Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [120]
I moved into the hallway and watched this world go by. The water, small ponds and streams, remained frozen under the sun of mid-fall, which boded well for the train tracks today. We passed a nomad’s tent with a motorcycle parked outside, and beyond I saw herds of grazing yaks. Onward we climbed toward the Tanggula Pass, past Nam-Tso Lake and mighty Mount Nyenchen Tanglha. Outside, I saw a fox, the first real wildlife I’d seen in China. Now, if someone would please turn the fucking music off I’d be happy. For better or worse, we’d moved on through the Thriller years and were now being serenaded by the cloying, sentimental sounds of Chinese pop music.
The compartment next to mine was occupied by policemen. They’re everywhere in Tibet, even on the train. They were smoking, of course, even though smoking was expressly forbidden, not only because smoking can be irritating to others, but because the train was equipped with pure, pressurized oxygen. And do you know what happens when a sufficient amount of oxygen meets an open flame? It blows up. Explodes. Boom. Really, the excitement never ends when traveling in China.
Just as I could resist the lure of Dan Brown no longer, we stopped at a train station a short distance from Nagqu, a town in the high grasslands of northern Tibet. I stepped outside. The air was crisp and so incredibly clean. We were at 15,000 feet and the sky here, its blueness, was stunning to behold. This was Tibetan Big Sky country. Hundreds of people who had neither the petty authority nor the colossal stupidity of the police, and thus had declined to smoke on the train, stepped out for a cigarette. I waited for the heart attacks.
It was, in fact, a very common occurrence on the way up. Lowlanders would suddenly find themselves in the thin air, light up a cigarette, and keel over dead. In the extreme altitudes of Tibet, it doesn’t take much to push someone over the edge. A mere smoke can do it. Our stop, however, resulted in no such casualties, and we reboarded and continued on upward through a landscape that was becoming increasingly desolate and lifeless, and as I scanned these vast spaces and the white mountains in the distance, I was left amazed. I did not know Earth could look like this. On a small barren road in the middle of nowhere, truly the middle of nowhere, the ultimate nowhere, I saw a monk on pilgrimage, doing his devotions with each step. I did not know people lived like this either, I thought.
The train rumbled onward, and I made my way to the dining car for a meal of spicy beef and, inexplicably, Budweiser. As a darkening Tibet rolled by, I finished Angels and Demons. Come on, Dan Brown, I thought. I stayed with you through all that bad prose, through every preposterous turn of the plot, and you end it like this? You lost me with this ending. It’s absurd. Not good absurd, but bad absurd. I was irritated. Fast-paced, plot-driven books depend on the resolution. Everything is in the resolution—all the buildup, all the tension. It works or fails by how it ends. I felt the same way I’d felt when I finished The Da Vinci Code: lightly soiled and snookered. And now I had another thirty-six hours to go and nothing to read. I returned to my compartment, hopped into my berth, and turned to go to sleep. My cabinmates were lying in the darkness, sucking down oxygen. Mere weekenders, I thought. Lowlanders. I’d become a mountain man myself. Well, not quite. But still, I did not need oxygen.