of the passes above 17,000 feet?”
They nodded absentmindedly. Yeah, I thought, that’s going to end well.
When the proprietor came to take our order, Lachlan remarked with typical Australian bluntness, “I come here for the toilets, mate. You have the best toilets in Lhasa.”
The owner beamed. “I clean them myself. And I do all the cooking. You must have the yak.”
“What’s not to like about Lhasa?” Cat observed.
Yak fatigue, for one thing. The Tibetans, I discovered, are not vegetarians. It is difficult to be a vegetarian at this altitude. There is a need for protein. And so the Tibetans eat yak. And it’s good. I liked the yak. I’d gorged myself on yak. I had yak momos, simple dumplings filled with yak; I had yak filet; I even had Yak Bourgogne at a French-Tibetan fusion restaurant. Such things exist in Lhasa. But I’d had my fill. I thought of the yak carcasses dumped onto the sidewalk. And I thought of the chef scrubbing his toilets until they became the pride of Lhasa. And then I thought of one thing that could mar my stay in this beautiful region.
“I’ll have the vegetarian curry,” I said.
Later, I ran into the Australians near the Barkhor Square. Lhasa, authentic Lhasa, is small and I often bumped into the same travelers again and again—many of whom I’d also met in Dali. Perhaps it was the promise of some kind of high that lured backpackers to both places.
“Did you guys get permits?” I asked them.
“No,” Cat said.
“Neither did I.”
It was the bane of traveling in Tibet. There is the Lhasa permit. Then there is the permit for the Tibet beyond Lhasa. And then there are the permits needed to travel on certain roads. And the rules were always changing. Sometimes permits could be had, sometimes not. The Chinese government is very particular about what foreigners are allowed to see in Tibet, and for inexplicable reasons, I hadn’t been able to get a permit for the regions far beyond Lhasa. Perhaps something was happening elsewhere in Tibet. Of course, here we’d be the last to know; not since Hong Kong had I encountered a news source that hadn’t been filtered by a government censor.
“We’ve decided to go anyway,” Lachlan said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Well, you’ll soon find out, I thought. The odds of four smokers biking up to 17,000 feet on a heavily policed road in a region where, technically, their very presence was a violation of national security laws were, I guessed, not particularly high. I wished them the best of luck.
I, however, had changed my plans. Deprived of a permit for eastern Tibet, I would turn southward toward the monasteries in Gyantse and Shigatse. I had hired a driver, a friendly young man named Goba, who had an English vocabulary of about forty words, which he used to express less than enthusiastic opinions about the Chinese.
“Lhasa no good,” he said as we sped past a billboard. The Developing Zone Is Very Promising. “In Lhasa, four Chinese. One Tibetan. No good.”
To finish the thought, he took his hands off the steering wheel and made a grabbing gesture. “Chinese take. Take!”
We made our way through the blighted sprawl of outer Lhasa, underneath the twinkling gaze of an enormous portrait of Deng Xiaoping. Soon, we were passed by an SUV ferrying police.
“Chinese police. No good. Chinese no good. Shigatse. Two Chinese. One Tibetan. No good. Gyantse. Four Tibetan. One Chinese. Is okay.”
We drove along a paved highway together with a few other trucks and SUVs. Soon, we had passed the last wispy trees and nearly all the traffic, and the landscape had become even more dry and ethereal, which I had not thought was possible. The mountains that surrounded us were more rugged and the highest among them