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The
road headed west from Gerze, and for the first 60km, there was road
work making travel difficult. Huge piles of dirt and sand, and a
partially completed realignment and grading of the road made it slow
going. There was an ambitious sign proclaiming the project, with a
picture of a paved eight-lane highway complete with cloverleaf exits:
Martin wondered if they were going to pave the road this year. I
suggested, sarcastically, that they might, and in addition, might be
making cloverleaf exits to the various towns in the region. The
prospects for asphalt seemed dim, but actually, within 2 or 3 years, I
wouldn't be at all surprised to find much of this road paved.
After a couple of days, during which we saw several more groups of chiu roaming near the road, we reached a long valley with salt flats. The largest of these, with deep piles of salt along a lake which had almost no water but plenty of salt, lay Yanhu, "Salt Lake" in Chinese. I told Martin about the Mormons and Salt Lake City in Utah in the US (there aren't many Mormons in Denmark...), and wondered if the people who settled here first had decided it was the place to be after seeing gulls, which were indeed in abundance along the lake shore - a strange sight at 4600m, thousands of km from the nearest ocean.
The town was a fair sized place, and there
was a Tibetan pilgrimage
or gathering going on at the time. Scores of Tibetans in their finest
walked the streets: bright colors on the women, who wore bright red
headcoverings resembling what you might find in a conservative Islamic
region (well, if they were black...), men in big overcoats with large
turquoise prayer necklaces, huge foxskin hats bouncing down the lane.
It was kaleidoscopic. And then, of course, the Hui in their skullcaps,
catering to the truckers en route to Ali. We had a late lunch/early
dinner at one Hui restaurant, where an anti-colonialist movie depicting
the foreign concessions in 
Shanghai at the turn
of the century,
complete with a cruel detachment of American Navy seamen harassing old
men and pregnant women, was on the TV. The truckers in the place asked
where I was from. "The U.S.", I said with a smile. They laughed and
pointed at the screen. "Yeah, yeah, I know..." We were waited on by a
boy of 10, who took our order and then brought the food when it was
ready, and busied himself inbetween by making sure everyone's teacup
was topped up and sweeping the bits of bone and sunflower seed shells
that had been spit onto the floor over the course of the day. The cook
came out sometime later, starting up a friendly conversation. I asked
him how long he had been there in Yanhu; 8 months. He was from Gansu,
near Lanzhou, where we had started our trip. I asked him if he liked it
here.
"No. This place is a s@#&hole." He frowned. Martin wanted to know what was in Xiongba, the place where we would leave the main road for our crossing of the Transhimalaya.
"That place? Its even more of a s@#&hole. Tibet sucks."
If all one saw was this dustblown town, salt irritating your eyes all day, the summer rain and the winter chill, you would be forced to agree. I smiled, wished him the best, shook the young boy's hand, and then we left to shop, not knowing when we would be able to resupply and figuring on as much as a week to cross the mountains to the south.
There were several Tibetan shops, stocked with little, but we got what we could. I waited outside while Martin searched for apples, watching a man diligently sweep the dirt in front of his shop. It was a sisyphean task: the wind blew the garbage-strewn street back onto his porch, and he just kept going. I wondered at his dedication, since most Tibetan shops accumulate large piles of trash in front of the place and never bother to do anything about it. As he came near to finishing (for a time, anyway), a jeep sped by, crushed a beer bottle in the middle of the street, and sent shards of glass and dirt back into his yard.
We headed a bit west and camped by the
lakeshore. The next morning,
we realized the road we wanted headed to the south, away from the truck
route. We went
back, happy to eat a decent breakfast again, and then
passed the pilgrims' camp on the way to the south and the Jing La pass.
Leaving the Northern Route
The
climb over the Jing La (4905m) was not difficult, although it was the
first serious pass we had climbed since Nagqu. Truck traffic declined
significantly as the road left the valley Yanhu was in and climbed
slowly but steadily past scattered nomad's tents to the pass. Near the
top was a road workers camp, where I rode past Uighurs from Xinjiang
driving bulldozers for regrading the road. I made it to the top and
waited for Martin, who took nearly an hour to catch up. He had a smile
on his face, and was holding a naan, bread from Xinjiang, in his hand.
The Uighurs, who had still been working when I passed, had stopped for
lunch by the time Martin came by, and called him over for tea and
bread. What was more, he held out a black bag and said, "There's
something else in there if you want it...". It was a slice of
watermelon. Perfect, just what a person needs at the top of a dry pass
in Tibet after having had nothing but apples for anything fresh the
last several weeks. We sat at the top by the prayer flags and enjoyed a
Central Asian lunch before heading down the south side of the pass.
The road on the other side was
horrendously stony and bumpy, taking
all the fun out of a long downhill. I made it to a dry riverbed in the
valley at the bottom and waited. Martin was slow to come, and when he
did, he didn't look happy. "Well, I've got a problem," he said. He
pointed to his front rack. There was a large crack running across the
weight bearing section of the carrier, big enough to see straight
through the bar to the other side. This was major.
"We might be able to splint it until we
make the next town," I offered.
"No...I don't know. I can't take the
chance, since the whole thing might break and that will be very hard to
weld."
"So you want to hitch back to Yanhu?"
"Not really, but I don't think I have any
other choice. We know there is a welder there: we don't know anything
about Xiongba."
We contemplated his next move while
cooking lunch. He resolved to
grab a truck to Yanhu, about 35km back, while I cycled toward Xiongba.
He would catch up later in the evening or the next day. I pedalled off
into the wind across the salt flat, while he waited for the next truck
to Yanhu.
The valley was unpopulated, except for a
small hamlet with three
buildings and a herd of yak grazing near the lake. I rode on for two
and a half hours, without a truck going by. I thought of Martin sitting
there being sandblasted by the wind, waiting futilely for a truck to
Yanhu. I began to climb a pass, and camped 30 minutes before dark, just
out of sight from several nomad tents in a high valley.
I lit my candle and started to write in my
journal. About an hour
later, I heard a Chinese-accented "Hello!" from a truck. The truck
stopped and idled. I heard some fussing, and then the unmistakeable
voice of Martin carried to me in the dark. I poked my head out of the
tent: "Martin?"
"Yeah, yeah, it's me."
"Everything fixed?"
"No. I didn't make it to Yanhu, there were
no trucks."
"Yeah, I noticed that."
"So I just stopped this guy and asked if
there was a welder in
Xiongba. He said yes, so I negotiated to go with him, 1Y per km." This
was a ludicrous sum: the trucker was definitely taking advantage of
him. "He saw your tent, not me."
"But your rack?"
"I'll move the weight to the rear, and
take it slowly to Xiongba."
"OK, I'll take some of your weight as
well."
He pitched his tent in the dark, and we
were soon asleep.
The next day, we had yet again a stiff
headwind, right from the
start. We climbed a steep section to the top of the pass, and then
followed a frustratingly sandy and slow descent down to Xiongba, which
was in a flat grassy valley. The place looked bleak. The town was not
on the main road, it was a few hundred meters off of it. There was no
sign of anything other than Tibetan mud houses. Dogs roamed the
streets, competing with goats nosing through the trash. A welder was
right near the entrance, however, so that problem was solved. There was
one Chinese restaurant, run by a Sichuanese couple. The standard 20Y
applied to the meal, extortionate in the rest of China, but ordinary in
western Tibet. We poked our heads into a Tibetan shop with the English
"shop" on the sign, something which came as quite a surprise. The owner
spoke some English: it turned out he had spent 8 years in Dharmsala,
India, studying at the New Tibet School. I asked him about how he got
there.
"I escaped," he
said, "to Nepal, and then to India. I had no passport."
"Was that difficult?"
"No, not really. You just walked across
the mountains."
"And you stayed eight years?"
"Yes. But I came back because I was always
sick. India's food and weather was not good for me. So I returned to
Tibet."
"Same way?"
"Yes, but I was caught. When I left in
1989, there were very few
guards on either side. But in 1997, the Chinese had many more guards.
They got me, and put me in jail in Shigatse for one month and 11 days."
"How was that?"
"Not too bad. Of course, they weren't
nice, but I managed. Afterward I went back home."
"Where is that?"
"You know Markam, in the east?"
"Yes, I was there in 1999." I had actually
snuck through the town at
night, since the area was closed to foreigners at the time and had a
notorious checkpoint, so I didn't see much. But the surrounding valley
was pretty and cultivated, a far cry from desolate barren Xiongba. "So
why are you here now?"
"Business. Business in Xiongba is good." I
supposed this was true:
his was certainly the most well-stocked store in the town, and there
was a crowd there, partially to stare at us, but partially to buy the
sundries on his shelves. "There are many of us from Markam in west
Tibet, particularly in Ali."
"Do you have family in Markam?" I meant
mother or father or brother, perhaps extended family.
"Oh yes, I have a wife and two children."
"How often do you go back?"
"About once every 2 or 3 years, then I
come back to work again."
This seemed strange. I mentioned that
Markam had seemed a fairly busy market town. "Yes."
"So why not stay there and run a business."
He smiled. "Better business here." At
least less competition.
I asked if there was a road south from
here heading into the
Transhimalaya and across to Kailas. "Oh yes, yes. It starts right
here." He pointed to one of the roads at the intersection he was
situated at.
"How far?"
He asked a local. "He says about 250km.
About 80km to Yagra, and then over the mountains to Hor Qu."
"So there is a road all the way?"
"Yes." This was good news: I had assumed
we would be travelling off-road for quite some ways.
We bought some candy from him and got some
water for drinking. He
said water should be no problem farther on. We left out of town on the
road heading south, which was obviously maintained. Although it was
stony, we made good speed, and climbed a small hill into another valley
by a lake to camp.
The next day we
cycled past a few permanent houses in the valley,
and came across a very large number of chiu, seemingly coexisting with
the human population of the valley, along with the livestock they
tended. The road launched up a hillside, switchbacking out of view. I
steeled myself for the climb and pedalled out ahead of Martin.
The climb had 19 switchbacks, and by the
time I had reached the top,
we were over 5200m, the first time we had gone past 5000m on the
trip.
I felt good, and took a nap by the chorten waiting for Martin. When he
arrived, he took a GPS reading, and found our altitude to be 5290m, one
of the higher passes in Tibet. We dropped down the other side, had
lunch by a stream in cold cloudy weather, and then rolled downhill to
the large salt lake and around to the town of Yagra.
The place was large, much larger than I
would have anticipated, and
had several very well-stocked tents selling foodstuffs and sundries. We
had instant noodles at a restaurant - the only one we could find -
served by a very good looking girl, who allowed the night to fall and
made no effort to provide any light for our meal. We finished in the
dark, and then stumbled out of town to a campsite that the next morning
we found out was the town dump.
The Highest Road in the
World (?)
We
left Yagra, heading back across the sandy basin containing the lake,
and then striking westward up a valley. I had been told emphatically by
a young man after informing him of our plans to go to Kailas
(Kangrinboche) that we should bear to the right at any fork in the
road. There was a fork about 10km out of town, and we did as we were
told, but the route didn't make sense to us when looking at the map: we
couldn't figure out why the road was heading west into this valley,
when a more obvious route seemed to lie to the south. But the road was
still fairly well-used, so we continued. Relief came when we turned to
the south up a valley, but the pass to which it led looked very high
judging by the contours.
My rear tire sidewall blew out a few km
further on, and I crankily
walked my bike over to the stream we were now following and changed to
my spare, flinging the old tire in disgust onto the road. Martin
chastened me for littering, but I was upset and didn't care: besides, I
told myself, you see truck tires in the middle of the road all the
time. "It's one thing if there is a town a day away. We don't know
anything about this road, we could be going for days."
We continued to
climb: Yagra lies at nearly 4900m, surely one of the
highest permanent habitations in the world, and the road climbed to
5000m, then 5100m, and we camped finally at 5300m, looking up at the
pass above us. As we were cycling, a large peak came into view. I
thought to myself, This one looks very doable...I wonder how high it
is. Martin was cycling slowly with his head down. I called his
attention to the peak. His mood changed immediately. He hurriedly
yanked out the TPC map he carried, and I got a compass bearing on a
couple of sites. The mountain was listed as 20,284 feet, which was very
nearly 6200m. I translated the altitude into meters for Martin (being
European, feet don't mean anything to him), and he became ecstatic. We
rolled up to a nice campsite at the base of the pass, and resolved to
climb the peak if the weather was decent the next day.
The day dawned beautiful, no clouds, ample
sun. It was, of course,
cold at 5300m, but nothing unbearable. We packed a few things for the
900m climb and headed out.
The climb went well,
although I delayed putting on my cold weather
gloves a bit too long, and had to enlist Martin's help in pulling them
on, since my hands were nearly immobilized by the cold. We stopped
three short times on the way to the top, and encountered kiangs three
times as well, once looking down on me from a ridge at nearly 5900m. I
couldn't imagine what they were doing at that elevation: the ground was
all splintered rock, with no vegetation whatsoever. The wind was
elemental, blowing at 40kph, gusting to much more. Our route up the
peak followed the northeast ridge (the mountain was a 3-sided affair),
which was subject to quite a bit of wind, although much less than the
south face. The northwest face we couldn't see from below, and didn't
follow on the way up. Finally, and relatively quickly, I found myself a
few meters below the top, and rested in a hollow in the rocks to wait
for Martin. He came up 15 minutes later, and I took the role of
cameraman to follow him from behind as he summitted, finding the
elevation to be 6189m by GPS. We each said a few words into the camera,
and filmed and photographed the spectacular view from the top. The
three sides fell away steeply and dramatically, 1000m and more, and
views of 150km to the south were afforded us at the top. We could see
Kailas (6700m) about 100km away as the crow flies, and the main front
of the Himalaya, marking the Nepali border 150km away, were also
visible. We sat at the top, on the leeward side, and
munched on a few
snacks, enjoying the view and glad to be out of the wind for a few
minutes. The climb had been a scramble up a steep rocky slope, but
completely 
nontechnical, for
which we would have been unprepared, so we
also felt fortunate to have found such a high, easy climb. To top it
off, Martin thought it was probably unclimbed, and being the first to
climb a 6200m peak is something in the climbing world, apparently.
We descended the northwest face, mostly
out of the wind, and
returned to camp, crossing the road pass on the way down, measuring it
at 5540m, perhaps the highest road pass in the world. We were tired
when we got back, and we both crawled into our respective tents and
took long naps before cooking and then falling back to sleep again.
The next day we climbed the road pass by
bike (we found out later
the pass is named Dakhche La in Tibetan) in a cold headwind, with
clouds overhead. We had been fortunate to climb the day before: this
day would have been miserable on the exposed mountainside. We dropped
down the other side of the pass, descending eventually to 5100m at a
bridge over the A'mao Tsangpo, and then heading upstream, climbing
slowly again. After 30km, we were sick of the wind, and I pitched my
tent as a cook tent for lunch, to get out of the wind. After lunch we
pedalled across a sandy plain, with several nomad's tents coming into
view at 5125m. At the first, I stopped to take a photo, and was
approached by an old man with a toddler holding his hand. The man asked
me to come in for tea, and after Martin came up and agreed, we followed
him into his tent.
The tent was white
canvas, and a second tent of brown yak hide was
pitched a few meters away. There were 3 women, a girl, and 3 toddlers
rolling around in amongst the blankets and sheepskins. A metal
tri-legged stove occupied the center of the tent, and a bag of yak dung
was nearby, supplying the fuel. Everyone was huddled on skins close to
the fire. Tea was poured while I looked around. Vats of sheep's milk
and yak butter were in one corner, along with a butter churn, a woolen
bag with barley flour lay nearby, and plastic jugs for water and ladles
encrusted with dried milk hung from the sides. The ceiling was slit the
whole length of the tent to allow for ventilation, but the inside was
still smokey. Everyone was wearing countless layers of clothes, and
various rings and necklaces completed the outfits. The children wormed
from one adult to the other, finding the appropriate mother to nurse
from eventually. A large pot with sheep's heads was slowly boiling over
the fire, although this was taken off
from time to time
to boil more
water for butter tea, which I was given, and consumed, large quantities
of (Martin couldn't stomach the stuff, so he begged off). We tried to
communicate awkwardly, teaching each other a few words in the other's
language, and smiled a lot. This went on for 3 hours, until the two men
who had been off herding yaks, goats, and sheep returned near sunset.
The women jumped up, and tied up the goats for milking, collecting the
milk in two large yak horns. The old man suggested that we pitch our
tents in between their two, since there was unfortunately no room left
in the tents (he had recently taken another tent down: they were
preparing to move to their winter camp near Yagra, 250m lower.) We did
so, with the two men finishing up with the livestock just as we were
done. We went back into the white tent and warmed ourselves by the fire
again, the room's number reaching 12 including us. One of the men
invited Martin to his tent, while I was to remain in this one for
dinner. Dinner was sheep's head from the pot, brains, eyeballs, and all
(which I declined), yak cheese, tsampa, and later, flatbreads
("bakbay") and goat butter 
made on a heavy
skillet later in the
evening. The young man in my tent, Karma, got out a radio and tuned in
a broadcast in Tibetan from Dharmsala. The old man (his name was A)
told me through gestures about a time as a young man, or maybe an
adolescent, that a Chinese had ripped an image of the Dalai Lama off
from around his neck and beaten him for it. I guessed this could have
been during the Cultural Revolution, and although he was vague about
his age (he didn't seem to know himself), I guessed he was near 50,
judging by the age of his two sons (27 and 29). He looked ancient: this
weather and lifestyle took its toll on the skin. After a few hot
flatbreads, we returned to our tents, compared notes briefly, and went
to sleep, with the strong wind swirling around the four tents.
The next morning, we woke up, watched the
women milk the goats, all
neatly tied up in a line, and hurried into the tent for a quick meal of
tsampa and tea. The
nomads were
overgenerous, stuffing our bags with
food: rice, tsampa, butter, bread. We thanked them profusely, and the
old man, A, warned us about the impending pass, the Juma La: there is
sure to be snow on the pass, so be ready for it, he signaled. I
communicated as best I could that we would watch out, and then we left,
leaving them sugar and peanuts as the two things we had to give in
exchange (unfortunately, this also made the tsampa less appealing...I
prefer sugar in my tsampa, but I gave them the half kilogram I had with
me as a thank you). As we made our way across the plain toward the
climb to the pass, we were hailed by every nomad we passed, and invited
in for tea: we had to beg off, since we were full, and needed to make
some progress that day.
We crossed a bridge at 5200m, and then
started climbing, reaching a
high point at 5387m before descending slightly and following a chain of
lakes coming down 
from the pass. There
was a nomad herding yaks at
5350m, presumeably one of the higher pastures one could find in the
world. The weather held for about 2 hours, during which time we had
magnificent views toward the pass and the main Gangdise range. Then the
snow came...dark misty clouds rolled across the ground at our level,
and visibility was reduced to a few meters. Snow blew parallel with the
ground, and we could hardly hold our heads up. We crossed what we
assumed to be the highest road bridge in the world at 5365m, and then a
fork in the road (one branch leading to the Lama La and the eastern
half of the Kailas kora, which we had been informed was not cycleable
by the nomads). We kept to the left, and followed the east shore of the
Juma Tso, which we couldn't see at all for the snow.
While I waited for
Martin on the snow covered road, the storm let
up, and the clouds parted to reveal a beautiful valley, with a large
lake ringed by peaks reaching to 6000m and higher. The sun shone on the
peaks, the blue sky was overhead, and I nearly got religion looking at
it all. We were both stunned into silence. We reached
the western end
of the lake, shortly before the pass itself, and decided to take a
chance on the weather and camp. We plowed through 7 or 8 centimeters of
snow, and camped by the lakeshore at 5370m, enjoying a snowy sunset and
a -16C night just below the Juma La.
The next day, excepting the malfunction of
my stove, and the
subsequent end to my fuel, was great. We cycled slowly through the snow
and the ice to the pass, GPSed at 5430m, and travelled another 4km
along a flat valley, to the corner in the mountains where the road
began to 
descend for real. By
the time we descended to 5300m, we had
been at that level or higher for nearly 40km. The road descended
further, and all told we had been above 5100m for 95km and 5000m for
100km, making this almost surely the highest stretch of road in the
world.
The snow was
receding in the brilliant sun, and we raced down,
eager to get to lower ground, warm temperatures, and - most importantly
- some good restaurant food. We turned a corner on the way down to be
presented with a view of Gurla Mandata (7700m), a huge massif standing
alone across the southern shore of Lake Manasarovar, ice far down its
shoulders. And then, the flat plain of Barga opened up in front of us,
and we raced down the last section to Barga.
In the old days, one had to be careful in
Barga: there was a road
barrier and checkpoint. We were too tired and hungry to care, and in
the end, it didn't matter. The barrier was still there, but I spoke
with a guard while we had dinner, and he said they were only checking
driver's papers. Mostly the guards were interested in our trip, in
where we were from, how many km per day we cycled, and so on. They were
each stationed in the place for three years, mostly young guys from
Gansu and Sichuan provinces. It seems to be a pattern, that the army
and allied agencies are staffed by poor kids from the western provinces
in China, in the same way that the military in the US draws its ranks -
perhaps not the officer corps - primarily from lower and lower-middle
class kids from the South and the Midwest.
As we rolled into the checkpoint (it is
not worthy of the moniker
"village", being too small), we were filmed by a tourist swinging a
video camera around. The Land Cruisers all around us were emblazoned
with sponsor's logos, and the words "Altay-Himalaya Expedition 2004".
The occupants were Russians from Moscow,
driving 4WD
vehicles from the
Altay Republic in southern Siberia, into the Altay region of Mongolia,
and then around China, touring for about 2 months. This was a 
lot to
fit in in 2 months, but that's the time they had allocated. A woman
talked with us briefly, Martin held his breath for a dole out of
chocolate or power bars, but only good wishes and short synopses of the
trip was dispensed. We watched the barrier go up and down as several
Land Cruiser tours going to and from Kailas passed Barga in both
directions. Stares, and a few smiles, but nothing more. We left town,
passing by the "State Compulsory Schoo [sic] Education Project for the
Under Developed Areas" compound, where a few dogs roamed the
schoolyard, travelling half an hour before the sun set and we set camp
with both Kailas and Gurla Mandata in plain view.
A Pair of Koras
We
cycled to Hor Qu (Huer in Chinese), hoping to grab a breakfast and a
few snacks before heading for a circle around Lake Manasarovar (Mapam
Yumtso in Tibetan). The town is on the northeastern shore of the lake,
a good jumping off point for the kora. I had passed through in 1999,
finding a village with a few white tents selling snacks and sundries. I
expected growth, but not to the degree I was greeted with this time. We
ate at a restaurant across from the army installation there, labeled
"Old Soldier Restaurant" in English, paying too much for our breakfast,
which was a long time coming since we appeared to have woken up the
proprietors at nearly 11 in the morning. A sheep was being led to a
place where it was tied up just outside, and part way through the meal,
various organs began making their way into the room, followed a few
minutes later by an expertly butchered sheep carcass. It weighed in at
23kg, and cost 280Y (roughly US$45). Martin was visibly shaken by the
fact that we had just been watching the sheep being led alive across
the road, although he was the meat-eater, not me...
We went in search of a shop, and found a
main street full of English
signs (the prosaic "Hotel. Good Room." or the more poetic "High
Mountain Hotel and Wineshop"), and noveau riche Chinese tourists,
walking around like billboards with trendy outdoor Goretex jackets,
cellphones, and digital cameras. There were a handful of Chinese
establishments snaring these folks, while the Tibetan places turned a
rather more slow business among pilgrims. We got fuel for our stoves, a
few 761 bars (life support for the Tibetan cyclist) to eat, and headed
out of town. At the edge of town, we met two backpackers, the first we
had seen since Yushu, lolling on a sleeping mat, waiting for a hitch.
We swapped stories for a quarter of an hour, finding out that there was
a bus to Ali from Yecheng (incredible to one who hadn't seen that road
since 1999, when a bus ride would have been nigh on impossible), there
was a regular bus from Ali to Lhasa (also news), and that Kashgar - one
of my favorite towns in all of China, having been stuck there, but
happily, in 1999 for 17 days - had been ruined by the promised Han
inmigration and the moving indoors of the famous and kaleidoscopic
Sunday market. I later heard more from other tourists coming from
Kashgar that it was "just another ugly Chinese city", booming with
migrants from the east: this greatly saddened me, although I haven't
seen the damage for myself. The coming of the railroad to Lhasa might
be read as the harbinger of disaster, at least in the aesthetic and
touristic sense...
We started off on the kora, finding a road
complete with bridges.
Tourists, safely stashed in their Land Cruisers, passed us circling the
lake counterclockwise (the
wrong
way if you are Buddhist or Hindu, and
why else were they there, if not to play at being visitors to a sacred
place? But the demands of tightly packed schedules required an
exception to time-honored tradition...). We stopped at a gompa, one of
five ringing the lake, where three well-dressed Tibetans were kicking
stones in the front of the monastery entrance. One approached me, as I
pulled out a camera to take a picture of a stupa with a rusting engine
block leaning up against it, the lake and Gurla Mandata in the
background.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" He was pandering to
me.
"It's ironic," I replied. He didn't get it.
"You are from?"
"The US."
"Ahhh, USA...Very good."
Always this refrain: it gets old,
particularly given what is going on in the world right now. I just said
"Sure."
"I am from Lhasa," he offered.
"I can see that. What are you doing here -
a kora?" I knew this wasn't true.
"No, no, I am a guide. We have Swiss
tourists with us. They are now
in the monastery." I didn't bother to ask how exactly it was that he
was guiding them when they were inside, poking around a monastery they
probably knew next to nothing about, circling a lake they probably knew
next to nothing about, while he was drinking a Coke in the parking lot.
We went in, poking around a monastery we
knew next to nothing about.
A monk in a yellow sweater came up to me and smiled. I asked his name
in Tibetan (I had learned this from the nomads a few days before). His
reply was unpronounceable for me. I smiled, asked the name of the
monastery (Shiraling Gompa), and looked around. The place was small,
with a shop selling Coke and Sprite, and two monks working on a
motorbike engine. He followed me around as I took a photo of yak cheese
drying in the sun, and then watched us as we cycled off.
The road left the lakeshore for a while,
and we came to the next
monastery (Trus Gho Gompa) near sundown. I stopped to take in the view
of the monastery in the foreground, with Mapam Yumtso and Kangrinboche
directly behind it. This place really took it all in. Three friendly
monks approached, and after I dismounted and laid down my bike to walk
around the grounds, they jumped on the bike and started racing around
all over the place. Martin's bike soon followed. They came back 
after 5
minutes of laughing and screaming, and requested that we lower the
seats. We obliged, and the fun continued. A few women looked quietly on
from the sidelines. I gave a 4 year old a ride on my back, and we all
eventually sat down by the stupa, panting and happy. They invited us to
stay in the pilgrims' accommodations. We took the room, with a window
framing the same view I had seen earlier, crawled
under the blankets,
ate a can of congee from Hor Qu, and fell asleep.
I slept well. The next morning, we packed,
and cooked a breakfast on
our stoves in the courtyard. A monk came out and invited us to have a
look at the monastery itself, morning prayers having just finished. The
place was very clean and well kept. There was a brass placard above the
entrance engraved with the words "Trus Gho Monastery Democratic
Management Committee". Just who were these people? Hopefully just the
monks living there, but I couldn't be sure: I had my doubts. The
interior had several different Boddhisattva likenesses behind glass,
well preserved and delicately carved and painted. The walls were
covered with silk that had the image of the Buddha repeated every few
inches. One of the monks was chanting and sweeping the chamber; the
abbot, an older man in an orange sweater, was saying prayers and
lighting yak butter candles while singing in a monotone. I smiled at
the monk sweeping the floor - he had been racing my bike all over the
compound - but now he just nodded.
We left and packed, and found a monk to
ask how much we owed. He
waved off the suggestion, refusing money, so I took 20Y to the abbot,
and gave it to him, indicating with a sweep of the hand that it was for
the gompa. He thanked me quietly and went back to sweeping out the
stone-floored courtyard.
The road around the southern lakeshore was
miserable, on account of
the rubble washing down over the aeons from Gurla Mandata. We
progressed slowly for the 12km along the southern shore, and then the
track improved, becoming smoother as we rounded the western shore. We
passed two pilgrims leading horses around: this didn't appear to be the
busy season. At a third monastery, set into a cliffside, we rested,
listening to the waters of the lake lapping against the stones of the
shore. 
The water was
crystal clear. I climbed up the steep slippery
path to the gompa to ask for water, and the monk there showed me
around. I asked how many monks lived there: Four, he said. I wondered
if that was the limit or if interest was flagging these days. The view
from the monastery courtyard, and the monks' room, was the sort of
thing that tourists would be two hundred bucks a night for: the lake,
the huge mountain covered in snow. Perfect for an alpine chalet...but
I'm sure some enterprising Chinese tourism authority has already
thought about this, and has well-laid plans to carry it out...
We finished the kora ending up back in
Barga, where we dined at the
same restaurant we had eaten at 2 days before (Martin swore by their
egg and tomato dish), and headed for Darchen, the pilgrim town at the
foot of Kailas/Kangrinboche, the starting point for the kora.
Darchen had grown in 5 years, although not
by much. There was an
ambitious new hotel at the start of the town, and a cellphone tower
with an array of solar panels to power it, but it was still
recognizeable. A Chinese woman called out to me as I entered the town,
waving me over to her restaurant. I was easy: a good meal before the
trek around the mountain sounded good. I had some pulled noodles (the
couple was from Lanzhou), Martin had his standby egg and tomato, and
they asked if we were staying the night in Darchen. It was our
intention to start the kora that day, so we declined, but they had
already brought their friend, a Tibetan woman, to offer her inexpensive
guesthouse rooms to us. We thanked them, but said we would leave. Where
to put the bikes? The question was answered when a pair of young
Tibetans speaking Chinese said we could leave our bikes at their place.
Great, so all that was left was the visa extension, which I had
suggested we try to get in Darchen rather than Ali. The man from the
restaurant led us over to the police. These were two Tibetans, one of
whom I thought I recognized from 5 years before, when I had been issued
a permit without a fine, quite a rare occurance. He eyed me for some
time, before saying, "I know you from before." I was pretty surprised:
it was one thing for me to remember him, quite another for him to
remember me. It was indeed Mr. Pingzo, and his associate Mr. Banma. He
gave us the permits, fining us this time ("I can't give it to you free
a second time" he joked) filling out paperwork while we tried to
decipher the sign on the wall describing "the rules for issuance of
permits to aliens". It was unintelligible. There was a chart with fees
for various visas, visa extensions, and permits: the three countries
mentioned specifically were Russia, the Ukraine, and the US. Apparently
everyone else didn't matter. And how many tourists were coming here
from the Ukraine, I asked. Mr. Pingzo replied, None that I have seen,
and I have been here 9 years. We shook hands, after we had collected
our "bamboo slips" (this was written on the english sign), and I
thanked him for the freebee the first time. He just smiled and ushered
me out the door.
The kora is a long
walk, 53km including a nearly 1000m climb to a
pass at the Drolma La (5660m). We started late in the day, thinking to
get near the foot of the pass, making for a shortish walk the following
day (the pass is about halfway). The walk climbs to a point where you
can see the mountain, a place where Tibetans prostrate towards the peak
several times before carrying on. We passed a group - two men, a woman,
and a young boy - who were starting off as well. The men carried light
loads, the woman an oversized bundled that weighed her down, as well as
a large teapot for tea in her hand. This was unsurprising, given what I
had seen in Tibet (and all around the world for that matter). The
prostration point was littered with clothes, thrown off as offerings,
and shoes. Shoes?? What happens after this? A 50km walk over stones and
ice is no easy thing for shod feet; it's damn near impossible barefoot.
Or perhaps pilgrims carry an extra pair along as an offering. I've
never personally witnessed a pair of shoes being tossed to the wind, so
I can't say for sure what actually happens, but I can't help but
wonder. We walked along the valley that becomes a canyon, admiring
glimpses of the very dramatic west face of what is arguably the world's
holiest mountain (Mount Kailas has remained unclimbed: although it
would be technically possible, though difficult, this would be very
sacreligious, and, gratefully, mountaineers, usually men with big egos,
have eschewed the desire to conquer this peak). A motorbike, running
its way up to the tents that service pilgrims, and, more lucratively,
western tourists, passed me on the foot path, struggling its way over
the stones. His engine died every few seconds, and I push-started him
twice. We camped in the windy canyon, as the temperature plunged, next
to the stream flowing down to the plain.
The night was cold. The next morning, we
shuffled in the shade until
we turned the corner and started climbing the Drolma La. A group of
pilgrims was up ahead, moving quickly, but stopping to prostrate and
rub all of the appropriate stones along the way. They made me doff my
hat and place my forehead on a well-worn rock before I could pass.
Later, they made Martin crawl through a tiny cave under the rocks on
the way up. The snowline was two or three hundred meters below the 
pass
top, and the sky was clear. This time Kailas was beautiful: five years
before, it had been sleeting and raining, and I couldn't see
anything.
A Tibetan was waiting at the top with a Polaroid camera. When the
pilgrims made it to the top, he made a brisk trade in photos, charging
about a dollar each, which the pilgrims gladly parted with. The
entrepreneurial sprit at 5600m: I liked that, for some reason. Probably
because it was a single man with a camera, not a "Kodak Photo Location"
with Mickey and Donald in Anaheim or Orlando.
A western tour group had made the pass
about the same time as I had,
but didn't dally: a short whoop and then down the other side. They were
still laboring down the pass an hour later after I had snacked and
waited for Martin. Two women were waiting at the bottom, a Swiss and an
American. We chatted for a while: the American asked whether I could
picture Jimmy Swaggart walking around this mountain, much less
prostrating his way around. I said I might see him do it in a
helicopter, surveying the area for a possible site for a new home. We
laughed, and she explained who Jimmy Swaggart was to the Swiss woman.
Martin and I had a long way to go yet, if we were to make it back to
Darchen by nightfall, so we wished them well and took off at a quick
pace.
The rest of the kora I walked briskly,
keeping as company a Tibetan
from Nagqu named Tsawang who was making his first round of the
mountain. He explained, in Tibetan I didn't understand, the
significance of the various stones, chortens, prostration points along
the way. He was very devout. He told me he had made 20 koras
around Nam
Tso, one of Tibet's four holy lakes. Nam Tso is huge, the biggest lake
in Tibet, and the circumference is probably nearly 500km. That is a lot
of walking, 10,000km (6000 miles), especially for a guy who was 29
years old and herded yaks for a living. We made it to Darchen as
darkness was falling, and I left him in the dusty street where the
pilgrims congregate, heading for the home of the two young men who had
stored our bikes.
The house was warm and lit, full of
family, who smiled and stared at
me while I waited for Martin, who arrived 2 hours later after first
attending the restaurant and having a meal. The place had an American
flag, and two other American flag-styled cloths draped over the TV. It
seemed very out of place, but these guys were young and hip, or as
young and hip as one can be in a place like Darchen. One of them,
Labang, worked at the Agricultural Bank of China in town, the other,
Dawa, hawked tickets for Kailas tours to well-heeled tourists (I didn't
understand how this worked, since presumeably these people already had
a tour arranged, but he said business was good). Two grandmothers
droned chants, spinning prayer wheels, and the two men went out
drinking, while I continued to wait for Martin. Thugpa (noodle soup
with yak meat) was served, and we were given places to sleep. Except
for the loud entrance of the two intoxicated men in the wee hours, I
slept like a rock.
We left the next day, but not before
stopping by the room of
Brahamchari Rajinder Swaroop ji, an Indian sadhu who had circled Mount
Kailas an incredible 155 times. He had a plan to create a non-profit
organization which would administer the Kailas and Manasarovar areas
for pilgrims and tourists from around the world. What he said about his
concern for the environment sounded sane: then he handed me a brochure
outlining his plan, and I began to think he was a bit off-kilter (many
people might say that right away about a man who lived in a cave for 6
years, had a vision, came to Mount Kailas, and spends every second day
walking around the mountain). It was elaborate. He had concluded a
Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese regarding the development
of the area. He had plans for planting flowers and herbs from the
Ayurvedic tradition around the mountain, alongside a path to be
constructed for pilgrims. There was also a plan for a helipad and
aerial koras of the place for "VIPs who are pressed for time but still
want the benefits of Holy Kailas". For those who don't know, flying a
helicopter at 5000m is unfeasible, or if attempted, pretty nearly
insane. It called for the Chinese to stop all development immediately,
and then grant all future development rights to his organization. There
wer nice letters written to the former prime minister of India, A.B.
Vajpayee, and form letters confirming receipt returned. A Certificate
of Appreciation had been given to Mr. Swaroop by the Chinese. It was a
little past realistic, I thought, but the fellow was nice, had a gentle
temperament, and asked me genuinely to try to start a Kailas society in
the US. "Well, we'll see about it..." I said as I left. Afterwards, we
had a breakfast at the Lanzhou restaurant, where the Chinese wished us
"tashidelek". I was greatly impressed by this: I had never before seen
a Chinese in Tibet make any effort at all to learn anything about
Tibetans, their language, or their culture. Most Chinese simply
regarded Tibet as a wild uninhabited piece of China, theirs for the
taking: perhaps these two were a turning point.
The Ghost of the Bogo La
We
headed north and west, trying to make good time to Ali, hoping to take
in the ruins of the Guge kingdom in the process, climbing the Bogo La
(rumored to be the highest road pass in the world) to get there. The
rest of the day was easy cycling, about 60km to Menshir, a good-sized
village half-way to the turnoff for the Bogo La. We pulled into the
town, seeing a few english signs ("Means double price," commented
Martin), and instead ducked into a pitch black Chinese restaurant with
no sign to eat la mian (the power came on later, and the proprietor put
in a techno video complete with pole dancers and bikini contests to
bring in the soldier crowd from the local army base). We camped about
200m from the town, and woke to a thin, wind-driven blanket of snow.
After finding the previous night's restaurant still closed, we wandered
the town in the snow, finding refuge in a Uighur restaurant, where a
Uighur trucker gave me, the US, and President Bush a big thumbs up. He
was apparently happy that Saddam Hussein was out of power, which I
couldn't argue with. The rest of it, "occupation good or bad", I didn't
get into, just warming my hands by the stove and staring at the floor.
We had a good breakfast and then pedalled
into the snow, climbing an
easy pass at 4850m and then descending to the Gar River valley, coming
to an army base at Songsha. There was a restaurant and shop there, both
full of bored soldiers from Sichuan and Gansu, and we had a warm meal
out of the cold wind. One guy, an officer, had been at this base for 10
years. 10 years in Songsha! It was incredible: there was nothing to the
place, beyond a concrete compound and probably 200 soldiers. The sun
was out when we finished, and we cycled a few km north before camping
on the stony plain.
Martin was groaning all night, sick with
food poisoning, and didn't
look good in the morning. A truck with some foreigners waving wildly
passed by as we were packing: a few minutes later, three people on
mountain bikes rode up, with no gear, no luggage. They were Russians
from Novosibirsk on a short one month holiday: Sergei, Alec, and Olga
(the english-speaker). They inquired into our health, and I told them
Martin had just gotten sick last night. Olga suggested he drink vodka:
"Russian medicine: it's an antiseptic!" she cried with a big smile.
After they left, we took advantage of a
strong tailwind to make it
the 25km to Garyarse, where I hoped for a shop and somewhere warm for
Martin to rest. It was also the location of the turnoff to the Bogo La.
Garyarse is described by Victor Chan in
his "Tibet Handbook" as the
former summer capital of west Tibet. Apparently, very hard times had
fallen on Garyarse between its heyday and the present. We were greeted
by 20 mud buildings, three of which contained teahouses. We sat in one
for a couple of hours, drinking soda and daydreaming. A truck of
pilgrims came in, and threw hunks of yak meat onto the top of the
stove, filling the room with charred yak meat smell. The woman running
the place smiled grimly and poured incense on the stovetop to compete
with the smell. She offered us beds for 20Y each, but wouldn't give us
any fuel for the stove, so we declined and camped 100m away.
The next day, Martin was a bit better, so
we started up the valley
to the Bogo La. The road was well maintained, although it crossed the
river at the bottom of the valley two dozen times on the way up. We
asked at a nomad camp at 4700m if this was indeed the way to the Bogo
La. Yes, we were told, but you can't get a bike
up there - there's no
road. This was bad news, but we could see the road continued, so we
carried on. Bad weather moved in, and we crossed the freezing stream in
a driving snow, arriving at a high summer pasture at 5100m. The road
stopped, and there were a few tracks to 5200m, but that was it. The
weather cleared near dark, and we camped surrounded by high
snow-covered mountains all around.
The night was very cold (-23C) and clear,
and the morning was crisp
and sunny. We walked around the valley, walking past piles of mani
stones showing the way to the pass, but there was most definitely no
road. We had at least solved the mystery, and hopefully set the record
straight. The pass was just hidden behind a mountain, but we could
verify it was the right one with the TPC map and Martin's GPS. By the
time we were done documenting this, clouds were moving in, and we were
chased back down the valley by a snow storm, crossing ice, sometimes
thick, sometimes thin, freezing my gear cables, my rims, my brakes,
rendering the bike nearly unrideable. We made it down, avoiding the
storm, which snarled at the entrance to the valley but didn't push down
to the Gar River, had some tea at another teahouse, and pushed towards
Ali as far as we could get before the sun set.
The
climb over the Jing La (4905m) was not difficult, although it was the
first serious pass we had climbed since Nagqu. Truck traffic declined
significantly as the road left the valley Yanhu was in and climbed
slowly but steadily past scattered nomad's tents to the pass. Near the
top was a road workers camp, where I rode past Uighurs from Xinjiang
driving bulldozers for regrading the road. I made it to the top and
waited for Martin, who took nearly an hour to catch up. He had a smile
on his face, and was holding a naan, bread from Xinjiang, in his hand.
The Uighurs, who had still been working when I passed, had stopped for
lunch by the time Martin came by, and called him over for tea and
bread. What was more, he held out a black bag and said, "There's
something else in there if you want it...". It was a slice of
watermelon. Perfect, just what a person needs at the top of a dry pass
in Tibet after having had nothing but apples for anything fresh the
last several weeks. We sat at the top by the prayer flags and enjoyed a
Central Asian lunch before heading down the south side of the pass.
The road on the other side was horrendously stony and bumpy, taking all the fun out of a long downhill. I made it to a dry riverbed in the valley at the bottom and waited. Martin was slow to come, and when he did, he didn't look happy. "Well, I've got a problem," he said. He pointed to his front rack. There was a large crack running across the weight bearing section of the carrier, big enough to see straight through the bar to the other side. This was major.
"We might be able to splint it until we make the next town," I offered.
"No...I don't know. I can't take the chance, since the whole thing might break and that will be very hard to weld."
"So you want to hitch back to Yanhu?"
"Not really, but I don't think I have any other choice. We know there is a welder there: we don't know anything about Xiongba."
We contemplated his next move while cooking lunch. He resolved to grab a truck to Yanhu, about 35km back, while I cycled toward Xiongba. He would catch up later in the evening or the next day. I pedalled off into the wind across the salt flat, while he waited for the next truck to Yanhu.
The valley was unpopulated, except for a small hamlet with three buildings and a herd of yak grazing near the lake. I rode on for two and a half hours, without a truck going by. I thought of Martin sitting there being sandblasted by the wind, waiting futilely for a truck to Yanhu. I began to climb a pass, and camped 30 minutes before dark, just out of sight from several nomad tents in a high valley.
I lit my candle and started to write in my journal. About an hour later, I heard a Chinese-accented "Hello!" from a truck. The truck stopped and idled. I heard some fussing, and then the unmistakeable voice of Martin carried to me in the dark. I poked my head out of the tent: "Martin?"
"Yeah, yeah, it's me."
"Everything fixed?"
"No. I didn't make it to Yanhu, there were no trucks."
"Yeah, I noticed that."
"So I just stopped this guy and asked if there was a welder in Xiongba. He said yes, so I negotiated to go with him, 1Y per km." This was a ludicrous sum: the trucker was definitely taking advantage of him. "He saw your tent, not me."
"But your rack?"
"I'll move the weight to the rear, and take it slowly to Xiongba."
"OK, I'll take some of your weight as well."
He pitched his tent in the dark, and we were soon asleep.
The next day, we had yet again a stiff headwind, right from the start. We climbed a steep section to the top of the pass, and then followed a frustratingly sandy and slow descent down to Xiongba, which was in a flat grassy valley. The place looked bleak. The town was not on the main road, it was a few hundred meters off of it. There was no sign of anything other than Tibetan mud houses. Dogs roamed the streets, competing with goats nosing through the trash. A welder was right near the entrance, however, so that problem was solved. There was one Chinese restaurant, run by a Sichuanese couple. The standard 20Y applied to the meal, extortionate in the rest of China, but ordinary in western Tibet. We poked our heads into a Tibetan shop with the English "shop" on the sign, something which came as quite a surprise. The owner spoke some English: it turned out he had spent 8 years in Dharmsala, India, studying at the New Tibet School. I asked him about how he got there.
"I escaped," he
said, "to Nepal, and then to India. I had no passport."
"Was that difficult?"
"No, not really. You just walked across the mountains."
"And you stayed eight years?"
"Yes. But I came back because I was always sick. India's food and weather was not good for me. So I returned to Tibet."
"Same way?"
"Yes, but I was caught. When I left in 1989, there were very few guards on either side. But in 1997, the Chinese had many more guards. They got me, and put me in jail in Shigatse for one month and 11 days."
"How was that?"
"Not too bad. Of course, they weren't nice, but I managed. Afterward I went back home."
"Where is that?"
"You know Markam, in the east?"
"Yes, I was there in 1999." I had actually snuck through the town at night, since the area was closed to foreigners at the time and had a notorious checkpoint, so I didn't see much. But the surrounding valley was pretty and cultivated, a far cry from desolate barren Xiongba. "So why are you here now?"
"Business. Business in Xiongba is good." I supposed this was true: his was certainly the most well-stocked store in the town, and there was a crowd there, partially to stare at us, but partially to buy the sundries on his shelves. "There are many of us from Markam in west Tibet, particularly in Ali."
"Do you have family in Markam?" I meant mother or father or brother, perhaps extended family.
"Oh yes, I have a wife and two children."
"How often do you go back?"
"About once every 2 or 3 years, then I come back to work again."
This seemed strange. I mentioned that Markam had seemed a fairly busy market town. "Yes."
"So why not stay there and run a business."
He smiled. "Better business here." At least less competition.
I asked if there was a road south from here heading into the Transhimalaya and across to Kailas. "Oh yes, yes. It starts right here." He pointed to one of the roads at the intersection he was situated at.
"How far?"
He asked a local. "He says about 250km. About 80km to Yagra, and then over the mountains to Hor Qu."
"So there is a road all the way?"
"Yes." This was good news: I had assumed we would be travelling off-road for quite some ways.
We bought some candy from him and got some water for drinking. He said water should be no problem farther on. We left out of town on the road heading south, which was obviously maintained. Although it was stony, we made good speed, and climbed a small hill into another valley by a lake to camp.
The next day we
cycled past a few permanent houses in the valley,
and came across a very large number of chiu, seemingly coexisting with
the human population of the valley, along with the livestock they
tended. The road launched up a hillside, switchbacking out of view. I
steeled myself for the climb and pedalled out ahead of Martin.
The climb had 19 switchbacks, and by the
time I had reached the top,
we were over 5200m, the first time we had gone past 5000m on the trip.
I felt good, and took a nap by the chorten waiting for Martin. When he
arrived, he took a GPS reading, and found our altitude to be 5290m, one
of the higher passes in Tibet. We dropped down the other side, had
lunch by a stream in cold cloudy weather, and then rolled downhill to
the large salt lake and around to the town of Yagra.
The place was large, much larger than I
would have anticipated, and
had several very well-stocked tents selling foodstuffs and sundries. We
had instant noodles at a restaurant - the only one we could find -
served by a very good looking girl, who allowed the night to fall and
made no effort to provide any light for our meal. We finished in the
dark, and then stumbled out of town to a campsite that the next morning
we found out was the town dump.
The Highest Road in the World (?)
We left Yagra, heading back across the sandy basin containing the lake, and then striking westward up a valley. I had been told emphatically by a young man after informing him of our plans to go to Kailas (Kangrinboche) that we should bear to the right at any fork in the road. There was a fork about 10km out of town, and we did as we were told, but the route didn't make sense to us when looking at the map: we couldn't figure out why the road was heading west into this valley, when a more obvious route seemed to lie to the south. But the road was still fairly well-used, so we continued. Relief came when we turned to the south up a valley, but the pass to which it led looked very high judging by the contours.
My rear tire sidewall blew out a few km further on, and I crankily walked my bike over to the stream we were now following and changed to my spare, flinging the old tire in disgust onto the road. Martin chastened me for littering, but I was upset and didn't care: besides, I told myself, you see truck tires in the middle of the road all the time. "It's one thing if there is a town a day away. We don't know anything about this road, we could be going for days."
We continued to
climb: Yagra lies at nearly 4900m, surely one of the
highest permanent habitations in the world, and the road climbed to
5000m, then 5100m, and we camped finally at 5300m, looking up at the
pass above us. As we were cycling, a large peak came into view. I
thought to myself, This one looks very doable...I wonder how high it
is. Martin was cycling slowly with his head down. I called his
attention to the peak. His mood changed immediately. He hurriedly
yanked out the TPC map he carried, and I got a compass bearing on a
couple of sites. The mountain was listed as 20,284 feet, which was very
nearly 6200m. I translated the altitude into meters for Martin (being
European, feet don't mean anything to him), and he became ecstatic. We
rolled up to a nice campsite at the base of the pass, and resolved to
climb the peak if the weather was decent the next day.
The day dawned beautiful, no clouds, ample sun. It was, of course, cold at 5300m, but nothing unbearable. We packed a few things for the 900m climb and headed out.
The climb went well,
although I delayed putting on my cold weather
gloves a bit too long, and had to enlist Martin's help in pulling them
on, since my hands were nearly immobilized by the cold. We stopped
three short times on the way to the top, and encountered kiangs three
times as well, once looking down on me from a ridge at nearly 5900m. I
couldn't imagine what they were doing at that elevation: the ground was
all splintered rock, with no vegetation whatsoever. The wind was
elemental, blowing at 40kph, gusting to much more. Our route up the
peak followed the northeast ridge (the mountain was a 3-sided affair),
which was subject to quite a bit of wind, although much less than the
south face. The northwest face we couldn't see from below, and didn't
follow on the way up. Finally, and relatively quickly, I found myself a
few meters below the top, and rested in a hollow in the rocks to wait
for Martin. He came up 15 minutes later, and I took the role of
cameraman to follow him from behind as he summitted, finding the
elevation to be 6189m by GPS. We each said a few words into the camera,
and filmed and photographed the spectacular view from the top. The
three sides fell away steeply and dramatically, 1000m and more, and
views of 150km to the south were afforded us at the top. We could see
Kailas (6700m) about 100km away as the crow flies, and the main front
of the Himalaya, marking the Nepali border 150km away, were also
visible. We sat at the top, on the leeward side, and
munched on a few
snacks, enjoying the view and glad to be out of the wind for a few
minutes. The climb had been a scramble up a steep rocky slope, but
completely nontechnical, for
which we would have been unprepared, so we
also felt fortunate to have found such a high, easy climb. To top it
off, Martin thought it was probably unclimbed, and being the first to
climb a 6200m peak is something in the climbing world, apparently.
We descended the northwest face, mostly out of the wind, and returned to camp, crossing the road pass on the way down, measuring it at 5540m, perhaps the highest road pass in the world. We were tired when we got back, and we both crawled into our respective tents and took long naps before cooking and then falling back to sleep again.
The next day we climbed the road pass by bike (we found out later the pass is named Dakhche La in Tibetan) in a cold headwind, with clouds overhead. We had been fortunate to climb the day before: this day would have been miserable on the exposed mountainside. We dropped down the other side of the pass, descending eventually to 5100m at a bridge over the A'mao Tsangpo, and then heading upstream, climbing slowly again. After 30km, we were sick of the wind, and I pitched my tent as a cook tent for lunch, to get out of the wind. After lunch we pedalled across a sandy plain, with several nomad's tents coming into view at 5125m. At the first, I stopped to take a photo, and was approached by an old man with a toddler holding his hand. The man asked me to come in for tea, and after Martin came up and agreed, we followed him into his tent.
The tent was white
canvas, and a second tent of brown yak hide was
pitched a few meters away. There were 3 women, a girl, and 3 toddlers
rolling around in amongst the blankets and sheepskins. A metal
tri-legged stove occupied the center of the tent, and a bag of yak dung
was nearby, supplying the fuel. Everyone was huddled on skins close to
the fire. Tea was poured while I looked around. Vats of sheep's milk
and yak butter were in one corner, along with a butter churn, a woolen
bag with barley flour lay nearby, and plastic jugs for water and ladles
encrusted with dried milk hung from the sides. The ceiling was slit the
whole length of the tent to allow for ventilation, but the inside was
still smokey. Everyone was wearing countless layers of clothes, and
various rings and necklaces completed the outfits. The children wormed
from one adult to the other, finding the appropriate mother to nurse
from eventually. A large pot with sheep's heads was slowly boiling over
the fire, although this was taken off from time to time
to boil more
water for butter tea, which I was given, and consumed, large quantities
of (Martin couldn't stomach the stuff, so he begged off). We tried to
communicate awkwardly, teaching each other a few words in the other's
language, and smiled a lot. This went on for 3 hours, until the two men
who had been off herding yaks, goats, and sheep returned near sunset.
The women jumped up, and tied up the goats for milking, collecting the
milk in two large yak horns. The old man suggested that we pitch our
tents in between their two, since there was unfortunately no room left
in the tents (he had recently taken another tent down: they were
preparing to move to their winter camp near Yagra, 250m lower.) We did
so, with the two men finishing up with the livestock just as we were
done. We went back into the white tent and warmed ourselves by the fire
again, the room's number reaching 12 including us. One of the men
invited Martin to his tent, while I was to remain in this one for
dinner. Dinner was sheep's head from the pot, brains, eyeballs, and all
(which I declined), yak cheese, tsampa, and later, flatbreads
("bakbay") and goat butter made on a heavy
skillet later in the
evening. The young man in my tent, Karma, got out a radio and tuned in
a broadcast in Tibetan from Dharmsala. The old man (his name was A)
told me through gestures about a time as a young man, or maybe an
adolescent, that a Chinese had ripped an image of the Dalai Lama off
from around his neck and beaten him for it. I guessed this could have
been during the Cultural Revolution, and although he was vague about
his age (he didn't seem to know himself), I guessed he was near 50,
judging by the age of his two sons (27 and 29). He looked ancient: this
weather and lifestyle took its toll on the skin. After a few hot
flatbreads, we returned to our tents, compared notes briefly, and went
to sleep, with the strong wind swirling around the four tents.
The next morning, we woke up, watched the
women milk the goats, all
neatly tied up in a line, and hurried into the tent for a quick meal of
tsampa and tea. The nomads were
overgenerous, stuffing our bags with
food: rice, tsampa, butter, bread. We thanked them profusely, and the
old man, A, warned us about the impending pass, the Juma La: there is
sure to be snow on the pass, so be ready for it, he signaled. I
communicated as best I could that we would watch out, and then we left,
leaving them sugar and peanuts as the two things we had to give in
exchange (unfortunately, this also made the tsampa less appealing...I
prefer sugar in my tsampa, but I gave them the half kilogram I had with
me as a thank you). As we made our way across the plain toward the
climb to the pass, we were hailed by every nomad we passed, and invited
in for tea: we had to beg off, since we were full, and needed to make
some progress that day.
We crossed a bridge at 5200m, and then
started climbing, reaching a
high point at 5387m before descending slightly and following a chain of
lakes coming down from the pass. There
was a nomad herding yaks at
5350m, presumeably one of the higher pastures one could find in the
world. The weather held for about 2 hours, during which time we had
magnificent views toward the pass and the main Gangdise range. Then the
snow came...dark misty clouds rolled across the ground at our level,
and visibility was reduced to a few meters. Snow blew parallel with the
ground, and we could hardly hold our heads up. We crossed what we
assumed to be the highest road bridge in the world at 5365m, and then a
fork in the road (one branch leading to the Lama La and the eastern
half of the Kailas kora, which we had been informed was not cycleable
by the nomads). We kept to the left, and followed the east shore of the
Juma Tso, which we couldn't see at all for the snow.
While I waited for
Martin on the snow covered road, the storm let
up, and the clouds parted to reveal a beautiful valley, with a large
lake ringed by peaks reaching to 6000m and higher. The sun shone on the
peaks, the blue sky was overhead, and I nearly got religion looking at
it all. We were both stunned into silence. We reached
the western end
of the lake, shortly before the pass itself, and decided to take a
chance on the weather and camp. We plowed through 7 or 8 centimeters of
snow, and camped by the lakeshore at 5370m, enjoying a snowy sunset and
a -16C night just below the Juma La.
The next day, excepting the malfunction of
my stove, and the
subsequent end to my fuel, was great. We cycled slowly through the snow
and the ice to the pass, GPSed at 5430m, and travelled another 4km
along a flat valley, to the corner in the mountains where the road
began to descend for real. By
the time we descended to 5300m, we had
been at that level or higher for nearly 40km. The road descended
further, and all told we had been above 5100m for 95km and 5000m for
100km, making this almost surely the highest stretch of road in the
world. The snow was
receding in the brilliant sun, and we raced down,
eager to get to lower ground, warm temperatures, and - most importantly
- some good restaurant food. We turned a corner on the way down to be
presented with a view of Gurla Mandata (7700m), a huge massif standing
alone across the southern shore of Lake Manasarovar, ice far down its
shoulders. And then, the flat plain of Barga opened up in front of us,
and we raced down the last section to Barga.
In the old days, one had to be careful in Barga: there was a road barrier and checkpoint. We were too tired and hungry to care, and in the end, it didn't matter. The barrier was still there, but I spoke with a guard while we had dinner, and he said they were only checking driver's papers. Mostly the guards were interested in our trip, in where we were from, how many km per day we cycled, and so on. They were each stationed in the place for three years, mostly young guys from Gansu and Sichuan provinces. It seems to be a pattern, that the army and allied agencies are staffed by poor kids from the western provinces in China, in the same way that the military in the US draws its ranks - perhaps not the officer corps - primarily from lower and lower-middle class kids from the South and the Midwest.
As we rolled into the checkpoint (it is
not worthy of the moniker
"village", being too small), we were filmed by a tourist swinging a
video camera around. The Land Cruisers all around us were emblazoned
with sponsor's logos, and the words "Altay-Himalaya Expedition 2004".
The occupants were Russians from Moscow, driving 4WD
vehicles from the
Altay Republic in southern Siberia, into the Altay region of Mongolia,
and then around China, touring for about 2 months. This was a lot to
fit in in 2 months, but that's the time they had allocated. A woman
talked with us briefly, Martin held his breath for a dole out of
chocolate or power bars, but only good wishes and short synopses of the
trip was dispensed. We watched the barrier go up and down as several
Land Cruiser tours going to and from Kailas passed Barga in both
directions. Stares, and a few smiles, but nothing more. We left town,
passing by the "State Compulsory Schoo [sic] Education Project for the
Under Developed Areas" compound, where a few dogs roamed the
schoolyard, travelling half an hour before the sun set and we set camp
with both Kailas and Gurla Mandata in plain view.
A Pair of Koras
We
cycled to Hor Qu (Huer in Chinese), hoping to grab a breakfast and a
few snacks before heading for a circle around Lake Manasarovar (Mapam
Yumtso in Tibetan). The town is on the northeastern shore of the lake,
a good jumping off point for the kora. I had passed through in 1999,
finding a village with a few white tents selling snacks and sundries. I
expected growth, but not to the degree I was greeted with this time. We
ate at a restaurant across from the army installation there, labeled
"Old Soldier Restaurant" in English, paying too much for our breakfast,
which was a long time coming since we appeared to have woken up the
proprietors at nearly 11 in the morning. A sheep was being led to a
place where it was tied up just outside, and part way through the meal,
various organs began making their way into the room, followed a few
minutes later by an expertly butchered sheep carcass. It weighed in at
23kg, and cost 280Y (roughly US$45). Martin was visibly shaken by the
fact that we had just been watching the sheep being led alive across
the road, although he was the meat-eater, not me...
We went in search of a shop, and found a
main street full of English
signs (the prosaic "Hotel. Good Room." or the more poetic "High
Mountain Hotel and Wineshop"), and noveau riche Chinese tourists,
walking around like billboards with trendy outdoor Goretex jackets,
cellphones, and digital cameras. There were a handful of Chinese
establishments snaring these folks, while the Tibetan places turned a
rather more slow business among pilgrims. We got fuel for our stoves, a
few 761 bars (life support for the Tibetan cyclist) to eat, and headed
out of town. At the edge of town, we met two backpackers, the first we
had seen since Yushu, lolling on a sleeping mat, waiting for a hitch.
We swapped stories for a quarter of an hour, finding out that there was
a bus to Ali from Yecheng (incredible to one who hadn't seen that road
since 1999, when a bus ride would have been nigh on impossible), there
was a regular bus from Ali to Lhasa (also news), and that Kashgar - one
of my favorite towns in all of China, having been stuck there, but
happily, in 1999 for 17 days - had been ruined by the promised Han
inmigration and the moving indoors of the famous and kaleidoscopic
Sunday market. I later heard more from other tourists coming from
Kashgar that it was "just another ugly Chinese city", booming with
migrants from the east: this greatly saddened me, although I haven't
seen the damage for myself. The coming of the railroad to Lhasa might
be read as the harbinger of disaster, at least in the aesthetic and
touristic sense...
We started off on the kora, finding a road
complete with bridges.
Tourists, safely stashed in their Land Cruisers, passed us circling the
lake counterclockwise (the wrong
way if you are Buddhist or Hindu, and
why else were they there, if not to play at being visitors to a sacred
place? But the demands of tightly packed schedules required an
exception to time-honored tradition...). We stopped at a gompa, one of
five ringing the lake, where three well-dressed Tibetans were kicking
stones in the front of the monastery entrance. One approached me, as I
pulled out a camera to take a picture of a stupa with a rusting engine
block leaning up against it, the lake and Gurla Mandata in the
background.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" He was pandering to
me.
"It's ironic," I replied. He didn't get it.
"You are from?"
"The US."
"Ahhh, USA...Very good."
Always this refrain: it gets old,
particularly given what is going on in the world right now. I just said
"Sure."
"I am from Lhasa," he offered.
"I can see that. What are you doing here -
a kora?" I knew this wasn't true.
"No, no, I am a guide. We have Swiss
tourists with us. They are now
in the monastery." I didn't bother to ask how exactly it was that he
was guiding them when they were inside, poking around a monastery they
probably knew next to nothing about, circling a lake they probably knew
next to nothing about, while he was drinking a Coke in the parking lot.
We went in, poking around a monastery we
knew next to nothing about.
A monk in a yellow sweater came up to me and smiled. I asked his name
in Tibetan (I had learned this from the nomads a few days before). His
reply was unpronounceable for me. I smiled, asked the name of the
monastery (Shiraling Gompa), and looked around. The place was small,
with a shop selling Coke and Sprite, and two monks working on a
motorbike engine. He followed me around as I took a photo of yak cheese
drying in the sun, and then watched us as we cycled off.
The road left the lakeshore for a while,
and we came to the next
monastery (Trus Gho Gompa) near sundown. I stopped to take in the view
of the monastery in the foreground, with Mapam Yumtso and Kangrinboche
directly behind it. This place really took it all in. Three friendly
monks approached, and after I dismounted and laid down my bike to walk
around the grounds, they jumped on the bike and started racing around
all over the place. Martin's bike soon followed. They came back after 5
minutes of laughing and screaming, and requested that we lower the
seats. We obliged, and the fun continued. A few women looked quietly on
from the sidelines. I gave a 4 year old a ride on my back, and we all
eventually sat down by the stupa, panting and happy. They invited us to
stay in the pilgrims' accommodations. We took the room, with a window
framing the same view I had seen earlier, crawled
under the blankets,
ate a can of congee from Hor Qu, and fell asleep.
I slept well. The next morning, we packed,
and cooked a breakfast on
our stoves in the courtyard. A monk came out and invited us to have a
look at the monastery itself, morning prayers having just finished. The
place was very clean and well kept. There was a brass placard above the
entrance engraved with the words "Trus Gho Monastery Democratic
Management Committee". Just who were these people? Hopefully just the
monks living there, but I couldn't be sure: I had my doubts. The
interior had several different Boddhisattva likenesses behind glass,
well preserved and delicately carved and painted. The walls were
covered with silk that had the image of the Buddha repeated every few
inches. One of the monks was chanting and sweeping the chamber; the
abbot, an older man in an orange sweater, was saying prayers and
lighting yak butter candles while singing in a monotone. I smiled at
the monk sweeping the floor - he had been racing my bike all over the
compound - but now he just nodded.
We left and packed, and found a monk to
ask how much we owed. He
waved off the suggestion, refusing money, so I took 20Y to the abbot,
and gave it to him, indicating with a sweep of the hand that it was for
the gompa. He thanked me quietly and went back to sweeping out the
stone-floored courtyard.
The road around the southern lakeshore was
miserable, on account of
the rubble washing down over the aeons from Gurla Mandata. We
progressed slowly for the 12km along the southern shore, and then the
track improved, becoming smoother as we rounded the western shore. We
passed two pilgrims leading horses around: this didn't appear to be the
busy season. At a third monastery, set into a cliffside, we rested,
listening to the waters of the lake lapping against the stones of the
shore. The water was
crystal clear. I climbed up the steep slippery
path to the gompa to ask for water, and the monk there showed me
around. I asked how many monks lived there: Four, he said. I wondered
if that was the limit or if interest was flagging these days. The view
from the monastery courtyard, and the monks' room, was the sort of
thing that tourists would be two hundred bucks a night for: the lake,
the huge mountain covered in snow. Perfect for an alpine chalet...but
I'm sure some enterprising Chinese tourism authority has already
thought about this, and has well-laid plans to carry it out...
We finished the kora ending up back in
Barga, where we dined at the
same restaurant we had eaten at 2 days before (Martin swore by their
egg and tomato dish), and headed for Darchen, the pilgrim town at the
foot of Kailas/Kangrinboche, the starting point for the kora.
Darchen had grown in 5 years, although not
by much. There was an
ambitious new hotel at the start of the town, and a cellphone tower
with an array of solar panels to power it, but it was still
recognizeable. A Chinese woman called out to me as I entered the town,
waving me over to her restaurant. I was easy: a good meal before the
trek around the mountain sounded good. I had some pulled noodles (the
couple was from Lanzhou), Martin had his standby egg and tomato, and
they asked if we were staying the night in Darchen. It was our
intention to start the kora that day, so we declined, but they had
already brought their friend, a Tibetan woman, to offer her inexpensive
guesthouse rooms to us. We thanked them, but said we would leave. Where
to put the bikes? The question was answered when a pair of young
Tibetans speaking Chinese said we could leave our bikes at their place.
Great, so all that was left was the visa extension, which I had
suggested we try to get in Darchen rather than Ali. The man from the
restaurant led us over to the police. These were two Tibetans, one of
whom I thought I recognized from 5 years before, when I had been issued
a permit without a fine, quite a rare occurance. He eyed me for some
time, before saying, "I know you from before." I was pretty surprised:
it was one thing for me to remember him, quite another for him to
remember me. It was indeed Mr. Pingzo, and his associate Mr. Banma. He
gave us the permits, fining us this time ("I can't give it to you free
a second time" he joked) filling out paperwork while we tried to
decipher the sign on the wall describing "the rules for issuance of
permits to aliens". It was unintelligible. There was a chart with fees
for various visas, visa extensions, and permits: the three countries
mentioned specifically were Russia, the Ukraine, and the US. Apparently
everyone else didn't matter. And how many tourists were coming here
from the Ukraine, I asked. Mr. Pingzo replied, None that I have seen,
and I have been here 9 years. We shook hands, after we had collected
our "bamboo slips" (this was written on the english sign), and I
thanked him for the freebee the first time. He just smiled and ushered
me out the door.
The kora is a long
walk, 53km including a nearly 1000m climb to a
pass at the Drolma La (5660m). We started late in the day, thinking to
get near the foot of the pass, making for a shortish walk the following
day (the pass is about halfway). The walk climbs to a point where you
can see the mountain, a place where Tibetans prostrate towards the peak
several times before carrying on. We passed a group - two men, a woman,
and a young boy - who were starting off as well. The men carried light
loads, the woman an oversized bundled that weighed her down, as well as
a large teapot for tea in her hand. This was unsurprising, given what I
had seen in Tibet (and all around the world for that matter). The
prostration point was littered with clothes, thrown off as offerings,
and shoes. Shoes?? What happens after this? A 50km walk over stones and
ice is no easy thing for shod feet; it's damn near impossible barefoot.
Or perhaps pilgrims carry an extra pair along as an offering. I've
never personally witnessed a pair of shoes being tossed to the wind, so
I can't say for sure what actually happens, but I can't help but
wonder. We walked along the valley that becomes a canyon, admiring
glimpses of the very dramatic west face of what is arguably the world's
holiest mountain (Mount Kailas has remained unclimbed: although it
would be technically possible, though difficult, this would be very
sacreligious, and, gratefully, mountaineers, usually men with big egos,
have eschewed the desire to conquer this peak). A motorbike, running
its way up to the tents that service pilgrims, and, more lucratively,
western tourists, passed me on the foot path, struggling its way over
the stones. His engine died every few seconds, and I push-started him
twice. We camped in the windy canyon, as the temperature plunged, next
to the stream flowing down to the plain.
The night was cold. The next morning, we
shuffled in the shade until
we turned the corner and started climbing the Drolma La. A group of
pilgrims was up ahead, moving quickly, but stopping to prostrate and
rub all of the appropriate stones along the way. They made me doff my
hat and place my forehead on a well-worn rock before I could pass.
Later, they made Martin crawl through a tiny cave under the rocks on
the way up. The snowline was two or three hundred meters below the pass
top, and the sky was clear. This time Kailas was beautiful: five years
before, it had been sleeting and raining, and I couldn't see
anything.
A Tibetan was waiting at the top with a Polaroid camera. When the
pilgrims made it to the top, he made a brisk trade in photos, charging
about a dollar each, which the pilgrims gladly parted with. The
entrepreneurial sprit at 5600m: I liked that, for some reason. Probably
because it was a single man with a camera, not a "Kodak Photo Location"
with Mickey and Donald in Anaheim or Orlando.
A western tour group had made the pass
about the same time as I had,
but didn't dally: a short whoop and then down the other side. They were
still laboring down the pass an hour later after I had snacked and
waited for Martin. Two women were waiting at the bottom, a Swiss and an
American. We chatted for a while: the American asked whether I could
picture Jimmy Swaggart walking around this mountain, much less
prostrating his way around. I said I might see him do it in a
helicopter, surveying the area for a possible site for a new home. We
laughed, and she explained who Jimmy Swaggart was to the Swiss woman.
Martin and I had a long way to go yet, if we were to make it back to
Darchen by nightfall, so we wished them well and took off at a quick
pace.
The rest of the kora I walked briskly,
keeping as company a Tibetan
from Nagqu named Tsawang who was making his first round of the
mountain. He explained, in Tibetan I didn't understand, the
significance of the various stones, chortens, prostration points along
the way. He was very devout. He told me he had made 20 koras
around Nam
Tso, one of Tibet's four holy lakes. Nam Tso is huge, the biggest lake
in Tibet, and the circumference is probably nearly 500km. That is a lot
of walking, 10,000km (6000 miles), especially for a guy who was 29
years old and herded yaks for a living. We made it to Darchen as
darkness was falling, and I left him in the dusty street where the
pilgrims congregate, heading for the home of the two young men who had
stored our bikes.
The house was warm and lit, full of
family, who smiled and stared at
me while I waited for Martin, who arrived 2 hours later after first
attending the restaurant and having a meal. The place had an American
flag, and two other American flag-styled cloths draped over the TV. It
seemed very out of place, but these guys were young and hip, or as
young and hip as one can be in a place like Darchen. One of them,
Labang, worked at the Agricultural Bank of China in town, the other,
Dawa, hawked tickets for Kailas tours to well-heeled tourists (I didn't
understand how this worked, since presumeably these people already had
a tour arranged, but he said business was good). Two grandmothers
droned chants, spinning prayer wheels, and the two men went out
drinking, while I continued to wait for Martin. Thugpa (noodle soup
with yak meat) was served, and we were given places to sleep. Except
for the loud entrance of the two intoxicated men in the wee hours, I
slept like a rock.
We left the next day, but not before
stopping by the room of
Brahamchari Rajinder Swaroop ji, an Indian sadhu who had circled Mount
Kailas an incredible 155 times. He had a plan to create a non-profit
organization which would administer the Kailas and Manasarovar areas
for pilgrims and tourists from around the world. What he said about his
concern for the environment sounded sane: then he handed me a brochure
outlining his plan, and I began to think he was a bit off-kilter (many
people might say that right away about a man who lived in a cave for 6
years, had a vision, came to Mount Kailas, and spends every second day
walking around the mountain). It was elaborate. He had concluded a
Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese regarding the development
of the area. He had plans for planting flowers and herbs from the
Ayurvedic tradition around the mountain, alongside a path to be
constructed for pilgrims. There was also a plan for a helipad and
aerial koras of the place for "VIPs who are pressed for time but still
want the benefits of Holy Kailas". For those who don't know, flying a
helicopter at 5000m is unfeasible, or if attempted, pretty nearly
insane. It called for the Chinese to stop all development immediately,
and then grant all future development rights to his organization. There
wer nice letters written to the former prime minister of India, A.B.
Vajpayee, and form letters confirming receipt returned. A Certificate
of Appreciation had been given to Mr. Swaroop by the Chinese. It was a
little past realistic, I thought, but the fellow was nice, had a gentle
temperament, and asked me genuinely to try to start a Kailas society in
the US. "Well, we'll see about it..." I said as I left. Afterwards, we
had a breakfast at the Lanzhou restaurant, where the Chinese wished us
"tashidelek". I was greatly impressed by this: I had never before seen
a Chinese in Tibet make any effort at all to learn anything about
Tibetans, their language, or their culture. Most Chinese simply
regarded Tibet as a wild uninhabited piece of China, theirs for the
taking: perhaps these two were a turning point.
The Ghost of the Bogo La
We
headed north and west, trying to make good time to Ali, hoping to take
in the ruins of the Guge kingdom in the process, climbing the Bogo La
(rumored to be the highest road pass in the world) to get there. The
rest of the day was easy cycling, about 60km to Menshir, a good-sized
village half-way to the turnoff for the Bogo La. We pulled into the
town, seeing a few english signs ("Means double price," commented
Martin), and instead ducked into a pitch black Chinese restaurant with
no sign to eat la mian (the power came on later, and the proprietor put
in a techno video complete with pole dancers and bikini contests to
bring in the soldier crowd from the local army base). We camped about
200m from the town, and woke to a thin, wind-driven blanket of snow.
After finding the previous night's restaurant still closed, we wandered
the town in the snow, finding refuge in a Uighur restaurant, where a
Uighur trucker gave me, the US, and President Bush a big thumbs up. He
was apparently happy that Saddam Hussein was out of power, which I
couldn't argue with. The rest of it, "occupation good or bad", I didn't
get into, just warming my hands by the stove and staring at the floor.
We had a good breakfast and then pedalled
into the snow, climbing an
easy pass at 4850m and then descending to the Gar River valley, coming
to an army base at Songsha. There was a restaurant and shop there, both
full of bored soldiers from Sichuan and Gansu, and we had a warm meal
out of the cold wind. One guy, an officer, had been at this base for 10
years. 10 years in Songsha! It was incredible: there was nothing to the
place, beyond a concrete compound and probably 200 soldiers. The sun
was out when we finished, and we cycled a few km north before camping
on the stony plain.
Martin was groaning all night, sick with
food poisoning, and didn't
look good in the morning. A truck with some foreigners waving wildly
passed by as we were packing: a few minutes later, three people on
mountain bikes rode up, with no gear, no luggage. They were Russians
from Novosibirsk on a short one month holiday: Sergei, Alec, and Olga
(the english-speaker). They inquired into our health, and I told them
Martin had just gotten sick last night. Olga suggested he drink vodka:
"Russian medicine: it's an antiseptic!" she cried with a big smile.
After they left, we took advantage of a
strong tailwind to make it
the 25km to Garyarse, where I hoped for a shop and somewhere warm for
Martin to rest. It was also the location of the turnoff to the Bogo La.
Garyarse is described by Victor Chan in
his "Tibet Handbook" as the
former summer capital of west Tibet. Apparently, very hard times had
fallen on Garyarse between its heyday and the present. We were greeted
by 20 mud buildings, three of which contained teahouses. We sat in one
for a couple of hours, drinking soda and daydreaming. A truck of
pilgrims came in, and threw hunks of yak meat onto the top of the
stove, filling the room with charred yak meat smell. The woman running
the place smiled grimly and poured incense on the stovetop to compete
with the smell. She offered us beds for 20Y each, but wouldn't give us
any fuel for the stove, so we declined and camped 100m away.
The next day, Martin was a bit better, so
we started up the valley
to the Bogo La. The road was well maintained, although it crossed the
river at the bottom of the valley two dozen times on the way up. We
asked at a nomad camp at 4700m if this was indeed the way to the Bogo
La. Yes, we were told, but you can't get a bike
up there - there's no
road. This was bad news, but we could see the road continued, so we
carried on. Bad weather moved in, and we crossed the freezing stream in
a driving snow, arriving at a high summer pasture at 5100m. The road
stopped, and there were a few tracks to 5200m, but that was it. The
weather cleared near dark, and we camped surrounded by high
snow-covered mountains all around.
The night was very cold (-23C) and clear,
and the morning was crisp
and sunny. We walked around the valley, walking past piles of mani
stones showing the way to the pass, but there was most definitely no
road. We had at least solved the mystery, and hopefully set the record
straight. The pass was just hidden behind a mountain, but we could
verify it was the right one with the TPC map and Martin's GPS. By the
time we were done documenting this, clouds were moving in, and we were
chased back down the valley by a snow storm, crossing ice, sometimes
thick, sometimes thin, freezing my gear cables, my rims, my brakes,
rendering the bike nearly unrideable. We made it down, avoiding the
storm, which snarled at the entrance to the valley but didn't push down
to the Gar River, had some tea at another teahouse, and pushed towards
Ali as far as we could get before the sun set.
We cycled to Hor Qu (Huer in Chinese), hoping to grab a breakfast and a few snacks before heading for a circle around Lake Manasarovar (Mapam Yumtso in Tibetan). The town is on the northeastern shore of the lake, a good jumping off point for the kora. I had passed through in 1999, finding a village with a few white tents selling snacks and sundries. I expected growth, but not to the degree I was greeted with this time. We ate at a restaurant across from the army installation there, labeled "Old Soldier Restaurant" in English, paying too much for our breakfast, which was a long time coming since we appeared to have woken up the proprietors at nearly 11 in the morning. A sheep was being led to a place where it was tied up just outside, and part way through the meal, various organs began making their way into the room, followed a few minutes later by an expertly butchered sheep carcass. It weighed in at 23kg, and cost 280Y (roughly US$45). Martin was visibly shaken by the fact that we had just been watching the sheep being led alive across the road, although he was the meat-eater, not me...
We went in search of a shop, and found a main street full of English signs (the prosaic "Hotel. Good Room." or the more poetic "High Mountain Hotel and Wineshop"), and noveau riche Chinese tourists, walking around like billboards with trendy outdoor Goretex jackets, cellphones, and digital cameras. There were a handful of Chinese establishments snaring these folks, while the Tibetan places turned a rather more slow business among pilgrims. We got fuel for our stoves, a few 761 bars (life support for the Tibetan cyclist) to eat, and headed out of town. At the edge of town, we met two backpackers, the first we had seen since Yushu, lolling on a sleeping mat, waiting for a hitch. We swapped stories for a quarter of an hour, finding out that there was a bus to Ali from Yecheng (incredible to one who hadn't seen that road since 1999, when a bus ride would have been nigh on impossible), there was a regular bus from Ali to Lhasa (also news), and that Kashgar - one of my favorite towns in all of China, having been stuck there, but happily, in 1999 for 17 days - had been ruined by the promised Han inmigration and the moving indoors of the famous and kaleidoscopic Sunday market. I later heard more from other tourists coming from Kashgar that it was "just another ugly Chinese city", booming with migrants from the east: this greatly saddened me, although I haven't seen the damage for myself. The coming of the railroad to Lhasa might be read as the harbinger of disaster, at least in the aesthetic and touristic sense...
We started off on the kora, finding a road
complete with bridges.
Tourists, safely stashed in their Land Cruisers, passed us circling the
lake counterclockwise (the wrong
way if you are Buddhist or Hindu, and
why else were they there, if not to play at being visitors to a sacred
place? But the demands of tightly packed schedules required an
exception to time-honored tradition...). We stopped at a gompa, one of
five ringing the lake, where three well-dressed Tibetans were kicking
stones in the front of the monastery entrance. One approached me, as I
pulled out a camera to take a picture of a stupa with a rusting engine
block leaning up against it, the lake and Gurla Mandata in the
background.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" He was pandering to me.
"It's ironic," I replied. He didn't get it.
"You are from?"
"The US."
"Ahhh, USA...Very good."
Always this refrain: it gets old, particularly given what is going on in the world right now. I just said "Sure."
"I am from Lhasa," he offered.
"I can see that. What are you doing here - a kora?" I knew this wasn't true.
"No, no, I am a guide. We have Swiss tourists with us. They are now in the monastery." I didn't bother to ask how exactly it was that he was guiding them when they were inside, poking around a monastery they probably knew next to nothing about, circling a lake they probably knew next to nothing about, while he was drinking a Coke in the parking lot.
We went in, poking around a monastery we knew next to nothing about. A monk in a yellow sweater came up to me and smiled. I asked his name in Tibetan (I had learned this from the nomads a few days before). His reply was unpronounceable for me. I smiled, asked the name of the monastery (Shiraling Gompa), and looked around. The place was small, with a shop selling Coke and Sprite, and two monks working on a motorbike engine. He followed me around as I took a photo of yak cheese drying in the sun, and then watched us as we cycled off.
The road left the lakeshore for a while,
and we came to the next
monastery (Trus Gho Gompa) near sundown. I stopped to take in the view
of the monastery in the foreground, with Mapam Yumtso and Kangrinboche
directly behind it. This place really took it all in. Three friendly
monks approached, and after I dismounted and laid down my bike to walk
around the grounds, they jumped on the bike and started racing around
all over the place. Martin's bike soon followed. They came back after 5
minutes of laughing and screaming, and requested that we lower the
seats. We obliged, and the fun continued. A few women looked quietly on
from the sidelines. I gave a 4 year old a ride on my back, and we all
eventually sat down by the stupa, panting and happy. They invited us to
stay in the pilgrims' accommodations. We took the room, with a window
framing the same view I had seen earlier, crawled
under the blankets,
ate a can of congee from Hor Qu, and fell asleep.
I slept well. The next morning, we packed, and cooked a breakfast on our stoves in the courtyard. A monk came out and invited us to have a look at the monastery itself, morning prayers having just finished. The place was very clean and well kept. There was a brass placard above the entrance engraved with the words "Trus Gho Monastery Democratic Management Committee". Just who were these people? Hopefully just the monks living there, but I couldn't be sure: I had my doubts. The interior had several different Boddhisattva likenesses behind glass, well preserved and delicately carved and painted. The walls were covered with silk that had the image of the Buddha repeated every few inches. One of the monks was chanting and sweeping the chamber; the abbot, an older man in an orange sweater, was saying prayers and lighting yak butter candles while singing in a monotone. I smiled at the monk sweeping the floor - he had been racing my bike all over the compound - but now he just nodded.
We left and packed, and found a monk to ask how much we owed. He waved off the suggestion, refusing money, so I took 20Y to the abbot, and gave it to him, indicating with a sweep of the hand that it was for the gompa. He thanked me quietly and went back to sweeping out the stone-floored courtyard.
The road around the southern lakeshore was
miserable, on account of
the rubble washing down over the aeons from Gurla Mandata. We
progressed slowly for the 12km along the southern shore, and then the
track improved, becoming smoother as we rounded the western shore. We
passed two pilgrims leading horses around: this didn't appear to be the
busy season. At a third monastery, set into a cliffside, we rested,
listening to the waters of the lake lapping against the stones of the
shore. The water was
crystal clear. I climbed up the steep slippery
path to the gompa to ask for water, and the monk there showed me
around. I asked how many monks lived there: Four, he said. I wondered
if that was the limit or if interest was flagging these days. The view
from the monastery courtyard, and the monks' room, was the sort of
thing that tourists would be two hundred bucks a night for: the lake,
the huge mountain covered in snow. Perfect for an alpine chalet...but
I'm sure some enterprising Chinese tourism authority has already
thought about this, and has well-laid plans to carry it out...
We finished the kora ending up back in Barga, where we dined at the same restaurant we had eaten at 2 days before (Martin swore by their egg and tomato dish), and headed for Darchen, the pilgrim town at the foot of Kailas/Kangrinboche, the starting point for the kora.
Darchen had grown in 5 years, although not by much. There was an ambitious new hotel at the start of the town, and a cellphone tower with an array of solar panels to power it, but it was still recognizeable. A Chinese woman called out to me as I entered the town, waving me over to her restaurant. I was easy: a good meal before the trek around the mountain sounded good. I had some pulled noodles (the couple was from Lanzhou), Martin had his standby egg and tomato, and they asked if we were staying the night in Darchen. It was our intention to start the kora that day, so we declined, but they had already brought their friend, a Tibetan woman, to offer her inexpensive guesthouse rooms to us. We thanked them, but said we would leave. Where to put the bikes? The question was answered when a pair of young Tibetans speaking Chinese said we could leave our bikes at their place. Great, so all that was left was the visa extension, which I had suggested we try to get in Darchen rather than Ali. The man from the restaurant led us over to the police. These were two Tibetans, one of whom I thought I recognized from 5 years before, when I had been issued a permit without a fine, quite a rare occurance. He eyed me for some time, before saying, "I know you from before." I was pretty surprised: it was one thing for me to remember him, quite another for him to remember me. It was indeed Mr. Pingzo, and his associate Mr. Banma. He gave us the permits, fining us this time ("I can't give it to you free a second time" he joked) filling out paperwork while we tried to decipher the sign on the wall describing "the rules for issuance of permits to aliens". It was unintelligible. There was a chart with fees for various visas, visa extensions, and permits: the three countries mentioned specifically were Russia, the Ukraine, and the US. Apparently everyone else didn't matter. And how many tourists were coming here from the Ukraine, I asked. Mr. Pingzo replied, None that I have seen, and I have been here 9 years. We shook hands, after we had collected our "bamboo slips" (this was written on the english sign), and I thanked him for the freebee the first time. He just smiled and ushered me out the door.
The kora is a long
walk, 53km including a nearly 1000m climb to a
pass at the Drolma La (5660m). We started late in the day, thinking to
get near the foot of the pass, making for a shortish walk the following
day (the pass is about halfway). The walk climbs to a point where you
can see the mountain, a place where Tibetans prostrate towards the peak
several times before carrying on. We passed a group - two men, a woman,
and a young boy - who were starting off as well. The men carried light
loads, the woman an oversized bundled that weighed her down, as well as
a large teapot for tea in her hand. This was unsurprising, given what I
had seen in Tibet (and all around the world for that matter). The
prostration point was littered with clothes, thrown off as offerings,
and shoes. Shoes?? What happens after this? A 50km walk over stones and
ice is no easy thing for shod feet; it's damn near impossible barefoot.
Or perhaps pilgrims carry an extra pair along as an offering. I've
never personally witnessed a pair of shoes being tossed to the wind, so
I can't say for sure what actually happens, but I can't help but
wonder. We walked along the valley that becomes a canyon, admiring
glimpses of the very dramatic west face of what is arguably the world's
holiest mountain (Mount Kailas has remained unclimbed: although it
would be technically possible, though difficult, this would be very
sacreligious, and, gratefully, mountaineers, usually men with big egos,
have eschewed the desire to conquer this peak). A motorbike, running
its way up to the tents that service pilgrims, and, more lucratively,
western tourists, passed me on the foot path, struggling its way over
the stones. His engine died every few seconds, and I push-started him
twice. We camped in the windy canyon, as the temperature plunged, next
to the stream flowing down to the plain.
The night was cold. The next morning, we
shuffled in the shade until
we turned the corner and started climbing the Drolma La. A group of
pilgrims was up ahead, moving quickly, but stopping to prostrate and
rub all of the appropriate stones along the way. They made me doff my
hat and place my forehead on a well-worn rock before I could pass.
Later, they made Martin crawl through a tiny cave under the rocks on
the way up. The snowline was two or three hundred meters below the pass
top, and the sky was clear. This time Kailas was beautiful: five years
before, it had been sleeting and raining, and I couldn't see
anything.
A Tibetan was waiting at the top with a Polaroid camera. When the
pilgrims made it to the top, he made a brisk trade in photos, charging
about a dollar each, which the pilgrims gladly parted with. The
entrepreneurial sprit at 5600m: I liked that, for some reason. Probably
because it was a single man with a camera, not a "Kodak Photo Location"
with Mickey and Donald in Anaheim or Orlando.
A western tour group had made the pass about the same time as I had, but didn't dally: a short whoop and then down the other side. They were still laboring down the pass an hour later after I had snacked and waited for Martin. Two women were waiting at the bottom, a Swiss and an American. We chatted for a while: the American asked whether I could picture Jimmy Swaggart walking around this mountain, much less prostrating his way around. I said I might see him do it in a helicopter, surveying the area for a possible site for a new home. We laughed, and she explained who Jimmy Swaggart was to the Swiss woman. Martin and I had a long way to go yet, if we were to make it back to Darchen by nightfall, so we wished them well and took off at a quick pace.
The rest of the kora I walked briskly,
keeping as company a Tibetan
from Nagqu named Tsawang who was making his first round of the
mountain. He explained, in Tibetan I didn't understand, the
significance of the various stones, chortens, prostration points along
the way. He was very devout. He told me he had made 20 koras
around Nam
Tso, one of Tibet's four holy lakes. Nam Tso is huge, the biggest lake
in Tibet, and the circumference is probably nearly 500km. That is a lot
of walking, 10,000km (6000 miles), especially for a guy who was 29
years old and herded yaks for a living. We made it to Darchen as
darkness was falling, and I left him in the dusty street where the
pilgrims congregate, heading for the home of the two young men who had
stored our bikes.
The house was warm and lit, full of family, who smiled and stared at me while I waited for Martin, who arrived 2 hours later after first attending the restaurant and having a meal. The place had an American flag, and two other American flag-styled cloths draped over the TV. It seemed very out of place, but these guys were young and hip, or as young and hip as one can be in a place like Darchen. One of them, Labang, worked at the Agricultural Bank of China in town, the other, Dawa, hawked tickets for Kailas tours to well-heeled tourists (I didn't understand how this worked, since presumeably these people already had a tour arranged, but he said business was good). Two grandmothers droned chants, spinning prayer wheels, and the two men went out drinking, while I continued to wait for Martin. Thugpa (noodle soup with yak meat) was served, and we were given places to sleep. Except for the loud entrance of the two intoxicated men in the wee hours, I slept like a rock.
We left the next day, but not before
stopping by the room of
Brahamchari Rajinder Swaroop ji, an Indian sadhu who had circled Mount
Kailas an incredible 155 times. He had a plan to create a non-profit
organization which would administer the Kailas and Manasarovar areas
for pilgrims and tourists from around the world. What he said about his
concern for the environment sounded sane: then he handed me a brochure
outlining his plan, and I began to think he was a bit off-kilter (many
people might say that right away about a man who lived in a cave for 6
years, had a vision, came to Mount Kailas, and spends every second day
walking around the mountain). It was elaborate. He had concluded a
Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese regarding the development
of the area. He had plans for planting flowers and herbs from the
Ayurvedic tradition around the mountain, alongside a path to be
constructed for pilgrims. There was also a plan for a helipad and
aerial koras of the place for "VIPs who are pressed for time but still
want the benefits of Holy Kailas". For those who don't know, flying a
helicopter at 5000m is unfeasible, or if attempted, pretty nearly
insane. It called for the Chinese to stop all development immediately,
and then grant all future development rights to his organization. There
wer nice letters written to the former prime minister of India, A.B.
Vajpayee, and form letters confirming receipt returned. A Certificate
of Appreciation had been given to Mr. Swaroop by the Chinese. It was a
little past realistic, I thought, but the fellow was nice, had a gentle
temperament, and asked me genuinely to try to start a Kailas society in
the US. "Well, we'll see about it..." I said as I left. Afterwards, we
had a breakfast at the Lanzhou restaurant, where the Chinese wished us
"tashidelek". I was greatly impressed by this: I had never before seen
a Chinese in Tibet make any effort at all to learn anything about
Tibetans, their language, or their culture. Most Chinese simply
regarded Tibet as a wild uninhabited piece of China, theirs for the
taking: perhaps these two were a turning point.
The Ghost of the Bogo La
We
headed north and west, trying to make good time to Ali, hoping to take
in the ruins of the Guge kingdom in the process, climbing the Bogo La
(rumored to be the highest road pass in the world) to get there. The
rest of the day was easy cycling, about 60km to Menshir, a good-sized
village half-way to the turnoff for the Bogo La. We pulled into the
town, seeing a few english signs ("Means double price," commented
Martin), and instead ducked into a pitch black Chinese restaurant with
no sign to eat la mian (the power came on later, and the proprietor put
in a techno video complete with pole dancers and bikini contests to
bring in the soldier crowd from the local army base). We camped about
200m from the town, and woke to a thin, wind-driven blanket of snow.
After finding the previous night's restaurant still closed, we wandered
the town in the snow, finding refuge in a Uighur restaurant, where a
Uighur trucker gave me, the US, and President Bush a big thumbs up. He
was apparently happy that Saddam Hussein was out of power, which I
couldn't argue with. The rest of it, "occupation good or bad", I didn't
get into, just warming my hands by the stove and staring at the floor.
We had a good breakfast and then pedalled
into the snow, climbing an
easy pass at 4850m and then descending to the Gar River valley, coming
to an army base at Songsha. There was a restaurant and shop there, both
full of bored soldiers from Sichuan and Gansu, and we had a warm meal
out of the cold wind. One guy, an officer, had been at this base for 10
years. 10 years in Songsha! It was incredible: there was nothing to the
place, beyond a concrete compound and probably 200 soldiers. The sun
was out when we finished, and we cycled a few km north before camping
on the stony plain.
Martin was groaning all night, sick with
food poisoning, and didn't
look good in the morning. A truck with some foreigners waving wildly
passed by as we were packing: a few minutes later, three people on
mountain bikes rode up, with no gear, no luggage. They were Russians
from Novosibirsk on a short one month holiday: Sergei, Alec, and Olga
(the english-speaker). They inquired into our health, and I told them
Martin had just gotten sick last night. Olga suggested he drink vodka:
"Russian medicine: it's an antiseptic!" she cried with a big smile.
After they left, we took advantage of a
strong tailwind to make it
the 25km to Garyarse, where I hoped for a shop and somewhere warm for
Martin to rest. It was also the location of the turnoff to the Bogo La.
Garyarse is described by Victor Chan in
his "Tibet Handbook" as the
former summer capital of west Tibet. Apparently, very hard times had
fallen on Garyarse between its heyday and the present. We were greeted
by 20 mud buildings, three of which contained teahouses. We sat in one
for a couple of hours, drinking soda and daydreaming. A truck of
pilgrims came in, and threw hunks of yak meat onto the top of the
stove, filling the room with charred yak meat smell. The woman running
the place smiled grimly and poured incense on the stovetop to compete
with the smell. She offered us beds for 20Y each, but wouldn't give us
any fuel for the stove, so we declined and camped 100m away.
The next day, Martin was a bit better, so
we started up the valley
to the Bogo La. The road was well maintained, although it crossed the
river at the bottom of the valley two dozen times on the way up. We
asked at a nomad camp at 4700m if this was indeed the way to the Bogo
La. Yes, we were told, but you can't get a bike
up there - there's no
road. This was bad news, but we could see the road continued, so we
carried on. Bad weather moved in, and we crossed the freezing stream in
a driving snow, arriving at a high summer pasture at 5100m. The road
stopped, and there were a few tracks to 5200m, but that was it. The
weather cleared near dark, and we camped surrounded by high
snow-covered mountains all around.
The night was very cold (-23C) and clear,
and the morning was crisp
and sunny. We walked around the valley, walking past piles of mani
stones showing the way to the pass, but there was most definitely no
road. We had at least solved the mystery, and hopefully set the record
straight. The pass was just hidden behind a mountain, but we could
verify it was the right one with the TPC map and Martin's GPS. By the
time we were done documenting this, clouds were moving in, and we were
chased back down the valley by a snow storm, crossing ice, sometimes
thick, sometimes thin, freezing my gear cables, my rims, my brakes,
rendering the bike nearly unrideable. We made it down, avoiding the
storm, which snarled at the entrance to the valley but didn't push down
to the Gar River, had some tea at another teahouse, and pushed towards
Ali as far as we could get before the sun set.
We headed north and west, trying to make good time to Ali, hoping to take in the ruins of the Guge kingdom in the process, climbing the Bogo La (rumored to be the highest road pass in the world) to get there. The rest of the day was easy cycling, about 60km to Menshir, a good-sized village half-way to the turnoff for the Bogo La. We pulled into the town, seeing a few english signs ("Means double price," commented Martin), and instead ducked into a pitch black Chinese restaurant with no sign to eat la mian (the power came on later, and the proprietor put in a techno video complete with pole dancers and bikini contests to bring in the soldier crowd from the local army base). We camped about 200m from the town, and woke to a thin, wind-driven blanket of snow. After finding the previous night's restaurant still closed, we wandered the town in the snow, finding refuge in a Uighur restaurant, where a Uighur trucker gave me, the US, and President Bush a big thumbs up. He was apparently happy that Saddam Hussein was out of power, which I couldn't argue with. The rest of it, "occupation good or bad", I didn't get into, just warming my hands by the stove and staring at the floor.
We had a good breakfast and then pedalled into the snow, climbing an easy pass at 4850m and then descending to the Gar River valley, coming to an army base at Songsha. There was a restaurant and shop there, both full of bored soldiers from Sichuan and Gansu, and we had a warm meal out of the cold wind. One guy, an officer, had been at this base for 10 years. 10 years in Songsha! It was incredible: there was nothing to the place, beyond a concrete compound and probably 200 soldiers. The sun was out when we finished, and we cycled a few km north before camping on the stony plain.
Martin was groaning all night, sick with food poisoning, and didn't look good in the morning. A truck with some foreigners waving wildly passed by as we were packing: a few minutes later, three people on mountain bikes rode up, with no gear, no luggage. They were Russians from Novosibirsk on a short one month holiday: Sergei, Alec, and Olga (the english-speaker). They inquired into our health, and I told them Martin had just gotten sick last night. Olga suggested he drink vodka: "Russian medicine: it's an antiseptic!" she cried with a big smile.
After they left, we took advantage of a strong tailwind to make it the 25km to Garyarse, where I hoped for a shop and somewhere warm for Martin to rest. It was also the location of the turnoff to the Bogo La.
Garyarse is described by Victor Chan in his "Tibet Handbook" as the former summer capital of west Tibet. Apparently, very hard times had fallen on Garyarse between its heyday and the present. We were greeted by 20 mud buildings, three of which contained teahouses. We sat in one for a couple of hours, drinking soda and daydreaming. A truck of pilgrims came in, and threw hunks of yak meat onto the top of the stove, filling the room with charred yak meat smell. The woman running the place smiled grimly and poured incense on the stovetop to compete with the smell. She offered us beds for 20Y each, but wouldn't give us any fuel for the stove, so we declined and camped 100m away.
The next day, Martin was a bit better, so
we started up the valley
to the Bogo La. The road was well maintained, although it crossed the
river at the bottom of the valley two dozen times on the way up. We
asked at a nomad camp at 4700m if this was indeed the way to the Bogo
La. Yes, we were told, but you can't get a bike
up there - there's no
road. This was bad news, but we could see the road continued, so we
carried on. Bad weather moved in, and we crossed the freezing stream in
a driving snow, arriving at a high summer pasture at 5100m. The road
stopped, and there were a few tracks to 5200m, but that was it. The
weather cleared near dark, and we camped surrounded by high
snow-covered mountains all around.
The night was very cold (-23C) and clear, and the morning was crisp and sunny. We walked around the valley, walking past piles of mani stones showing the way to the pass, but there was most definitely no road. We had at least solved the mystery, and hopefully set the record straight. The pass was just hidden behind a mountain, but we could verify it was the right one with the TPC map and Martin's GPS. By the time we were done documenting this, clouds were moving in, and we were chased back down the valley by a snow storm, crossing ice, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, freezing my gear cables, my rims, my brakes, rendering the bike nearly unrideable. We made it down, avoiding the storm, which snarled at the entrance to the valley but didn't push down to the Gar River, had some tea at another teahouse, and pushed towards Ali as far as we could get before the sun set.