I left Golmud late-ish in the day on December 16. The weather was fair, the wind wasn't bad - in fact, it was slightly behind me, and the road was nice and sealed.
Things went well for 30km: across the grey sandy plain approaching a perforation in the wall of mountains to the south, a finger of the Kunlun Mountains I had crossed in the opposite direction from Tibet six weeks earlier. I sat comfortably riding slowly up, watching numerous buses and trucks pass by to or from Lhasa: some of the buses were from points as far away as Lanzhou (Lanzhou to Lhasa is a long haul on a bus).
A collection of buildings approached after I passed under a railroad overpass: a few warehouses, a restaurant or two, a string of PetroChina gas stations at the far end. Trucks were queued up at a weigh station. I cycled in at about 2PM.
"Hey!!" A yelp from my right. I ignored it, knowing full-well that it might be the police. This tactic works sometimes, since it might be more hassle than it's worth to stop a foreigner for something minor, like "Um, can I see your passport?...OK, have a nice day."
I carried on and stopped at a gas station for a photo (the English translation of "China Petroleum" was "China Petrifies"). As I was putting away my camera, a taxi pulled up in a hurry, and a man in plain clothes gets out and flashes a badge.
"Hello." I smiled cheerily.
"Hello - your passport." I got my passport out, handed it over. "Where are you going?"
"Lhasa."
"You can't go there on a bicycle."
"Why? Is it too cold?" I knew the real answer, which was that they wanted lots of money for any foreigner to get to Tibet.
"No, the weather is fine here. You have to take a bus from Golmud."
"Ah, I see. But I would like to ride a bicycle there."
"It's not possible."
"Why not?"
Here he smiled: "Because you are rich. You come from the US, which is a very rich country. You have to go to the Tibet Travel Service and pay US$200 and then get on a bus" - another smile - " for the Chinese price: 200Y". This was less than $25, meaning there was a foreigner surcharge of $200 for the privilege of sitting on a bus for nearly 24 hours, assuming no breakdowns (which is a very generous assumption). It was outrageous.
"Well, yes, the US is a rich country, but then so again is China," I said. "And no one in the US pays $225 for a bus ride anywhere, if you want to look at it that way."
He just shrugged his shoulders. He was walking me back down to the checkpoint. "Go back to Golmud, buy a ticket, and perhaps I will see you tomorrow." He handed me my passport at the barrier, and indicated that I was to head back.
"Sure, OK. See you tomorrow." I even smiled and waved, since I knew this was not what I was going to do.
It was inconvenient, certainly, but not a show-stopper. I cycled back to the rail overpass. The newly constructed train with its embankment provided a nice cover if you walked along the other side, which was of course exactly what I did. The ride back to the rail line was about 3km, and then I had to walk back in loose soil. There was a hydroelectric dam along the river that cut through the mountains. I headed up to this, squeezed through a fence, walked along the dam reservoir (which was frozen on the surface) and rejoined the road, about 1km further south. I sat behind a rock outcropping - just in case - and had some snacks for lunch, and then moved on, saving myself US$200 in any case.
The road gained elevation steadily, and by the time I camped in the dark, I had come up about 650m from Golmud. The next morning I woke to cold, and cycled the remaining 5km into a town where I could get something warm to eat. I spoke with the woman running the restaurant I stopped in: she said she occasionally saw cyclists in better months, but not in December. She thought I was crazy; so did I.
A headwind came up, and for the next 12 days, didn't let up. I climbed into the Kunlun, and only 55km later into the day, I stopped in a cold ice drizzle at a Muslim restaurant. The place was run by a Sala couple, from an ethnic group that had migrated from Central Asia a couple of hundred years before and now resided primarily in the Qinghai-Gansu border region. A local holy man came by, and we chatted amicably about several things. I stumbled over a few Arabic characters, as he smiled at my very rusty recollection of written Arabic. I slept on a brick bed with a coal fire underneath it, cozy in an otherwise drafty and cold restaurant. I heard the azan (call to prayer) sometime in the predawm - the first time I had ever heard it in China. The family I was staying with, who ran the place, fixed up a clay-pot soup for breakfast. The woman, in a black Hui headscarf, was haggard and tired. The kids moaned in bed when prodded to wake up. The man, to whom I had spoken with at length the night before, suddenly didn't trust my Chinese when I asked how much I owed him. He pulled out a calculator, punched in a few numbers, and then handed it over: the display said 67 (the calculator, I guessed, conferred some legitimacy on the final tally). I raised my eyebrows: this was far too much. I wasn't in the mood to argue, and I figured karma would either pay he or I back, so I simply said "Look, I know you are charging me far too much, but I don't want to argue. You know its dishonest," and gave him the money. His face sank, the woman froze, but there was no further movement. I left, not feeling really much of anything, just eager to get over the pass and onto the Tibetan plateau again.
The wind was miserable. It took me several hours to climb 32km to the summit of the Kunlun Shankou (Pass), which was just below 4800m. The new train line snaked back and forth across the gorge on the way up. At the top, prayer flags flapped violently in the wind. I was re-entering Tibet.
I came down the other side and stopped in a small truckstop, half-Tibetan, half-Hui. I did what any sensible person would do: ate in the Hui restaurant, and slept with the Tibetans. The Tibetan that took me over to the hostel was a very friendly man by the name of Namu Jieben. We sat in the gathering dark next to a warm coal stove and talked in Chinese about my trip, about the ride in front of me to Lhasa, about the US. He put a large bucket of coal in my room, stoked the stove, and after I had gotten in bed, came back to make sure I was warm and tossed another 3 blankets on top of me.
The enormous guard dogs kept me from going to wake anyone in the morning for an hour or so. Each time I moved, they strained at the end of their chains and barked until they were hoarse, which took quite a while. Finally, Namu emerged, held one back, and let me into his room. He asked if I was hungry. I had assumed I would go back to the Hui restaurant, but he offered to cook up some breakfast, so I sat while he prepared fried rice. He seemed unsure over the stove, hesitating after each move, pausing over salt, then tipping over bowls and cups of tea as he remembered he wanted to add more oil. The end result was tasty. He went outside and retrieved two dirty bowls: "Gou chi" he said ("Dog food"). He spent as much time preparing something for the dogs to eat as for our breakfast, boiling some meat, adding the rest of the leftover rice, adding flour to make a white gruel. It touched me that someone would actually cook something for a dog, particularly those half mad mastiffs outside. I liked this guy quite a bit: he washed afterwards and slicked back his hair. He was dressed in loosely hanging pants, and a checkered flannel that made him look something like a lumberjack. As I left, he told me to stop in at Kekexilik to get some hot water, about 50km down the road.
The wind was nearly silent as I left, and I made the ranger station at Kekexilik in slightly over 2 hours. There was a watchtower, and barbed-wire fencing ran out into the plain to the west. Several late model cars were parked in front of what was essentially a trailer. I asked one of the well-dressed men out front if I could get some water here. He went to go see. Another man, similarly well-dressed urged me to come into the room.
There was some sort of event going on. Cake on the table, bottles of water and soda, and lots of people smiling and taking pictures. Someone handed me a pen and asked me to sign the banner on the wall. I was asked the usual. "Oohs" and "aahs" were murmured around the room. They asked me to pose with the ranger and a VIP, holding a certificate or check of some kind - a donation to the ranger station, I gathered. Around the room were several macabre pictures of slaughtered and beheaded wildlife, primarily the endangered chiru I had seen in western Tibet and on the Changtang. There was a series depicting the successful apprehension of poachers. They stood next to the skins they had tried to make off with, a guard pointing a rifle at them. There were strips over their eyes, making them anonymous. These men were likely dead by now: the penalty for poaching chiru in China is death. I turned around and watched the back-slapping and laughter, feeling uneasy. More photos followed, most with me in them. Perhaps a Westerner in the photo added some pizazz to the cause. All I wanted was boiled water.
As they left, the VIPs gave me a six-pack of Red Bull "Vitamin Drink". I drank them all that day, since I knew they would freeze. The stuff has more caffeine than coffee, I think, because I couldn't sleep that night after pulling into Wudolian, a Hui truckstop town with a hostel that was ordered around a trash-filled lot, but that had rooms that were very clean and painted an excruciatingly bright white, nearly antiseptic.
The following days to the southern edge of the plain at
the Tanggula
Shankou were prolonged suffering. The daytime highs were rarely above
-5C, and nights were down to -30C. The wind was incessant. I had to
cycle a half (or quarter, nearly) day into Toutouhe, a town on a branch
of the upper Yangtze River, which rose to the west on the plateau near
here. The wind was incredible, blowing sand, grit, ice from drifted
snow into my face, and making it impossible to stay on the bike, or at
any rate impossible to cycle in a straight line, which put me in peril
of the trucks which continued to cycle in the nearly gale-force winds,
although they were very high-profile and the visibility had dropped to
about 100m. At the town (Toutouhe), I called it quits, got a dismal
room in a
truckstop hostel, had something to eat, and went to sleep early, hoping
the next day would dawn better.
Two truckers were put into my room late at night, staggering in, one
flopping on the bed next to mine. He gurgled, moaned, shifted around
under the blankets, his
head buried in
there somewhere. At some point
he begain to belch and vomit loudly. This went on periodically for some
time. His friend was kind enough to wipe the vomit off of the side of
his face and try to keep the sheets somewhat clean as his dinner ended
up on the floor. The room reeked. In the morning I asked his friend if
the guy had altitude sickness. "No, he just drank too much." I managed
a wry smile, gathered my things, and checked out.
I spent a last night on the high plateau in the last settlement before the Tanggula Shankou and the border into the Tibet Autonomous Region, in the aptly-named town of Tanggula. I found a restaurant/hostel, where a man with taut skin that was still wrinkled around the neck over his turtleneck served me mutton soup and rice without saying a word. I was tired and asked about a bed. He indicated a room beyond the kitchen: again no words. I fell asleep in the bed, the odor of diesel from the generator permeating the sheets and blankets. In the morning, I got up, figuring to ask for fried rice. The proprietor wasn't up, so I wandered the place looking for a shop or restaurant. Nothing was open, even though the sun was out all the way, and it wasn't particularly early to rise. Eventually a Hui opened a tea house, and I had instant noodles and some steamed bread. I returned to the hostel, where the man was just rising. He asked if I had had something to eat. I said, yes, paid him for the mutton soup and the bed, and left into the sun: we had had about 20 words between us.
A day and a half later, I was in Amdo, after struggling down from
the Tanggula Shankou into the TAR in a hard-driven snow, and camping a
very cold night at high altitude between the Tanggula and another only
slightly lower pass, breaking ice for water in the evening. When I
arrived in Amdo, the wind was howling, the 
temperature had plummeted,
and my face was frozen stiff. I found a restaurant, thawed out, and
quit a couple of hours early for the day, figuring on getting a hotel
room. I asked around and was directed to a dilapidated 3 storey
building across from some billiards tables, which, remarkably, had a
few patrons trying to play a game in the absolutely frigid temperatures
and wind (it was about -10C and a very stiff wind whipped through the
town). A Tibetan woman sat in an office warming herself by a yak dung
stove. A room could be had for 30Y, or 50Y if I wanted a room with a
large bag of yak dung to keep myself warm. I passed on the dung,
figuring I had camped and could handle a cold room. The room was
freezing, hardly warmer than my tent. At 4AM, a horrendous cracking
sound woke me: it sounded like someone was going to fall through the
ceiling, or was trying to tear their way through the wall to my side.
The sound persisted. I turned on the light. The floor, with red
faux-marble tiles laid on top of it, was buckling from the cold,
causing the noise. I checked my watch for the temperature: -15C. I was
indoors, and my room was -15C. I laughed, burrowed down under the
covers, my sleeping bag, and my army coat - all of which I had piled on
top of me, and tried to ignore the sound of the floor buckling
underneath me.
The ride to Nagqu was better, as I descended towards Lhasa, and the
weather improved slightly. I camped about 40km out of town, in exactly
the same spot that I
had camped with
Martin as we left Nagqu for the
west in mid-September. I stopped in Nagqu for a lunch and a quick check
of my email (in a net cafe where the staff were struggling with the
chimney of their yak dung stove, which was spewing smoke into the room
which I had to peer through to see the monitor. When I left the city in
the mid afternoon, the wind had picked up again, and I struggled for
the next day and a half.
I was sick of the wind, and the sky was overcast. I was ready to
throw in the towel and try to flag a ride to Lhasa, 250km away, when I
came upon two groups of 
prostrators. One of
them called me over for
lunch. While I had tsampa and tea, and shared the candy I had with
them, I found out they had
started from a
small place southeast of
Xining, near the Gansu border and not far from Lanzhou. How long had
they been going like this - two steps and then laying themselves out on
the road completely prostrated? "Seven months, and about another month
and a half before we get to Lhasa". This is always stunning to hear,
even if you know people do this: scraping the ground for 8 1/2 months
to make one's way to a holy place. There isn't anything in the US, or
the western world, that I can think of that compares. The devotion was
so complete, I felt I had to go on. What was another 2 or 2 1/2 days
into the wind in the face of this display of piety?
That night I stayed in a Tibetan teahouse, hosted by a monk from a
local monastery who chanted, seemingly without taking a breath for over
an hour, completely 
mesmerizing me, and
impressing even the locals. The
following day, I carried on south through a snow-blanketed valley, past
more prostrators, and then down into much warmer weather.
The ride into Lhasa was pleasant, although I put in two long days to make it there for New Year's Eve. The road passed fallow fields, indicating heavy cultivation in non-winter months, lying next to nice tidy whitewashed Tibetan settlements. Lhasa itself sprawls out along a river for many kilometers. The western end of town was indistinguishable from a Chinese city. I thought to myself: where are the Tibetans? Chinese crowded fancy restaurants and boutiques, men in leather jackets talked loudly into cellphones, new cars plied the roads driving like jerks. I was dismayed: this was a radical change from what I had seen in 1999.
The eastern end of the city was slightly more sedate, with Tibetans
peopling the sidewalks and roads. The Potala was dark in the night -
the Chinese had had the grace not to floodlight the place as they do
with any other monument or attraction. Fireworks crackled behind me,
celebrating a New Year that was more or less meaningless to either
Chinese or Tibetans. I found the Barkhor, and the guesthouse I had
stayed at in 1999, found it still there, and just as cozy. I checked
in, took a shower, and had ideas of trying to stay up for the New Year,
for....no reason, really. I gave in to sleep, and was unconscious well
before the beginning of 2005. And so another year passes...
Lhasa to Kathmandu: A Long Unedited, Rambling Affair
(I
wrote this as an email to several people, in a free-ranging style,
which, as is usual for me, didn't follow the rules of punctuation,
capitalization, or good sense. It turned out to be rather long, so I am
posting it here, to be edited, refined, deleted, whatever, at a later
date...)
lhasa was good, in the sense that i was able to rest, spend too much
on foreign good, and have a wander around on something other than a
bicycle. it was bad in the sense that the place is being overrun by
chinese migrants, is being paved over and built up with shopping malls
and expensive restaurants catering almost exclusively to han chinese,
leaving the tibetans confined to their small piece of a rapidly
expanding city. i have an image in my head of the pilgrims who have
troubled themselves to make their way to lhasa - the trip of a lifetime
for some - staring in amazement at temples to capitalism in communist
china ("communism with 'Chinese characteristics'" is the official
explanation for the free - and massively corrupt - market in china,
meaning that a completely stifling political environment is still alive
and well in the middle kingdom), clutching a color brochure advertising
"Sale!" in english (a language they were even less likely to read than
chinese) for some useless household items they have no hope of
affording. and of course the police. police everywhere, in uniform or
plain clothes, checking out pilgrims, checking out monks, checking out
foreign tourists. they have little tables all around the jokhang
circuit, sipping tea and eyeing the devout as they circumambulate
tibet's holiest temple. they stand in a cluster in the middle of the
barkhor square (just outside the temple). there are no fewer than 3
police offices within a stones throw of the wall that the pilgrims
prostrate at, one with the english title "barkhor square community
service center", another called the "jokhang control office". if you
get a tibetan to talk to you frankly, they will say that there are
police posing as monks inside the temples. there are supposedly cameras
watching the whole tibetan "quarter" (i wouldnt say that it constitutes
even a quarter of the city anymore), which i have no reason to doubt.
they station themselves next to sacred hearths where juniper and barley
are burnt, scowling out from under their blue hats.
i had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a tibetan artist,
who walked me around a few smaller monasteries, explained a few things,
talked quietly about 
chinese policies.
"they destroyed almost
everything in their cultural revolution, and now they take is away from
us to sell as a tourist attraction, a commodity". and we - the tourists
- keep coming, by the thousands, giving our money to government run
tourist sites. it was depressing. but i do have confidence in the
tibetan people, though their whole culture may one day be only
sustained in diaspora communities. the railroad is coming, and most of
them know what this means. their spirit is incredible, and they are
without a dounbt the
most sincerely
religious people i have ever
encountered. i tend to extreme scepticism regarding religion,
particularly as practiced in the West, but here, confronted with
something so genuine, it merely put me at ease. there is no distinction
between "religion" and "everyday life": it is a seamless whole, which
is beautiful to see, to hear, to feel. this is what cannot be crushed
under the boot, either of the police, the military, or consumerism. and
it is gentle, tolerant, holistic, not revelatory or messianic: there is
no "hard sell". they are indifferent to yours, or anyone else's,
religion, or lack thereof: they are undisturbed by whether your sould
goes anywhere, stays put, or doesnt exist. theirs is unshakeable.
and lhasa was the first place i was able to relax with
some
foreigners, speak a bit (actually too much, for those who know me...)
of english, check up on news, be a bit lazy. i did visit one government
site, the drepung monastery, which was enormous and relatively full of
pilgrims. i was reticent to contribute to government coffers: as if
anticipating me, there was a sign at the ticket window "all entrance
fee go to
maintenance of
monastery, thus same as donation". i chuckled,
borrowed tara's student card, and knocked about 20% off of my
admission.
i left lhasa after dragging my feet, enjoying a bed a day longer
than i had planned. the ride to yamdrok yumtso (one of tibets holy
lakes) was pleasant, and the weather south from lhasa was considerably
warmer than that in amdo (ie qinghai province and the golmud highway).
a 
long climb rewarded me with a view of the lake, very blue
against the
brown hillsides of the mountains dropping down to its shore, and a few
distant snow clad peaks. i was also rewarded with a view of the chinese
hydropower project sucking water from the lake at 4500m, and taking
advantage of physics, collecting energy on the way down to 3700m.
unfortunately the lake has no significant inlet, so this is a one way
ticket, and the lake cant be replenished naturally. "we'll fix that
later", the chinese say...and this is one of 4 holy lakes in tibet?
lest we become too righteously indignant, i should mention that most of
us could very easily cast our critical eyes homeward to find the same
errors taking place right now.
i met four foreigners on the way to the nepali border, all on the
same day. a landcruiser drove by, with a head out the window and a
friendly "jeff!", from didian and 
anne-claude, a
french pair i met in
lhasa several days earlier. they stopped, we chatted, discussed the
pros and cons of travel by different modes, and they were extremely
generous (tres
genereux) in their offer to cram my bicycle and me along with it into
their truck to nepal. i politely declined, privately thinking they had
better run before i change my mind, but in the end accepted a few
chocolate bars...we promised to meet up in kathmandu, assuming i could
make it there within some reasonable period of time. an hour or so
later, i met two fellows with trekking packs sauntering down the pass i
was climbing. these turned out to be an argentine and an indian, 2
months into a 9 month walk from kathmandu to mt. kailas, via lhasa. we
chatted for 20 or 30 minutes, they shifting their weight from the packs
on their backs, i wishing they would put the packs down to keep me from
feeling i was detaining them, traded news about roads, distances, the
political and security situation in nepal, and so on.
from here to gyantse was no great challenge. the pass was beautiful,
the glaciated mountain perfect in the deep blue sky of nearly 5000m,
brown against white against
grey agains blue.
and then a nice roll down
that afternoon and the next morning, past farms, whitewashed houses,
pony carts. the dzong
(castle) of
gyantse was visible from 15km away,
perched on a large outcropping over the town and surrounding valley. i
had a look around, arriving too late for a tour of the pulchoi
monastery there and its stupa, so i climbed the castle, along a path
which was perhaps also designated as a toilet, with human dung all
along it, and a disinterested ticket officer knitting, so i just walked
up to the top and surveyed the valley. unfortunately, the weather had
turned cold and cloudy, so i found a room at the "gyantse fur niture
(sic) factory hotel" and settled it, watching boys and men plane wood
for cabinets and beds, tibetan-style. it was the sort of place where
you probably arent supposed to stay as a foreigner, but there is no
record, no examination of a passport, just 20 yuan passed to the
smiling woman and a room with two beds, a tv, and a washbasin.
i poked around the monastery the following morning, which was quite
impressive. the stupa had small alcoves all along its perimeter with
buddhas, pilgrims shoving i
nto them and shoving
back out. in the main
monastery, the carvings were ornate and fantastic wood pieces, showing
various manifestations
of the buddha,
present, past, future, angry,
woman, and so on. old women, already hunched over, squeezed underneath
walls stacked with ancient mouldering sutras to cleanse sin, stooping
sometimes as low as a meter or less to do so. and always the drone of a
chant in the semidark
.
that afternoon i headed south, hoping to take an alternate route to
the nepali border, having been warned away from stone throwing kids and
agressive beggars. the 
road was good, paved
even, for 45km, winding up
a valley past farms, through a rocky gorge, past hillsides coated with
splinters of shale shining in a warm sun. it was all looking good as
the road changed to dirt and i started to climb toward a pass near the
indian border, when i saw a barrier down along the road. i debated
whether to walk around it, or to just run straight in and see what
happened. since i had no knowledge of it, i just went straight in. an
army youth stopped me and asked for my passport. this wasnt a police
checkpoint, but a military one, and it was probably for the better i
didnt attempt to run it. while waiting, i watched young guys vault
concrete blocks and hide behind trees before raising and aiming rifles.
a few shots were fired in the exercise. so this place was serious. the
soldiers inspected even donkey carts, and held trucks for half an hour
and more. in the end, as i had guessed almost immediately, i was turned
around: "go to shigatse", the main friendship highway to nepal. i
sighed and headed off to shigatse, tibet's second city.
the place had grown since 1999, particularly on the outskirts, and
it had the boutiques along the main street. the area around the
monastery (tashilunpo monastery, seat of the panchen lama) had been
"revitalized", meaning it was that boring sort of strip with clean
vendors and shops, sterile in the bad sort of way. all the shops had
english signs, which are always fun to read in china. there was a hair
salon entitled simply "beauty": a promise? a threat? an arrogant
statement? my hotel wasnt far away, a rambling place called the
shambala tibet hotel. it was a dump, like most. the staff were bundled
up next to a yak dung stove when i came in, sipping, or drinking,
depending, chang - tibetan barley beer. they were convivial, and soon
were dancing and singing to the man's tibetan banjo, recording
themselves into an old tape player and giggling at the results, which i
thought actually sounded pretty good. i stopped in at a chinese
restaurant, where a nice sichuanese prepared fried noodles for 4Y
(about half a dollar), and we talked about chengdu, kunming (his most
recent stopover - for 10 years), and shigatse. how did he like it here?
he was slow to answer..."its fine". he had been in shigatse 2 1/2
months, a very recent migrant. i asked why he came. "for money...what
else would you do here?" a nice straight answer. i liked him, like i
like almost every chinese i met, but i worried again about tibet's
future, or if it had one. was there a government subsidy. "a small one,
related to taxes" he told me. no cash subsidy, but i guess it had been
enough. i almost told the guy that he wasnt charging the proper tibetan
price for chinese food, since 4Y was much more of an eastern price for
the food, not the 7 or 8Y one typically paid in tibet, but i figured he
had time to learn, or fail and return to chengdu (which was where the
vast majority of han in tibet come from).
here lies the problem: can you blame the poor chinese migrants, who
are coming from sichuan, one of the most densely populated places in
the world, poor, and told that money is easy if only you will go west,
the place is virtually uninhabited, or only by savages? didnt something
similar happen in the US: "go west, young man, and find yourself" and
free land to the white people who were willing to homestead the
"frontier"? meanwhile the indigenous population is overrun, often
brutally and murderously (tibet in the 1950s and 1960s lost perhaps as
many as 1 million people, the american frontier in the 19th century
cost the native americans on the order of 5 to 10 million), by a greedy
government. and so history repeats itself. can you hate the irish
immigrant, the russian, the pole, who came to the US fleeing poverty,
perhaps repression, and gained something at the cost of a slaughter
they were ignorant of, likely didnt grasp or understand? there is a
racist ideology that has to operate in both cases, bred in ignorance,
and the conscious product of greedy men running the show, spreading it
on down the line. of course there is individual culpability and
responsibility, but the difficulty for me is to reconcile the warm
feelings i have for the chinese people now living in tibet, and the
cultural destruction it portends.
from shigatse the road was quite good to lhatse, a much smaller town
about halfway from lhasa to the nepali border. there is a checkpoint
outside of lhatse, so after grabbing a lunch, i headed out, walked
around it into the surrounding fields, and rejoined my road, now
heading south toward the gyaltso la and nepal. the pass climb was
miserably windy, and the next morning it took me half the day to make
20km to the top, forced to walk the final 4km since i couldnt ride in
the wind. this was the
highest point on
the friendship highway: one
more and downhill to nepal. i struggled all afternoon to make the
remaining 50km to the junction town near shegar, passing the signs for
the qomolangma nature reserve ("qomolangma" is the tibetan name for mt
everest, "sagarmatha" on the nepali side), and catching a very fleeting
glimpse of the worlds highest peak from the pass, well over 200km away.
the wind was incredibly strong down the valley, hurling pebbles at me
as it raked the ground, stirring up huge clouds of dust as it stopped
me dead in my tracks, bent over, eyes closed,
struggling sometimes even to stand. whatever one may say, winter is
probably not the ideal time to travel southward on the friendship
highway, at least by bicycle. that night, with another checkpoint to
run, i lingered in baibo, a small junction with a few tourist hotels, a
gas station, and several "chengdu restaurant"s, testifying to the place
where the han come from. i stopped in a hui muslim restaurant, and
ordered gan ben (a plate of noodles with a vegetable sauce - no meat
since i asked for it "su de" ie vegetarian).
a young guy said "hello". i responded, and so began a very
interesting talk. the man was tibetan, from northeastern qinghai (the
tibetan region of amdo), here to help a friend. as the conversation
progressed, it turned out he was helping a friend escape to nepal.
this, he said, was often the starting point for tibetans fleeing china
for nepal, the beginning of a 20 or 30 day trek over the himalaya. he
said he was stuck here now for 3 days, waiting to find a driver to take
him to shigatse. i had seen a bus heading there just outside the
restaurant. "why not that one?" i asked.
the reason was that the police usually asked passengers in this part
of tibet for their identity papers, and if you came from northern or
eastern tibet, you could very well land in jail, since ostensibly the
reason you were here was to enter or (more likely) leave china via
nepal. so here he was, looking for a ride, staying in a hui restaurant
because the police raid the tibetan restaurants, but not the chinese.
the hui were watching us intently, ignorant of our conversation's
topic. i asked if he was worried these people might inform the police.
he was dismissive: "they are ignorant, they only want the money". i
asked the hui where they were from. it turned out they were from linxia
district in gansu, which i had cycled through on my first day cycling
in august. the place had been deeply impoverished, and oddly, i had
seen an english language program on the area on the tv in shigatse a
few days before, describing the crushing poverty of the region. once
again, the push and pull of emotions,
sympathies. it seems easy to say something without entering on the
human scale, but things are blurry in real life.
i ran the checkpoint by moonlight, skating easily under the barrier
as laughter floated out from the room the guards were stationed in. i
had lunch the next day at "the ritz" (really! - written in english and
everything), a tibetan tea house at the roadside where i had what was
hopefully my last bowl of thugpa (yak meat stew) and the woman giggle
each time she said "good" with a smile. i climbed the toward the lalung
la, the final pass in tibet before the downhill to nepal, but stopped
some ways 
short of the top,
seeing inclement weather on the horizon and
it being relatively late anyway. the next morning i finished the climb
- i had only been 5km from the pass, which was flat - in the snow. the
southern side became a giant snowfield, and soon i couldnt see much in
the snowfall. by the time i reached nyalam, the last town before the
border, a thick blanket of snow covered the road and everything else. i
stopped for lunch, and as i set out, even the trucks equipped with snow
chains were stopped. i was alone on the road, 10cm deep in snow and
growing, with drifts driven by the wind thighdeep as i plunged into
them and had to put my feet down. the wind howled, and my eyes squinted
as i plowed on into the whiteout. this was the largest descent on a
road in the world, and i was doing it in a blizzard, unable to see what
i had been looking forward to: the transition from the plateau, high
and dry, to the subtropics. night
fell, and i pressed on, partly to avoid a last police
checkpoint, and
partly because my visa expired the next day. i had little choice in the
matter. but when i stopped, i could tell things were getting warmer as
i dropped down a small canyon which became soon a giant gap in the
mountains, with the river dropping away far beyond sight. all around me
was the sound of water melting, running, pouring, jumping. and in the
very dim light, i could make out trees, something that had been absent
from my presence, save for towns, for a very long time. the snow
stopped, and then the rain stopped, and a half moon came out from the
clouds overhead. the dim blue light, the rushing of water, the smell of
green: in some ways i didnt mind greeting the subcontinent like this,
mostly deprived of sight, but full of the other senses. mud caked my
feet, my legs, my bicycle, ground my brakes down. finally, the lights
of zhangmu, the border town, ran down the hillside, a very verticle
settlement ranging several hundred meters down along the mountain,
switchbacking to another country, another culture.
i managed to get two flats 1km from the town, one in each tire, so i
walked the last bit, finding a hui restaurant to sleep in (heeding my
friend's advice from two nights before). i had my last chinese muslim
meal, tossed out some garbage, and went to sleep on a pallet in the
back.
the next morning i crossed the border. zhangmu was already a mix,
with over half of the establishments appearing to be nepali, trucks
lining the streets definitely not chinese, the rounded sounds of the
subcontinent contrasting with the more staccato chinese. it was snowing
in zhangmu, and raining - pouring - in nepal. i wandered into the
nepali immigration office, which was a cold concrete block with a
handpainted sign, in marked contrast to the chinese post, which had
die-cut signs and golden
characters set into the stone, a granite marker telling "the story of
the friendship bridge". the officer was wearing a track suit and a fake
nike wool cap. he said it was cold; i said it was relatively warm for
me...the visa was a sticker cut from a page with scissors. i asked
where i might change money, and he offered to change some for me. i had
no idea of the rate, so i just changed a bit of chinese money (and
later found he had actually given me a very reasonable rate). the road
was almost a running river, stoney and muddy. 25 year old toyota
two-door cars plied the road intermittently. people walked around in
flip-flops, wrapped in saris. banana palms clung to cliffs over the
river. i could smell masala from every small cafe i passed. the place
looked very much like southern yunnan province in china, or the
northern parts of laos or interior vietnam. further down, terraces
scaled to impossible heights. my shiter cable broke in the downpour,
something that had never happened to me before. i shrugged, sheltered
under a cliff overhand, and pulled out a spare, glad i had one. i
carried on, through several military checkpoints (i was never stopped,
just a smile and a wave), reminding me that i knew there was an armed
rebellion of some sort carrying on nearby.
i reached blacktop, and a bit further down reached a town. i stopped
at the opposite edge to check on my map where i was in relationship to
kathmandu, my 
journey's end. a man
approached me and asked if i wanted
to stay at his guesthouse. i asked how far it was to kathmandu, and
found it was about 80km, probably too far to make it that afternoon. so
i accepted his invitation. his name was rajinder, and he spoke
wonderful english, which was good for me, since i spoke not a word of
nepali. we stayed up into the night discussing the situation in nepal,
the tourist trade, the mores of our respective societies, and food.
i slept well, and was ready for the final ride into kathmandu. the
rain had stopped, though it was a bit cool, and i rode in the morning
sun, happy to be somewhere 
well above freezing,
looking into pastures
at water buffalo, or into houses at chickens, passing stalls selling
bananas, milk tea, sweets. distinctly not chinese. the place was
considerably poorer than china, everything seemed old, crumbling,
rusting, but this is also a result of the tropical weather, which which
china, and tibet particularly, doesnt have to contend. i began the
climb to the kathmandu valley, after passing monkeys in trees and men
breaking stones on the beach of the now large river i was following.
my tube was leaking slowly, so i stopped to patch it for the 13th
time (literally). when this was done, i inflated the tire, and it
exploded, unmendable. my ride was over. i grinned to myself: after all
of this struggle, after holding together the bike and its parts (and
neglecting more serious maintenance when i should have attended to it),
i was going to take a bus into kathmandu. i shrugged, walked back to
the nearest village 10 minutes away,
and was almost
immediately picked
up by a passing bus. i and my bicycle were taken up top, and i enjoyed
the scenery the rest of the way on the luggage rack, 4m above the
road's surface, as we climbed into the valley kathmandu lies in.
the pollution, in spite of the recent rain, was horrible. cows and
chickens vied with vehicles and pedestrians on the road. everything
looked like it was ready to crumble. the government ministries looked
disheveled, untended. weeds, green, grew everywhere. there was washing
hanging from a window of the supreme court of nepal. the pavement was
cracked, broken, uneven. large muddy ditches lay in front of
presumeably middle-class homes. the airport was in the middle of the
city. NGOs plied the streets in their new landcruisers. men without
legs craned their heads about on the sidewalk to beg alms. there was
energy, though it was lethargic, bundled up due to the (relative) cold.
i got down from the bus, and asked directions for "thamel", the only
placename i knew in kathmandu, and the main tourist district. it was
easy enough to find, since the bus driver assumed correctly that that
was where i was going. i was unprepared for what waited for me: a
district that went on and on, english signs everywhere,
hotels, shops,
internet cafes, men asking if i wanted hash, marijuana, herion -
"brother?". i walked one street and just decided it was hopeless to
distinguish between them. i chose lhasa guesthouse, thinking i would
like to support the tibetan expat community as part of a parting with
tibet. the folks were tibetan, and the room was cheap, and had running
water, so the deal was made.
i washed off 2 weeks of grit, cold, snow, sweat, and had a look
around. rickshaws pestered, more offers of drugs, and few white faces.
the place was on hold, 
waiting for the
tourists that werent coming.
over the last few days i have discussed and read up on the situation in
nepal, which is quite volatile and unlikely to get better. the maoists
rebels control an entire swath of nepal in the west near the indian
border (where the
movement began),
and there is continuous fighting
along several fronts with the security forces. both sides kill
civilians consistently. boys and girls are pressed into service and
then killed by either side. the country's economy, never robust, is
falling apart, the fault of a massively corrupt government where the
king disbanded parliament years
ago, the military smuggles across the indian border, the us supplies
the security forces with weapons that they immediately lose when the
maoists overrun their outposts, there are bandh's (general strikes)
called in some part of the country, or several, every day. it is an
interesting situation to look at, but tragic for the people. it is a
place where the king has the
support of 6% of
the population, and the
maoists 14% (their program most closely resembles that of the sendero
luminoso, "the shining path", of peru, another mountainous, desperately
poor country with a military dictatorship, wracked by civil war for two
decades where the peasants are caught in the crossfire, and western
"democracies" prop up a dictatorship which arbitrarily detains and
executes people regularly).
it was a good trip, a long one, and one that
continually (last paragraph notwithstanding) affirmed my faith in
people, even in the face of the ugly things we manage to do to one
another.
(I wrote this as an email to several people, in a free-ranging style, which, as is usual for me, didn't follow the rules of punctuation, capitalization, or good sense. It turned out to be rather long, so I am posting it here, to be edited, refined, deleted, whatever, at a later date...)
lhasa was good, in the sense that i was able to rest, spend too much on foreign good, and have a wander around on something other than a bicycle. it was bad in the sense that the place is being overrun by chinese migrants, is being paved over and built up with shopping malls and expensive restaurants catering almost exclusively to han chinese, leaving the tibetans confined to their small piece of a rapidly expanding city. i have an image in my head of the pilgrims who have troubled themselves to make their way to lhasa - the trip of a lifetime for some - staring in amazement at temples to capitalism in communist china ("communism with 'Chinese characteristics'" is the official explanation for the free - and massively corrupt - market in china, meaning that a completely stifling political environment is still alive and well in the middle kingdom), clutching a color brochure advertising "Sale!" in english (a language they were even less likely to read than chinese) for some useless household items they have no hope of affording. and of course the police. police everywhere, in uniform or plain clothes, checking out pilgrims, checking out monks, checking out foreign tourists. they have little tables all around the jokhang circuit, sipping tea and eyeing the devout as they circumambulate tibet's holiest temple. they stand in a cluster in the middle of the barkhor square (just outside the temple). there are no fewer than 3 police offices within a stones throw of the wall that the pilgrims prostrate at, one with the english title "barkhor square community service center", another called the "jokhang control office". if you get a tibetan to talk to you frankly, they will say that there are police posing as monks inside the temples. there are supposedly cameras watching the whole tibetan "quarter" (i wouldnt say that it constitutes even a quarter of the city anymore), which i have no reason to doubt. they station themselves next to sacred hearths where juniper and barley are burnt, scowling out from under their blue hats.
i had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a tibetan artist,
who walked me around a few smaller monasteries, explained a few things,
talked quietly about chinese policies.
"they destroyed almost
everything in their cultural revolution, and now they take is away from
us to sell as a tourist attraction, a commodity". and we - the tourists
- keep coming, by the thousands, giving our money to government run
tourist sites. it was depressing. but i do have confidence in the
tibetan people, though their whole culture may one day be only
sustained in diaspora communities. the railroad is coming, and most of
them know what this means. their spirit is incredible, and they are
without a dounbt the most sincerely
religious people i have ever
encountered. i tend to extreme scepticism regarding religion,
particularly as practiced in the West, but here, confronted with
something so genuine, it merely put me at ease. there is no distinction
between "religion" and "everyday life": it is a seamless whole, which
is beautiful to see, to hear, to feel. this is what cannot be crushed
under the boot, either of the police, the military, or consumerism. and
it is gentle, tolerant, holistic, not revelatory or messianic: there is
no "hard sell". they are indifferent to yours, or anyone else's,
religion, or lack thereof: they are undisturbed by whether your sould
goes anywhere, stays put, or doesnt exist. theirs is unshakeable.
and lhasa was the first place i was able to relax with
some
foreigners, speak a bit (actually too much, for those who know me...)
of english, check up on news, be a bit lazy. i did visit one government
site, the drepung monastery, which was enormous and relatively full of
pilgrims. i was reticent to contribute to government coffers: as if
anticipating me, there was a sign at the ticket window "all entrance
fee go to maintenance of
monastery, thus same as donation". i chuckled,
borrowed tara's student card, and knocked about 20% off of my
admission.
i left lhasa after dragging my feet, enjoying a bed a day longer
than i had planned. the ride to yamdrok yumtso (one of tibets holy
lakes) was pleasant, and the weather south from lhasa was considerably
warmer than that in amdo (ie qinghai province and the golmud highway).
a long climb rewarded me with a view of the lake, very blue
against the
brown hillsides of the mountains dropping down to its shore, and a few
distant snow clad peaks. i was also rewarded with a view of the chinese
hydropower project sucking water from the lake at 4500m, and taking
advantage of physics, collecting energy on the way down to 3700m.
unfortunately the lake has no significant inlet, so this is a one way
ticket, and the lake cant be replenished naturally. "we'll fix that
later", the chinese say...and this is one of 4 holy lakes in tibet?
lest we become too righteously indignant, i should mention that most of
us could very easily cast our critical eyes homeward to find the same
errors taking place right now.
i met four foreigners on the way to the nepali border, all on the
same day. a landcruiser drove by, with a head out the window and a
friendly "jeff!", from didian and anne-claude, a
french pair i met in
lhasa several days earlier. they stopped, we chatted, discussed the
pros and cons of travel by different modes, and they were extremely
generous (tres
genereux) in their offer to cram my bicycle and me along with it into
their truck to nepal. i politely declined, privately thinking they had
better run before i change my mind, but in the end accepted a few
chocolate bars...we promised to meet up in kathmandu, assuming i could
make it there within some reasonable period of time. an hour or so
later, i met two fellows with trekking packs sauntering down the pass i
was climbing. these turned out to be an argentine and an indian, 2
months into a 9 month walk from kathmandu to mt. kailas, via lhasa. we
chatted for 20 or 30 minutes, they shifting their weight from the packs
on their backs, i wishing they would put the packs down to keep me from
feeling i was detaining them, traded news about roads, distances, the
political and security situation in nepal, and so on.
from here to gyantse was no great challenge. the pass was beautiful,
the glaciated mountain perfect in the deep blue sky of nearly 5000m,
brown against white against grey agains blue.
and then a nice roll down
that afternoon and the next morning, past farms, whitewashed houses,
pony carts. the dzong (castle) of
gyantse was visible from 15km away,
perched on a large outcropping over the town and surrounding valley. i
had a look around, arriving too late for a tour of the pulchoi
monastery there and its stupa, so i climbed the castle, along a path
which was perhaps also designated as a toilet, with human dung all
along it, and a disinterested ticket officer knitting, so i just walked
up to the top and surveyed the valley. unfortunately, the weather had
turned cold and cloudy, so i found a room at the "gyantse fur niture
(sic) factory hotel" and settled it, watching boys and men plane wood
for cabinets and beds, tibetan-style. it was the sort of place where
you probably arent supposed to stay as a foreigner, but there is no
record, no examination of a passport, just 20 yuan passed to the
smiling woman and a room with two beds, a tv, and a washbasin.
i poked around the monastery the following morning, which was quite
impressive. the stupa had small alcoves all along its perimeter with
buddhas, pilgrims shoving into them and shoving
back out. in the main
monastery, the carvings were ornate and fantastic wood pieces, showing
various manifestations of the buddha,
present, past, future, angry,
woman, and so on. old women, already hunched over, squeezed underneath
walls stacked with ancient mouldering sutras to cleanse sin, stooping
sometimes as low as a meter or less to do so. and always the drone of a
chant in the semidark
. that afternoon i headed south, hoping to take an alternate route to
the nepali border, having been warned away from stone throwing kids and
agressive beggars. the road was good, paved
even, for 45km, winding up
a valley past farms, through a rocky gorge, past hillsides coated with
splinters of shale shining in a warm sun. it was all looking good as
the road changed to dirt and i started to climb toward a pass near the
indian border, when i saw a barrier down along the road. i debated
whether to walk around it, or to just run straight in and see what
happened. since i had no knowledge of it, i just went straight in. an
army youth stopped me and asked for my passport. this wasnt a police
checkpoint, but a military one, and it was probably for the better i
didnt attempt to run it. while waiting, i watched young guys vault
concrete blocks and hide behind trees before raising and aiming rifles.
a few shots were fired in the exercise. so this place was serious. the
soldiers inspected even donkey carts, and held trucks for half an hour
and more. in the end, as i had guessed almost immediately, i was turned
around: "go to shigatse", the main friendship highway to nepal. i
sighed and headed off to shigatse, tibet's second city.
the place had grown since 1999, particularly on the outskirts, and it had the boutiques along the main street. the area around the monastery (tashilunpo monastery, seat of the panchen lama) had been "revitalized", meaning it was that boring sort of strip with clean vendors and shops, sterile in the bad sort of way. all the shops had english signs, which are always fun to read in china. there was a hair salon entitled simply "beauty": a promise? a threat? an arrogant statement? my hotel wasnt far away, a rambling place called the shambala tibet hotel. it was a dump, like most. the staff were bundled up next to a yak dung stove when i came in, sipping, or drinking, depending, chang - tibetan barley beer. they were convivial, and soon were dancing and singing to the man's tibetan banjo, recording themselves into an old tape player and giggling at the results, which i thought actually sounded pretty good. i stopped in at a chinese restaurant, where a nice sichuanese prepared fried noodles for 4Y (about half a dollar), and we talked about chengdu, kunming (his most recent stopover - for 10 years), and shigatse. how did he like it here? he was slow to answer..."its fine". he had been in shigatse 2 1/2 months, a very recent migrant. i asked why he came. "for money...what else would you do here?" a nice straight answer. i liked him, like i like almost every chinese i met, but i worried again about tibet's future, or if it had one. was there a government subsidy. "a small one, related to taxes" he told me. no cash subsidy, but i guess it had been enough. i almost told the guy that he wasnt charging the proper tibetan price for chinese food, since 4Y was much more of an eastern price for the food, not the 7 or 8Y one typically paid in tibet, but i figured he had time to learn, or fail and return to chengdu (which was where the vast majority of han in tibet come from).
here lies the problem: can you blame the poor chinese migrants, who are coming from sichuan, one of the most densely populated places in the world, poor, and told that money is easy if only you will go west, the place is virtually uninhabited, or only by savages? didnt something similar happen in the US: "go west, young man, and find yourself" and free land to the white people who were willing to homestead the "frontier"? meanwhile the indigenous population is overrun, often brutally and murderously (tibet in the 1950s and 1960s lost perhaps as many as 1 million people, the american frontier in the 19th century cost the native americans on the order of 5 to 10 million), by a greedy government. and so history repeats itself. can you hate the irish immigrant, the russian, the pole, who came to the US fleeing poverty, perhaps repression, and gained something at the cost of a slaughter they were ignorant of, likely didnt grasp or understand? there is a racist ideology that has to operate in both cases, bred in ignorance, and the conscious product of greedy men running the show, spreading it on down the line. of course there is individual culpability and responsibility, but the difficulty for me is to reconcile the warm feelings i have for the chinese people now living in tibet, and the cultural destruction it portends.
from shigatse the road was quite good to lhatse, a much smaller town
about halfway from lhasa to the nepali border. there is a checkpoint
outside of lhatse, so after grabbing a lunch, i headed out, walked
around it into the surrounding fields, and rejoined my road, now
heading south toward the gyaltso la and nepal. the pass climb was
miserably windy, and the next morning it took me half the day to make
20km to the top, forced to walk the final 4km since i couldnt ride in
the wind. this was the highest point on
the friendship highway: one
more and downhill to nepal. i struggled all afternoon to make the
remaining 50km to the junction town near shegar, passing the signs for
the qomolangma nature reserve ("qomolangma" is the tibetan name for mt
everest, "sagarmatha" on the nepali side), and catching a very fleeting
glimpse of the worlds highest peak from the pass, well over 200km away.
the wind was incredibly strong down the valley, hurling pebbles at me
as it raked the ground, stirring up huge clouds of dust as it stopped
me dead in my tracks, bent over, eyes closed,
struggling sometimes even to stand. whatever one may say, winter is
probably not the ideal time to travel southward on the friendship
highway, at least by bicycle. that night, with another checkpoint to
run, i lingered in baibo, a small junction with a few tourist hotels, a
gas station, and several "chengdu restaurant"s, testifying to the place
where the han come from. i stopped in a hui muslim restaurant, and
ordered gan ben (a plate of noodles with a vegetable sauce - no meat
since i asked for it "su de" ie vegetarian).
a young guy said "hello". i responded, and so began a very interesting talk. the man was tibetan, from northeastern qinghai (the tibetan region of amdo), here to help a friend. as the conversation progressed, it turned out he was helping a friend escape to nepal. this, he said, was often the starting point for tibetans fleeing china for nepal, the beginning of a 20 or 30 day trek over the himalaya. he said he was stuck here now for 3 days, waiting to find a driver to take him to shigatse. i had seen a bus heading there just outside the restaurant. "why not that one?" i asked.
the reason was that the police usually asked passengers in this part
of tibet for their identity papers, and if you came from northern or
eastern tibet, you could very well land in jail, since ostensibly the
reason you were here was to enter or (more likely) leave china via
nepal. so here he was, looking for a ride, staying in a hui restaurant
because the police raid the tibetan restaurants, but not the chinese.
the hui were watching us intently, ignorant of our conversation's
topic. i asked if he was worried these people might inform the police.
he was dismissive: "they are ignorant, they only want the money". i
asked the hui where they were from. it turned out they were from linxia
district in gansu, which i had cycled through on my first day cycling
in august. the place had been deeply impoverished, and oddly, i had
seen an english language program on the area on the tv in shigatse a
few days before, describing the crushing poverty of the region. once
again, the push and pull of emotions,
sympathies. it seems easy to say something without entering on the
human scale, but things are blurry in real life.
i ran the checkpoint by moonlight, skating easily under the barrier
as laughter floated out from the room the guards were stationed in. i
had lunch the next day at "the ritz" (really! - written in english and
everything), a tibetan tea house at the roadside where i had what was
hopefully my last bowl of thugpa (yak meat stew) and the woman giggle
each time she said "good" with a smile. i climbed the toward the lalung
la, the final pass in tibet before the downhill to nepal, but stopped
some ways short of the top,
seeing inclement weather on the horizon and
it being relatively late anyway. the next morning i finished the climb
- i had only been 5km from the pass, which was flat - in the snow. the
southern side became a giant snowfield, and soon i couldnt see much in
the snowfall. by the time i reached nyalam, the last town before the
border, a thick blanket of snow covered the road and everything else. i
stopped for lunch, and as i set out, even the trucks equipped with snow
chains were stopped. i was alone on the road, 10cm deep in snow and
growing, with drifts driven by the wind thighdeep as i plunged into
them and had to put my feet down. the wind howled, and my eyes squinted
as i plowed on into the whiteout. this was the largest descent on a
road in the world, and i was doing it in a blizzard, unable to see what
i had been looking forward to: the transition from the plateau, high
and dry, to the subtropics. night
fell, and i pressed on, partly to avoid a last police
checkpoint, and
partly because my visa expired the next day. i had little choice in the
matter. but when i stopped, i could tell things were getting warmer as
i dropped down a small canyon which became soon a giant gap in the
mountains, with the river dropping away far beyond sight. all around me
was the sound of water melting, running, pouring, jumping. and in the
very dim light, i could make out trees, something that had been absent
from my presence, save for towns, for a very long time. the snow
stopped, and then the rain stopped, and a half moon came out from the
clouds overhead. the dim blue light, the rushing of water, the smell of
green: in some ways i didnt mind greeting the subcontinent like this,
mostly deprived of sight, but full of the other senses. mud caked my
feet, my legs, my bicycle, ground my brakes down. finally, the lights
of zhangmu, the border town, ran down the hillside, a very verticle
settlement ranging several hundred meters down along the mountain,
switchbacking to another country, another culture.
i managed to get two flats 1km from the town, one in each tire, so i walked the last bit, finding a hui restaurant to sleep in (heeding my friend's advice from two nights before). i had my last chinese muslim meal, tossed out some garbage, and went to sleep on a pallet in the back.
the next morning i crossed the border. zhangmu was already a mix,
with over half of the establishments appearing to be nepali, trucks
lining the streets definitely not chinese, the rounded sounds of the
subcontinent contrasting with the more staccato chinese. it was snowing
in zhangmu, and raining - pouring - in nepal. i wandered into the
nepali immigration office, which was a cold concrete block with a
handpainted sign, in marked contrast to the chinese post, which had
die-cut signs and golden
characters set into the stone, a granite marker telling "the story of
the friendship bridge". the officer was wearing a track suit and a fake
nike wool cap. he said it was cold; i said it was relatively warm for
me...the visa was a sticker cut from a page with scissors. i asked
where i might change money, and he offered to change some for me. i had
no idea of the rate, so i just changed a bit of chinese money (and
later found he had actually given me a very reasonable rate). the road
was almost a running river, stoney and muddy. 25 year old toyota
two-door cars plied the road intermittently. people walked around in
flip-flops, wrapped in saris. banana palms clung to cliffs over the
river. i could smell masala from every small cafe i passed. the place
looked very much like southern yunnan province in china, or the
northern parts of laos or interior vietnam. further down, terraces
scaled to impossible heights. my shiter cable broke in the downpour,
something that had never happened to me before. i shrugged, sheltered
under a cliff overhand, and pulled out a spare, glad i had one. i
carried on, through several military checkpoints (i was never stopped,
just a smile and a wave), reminding me that i knew there was an armed
rebellion of some sort carrying on nearby.
i reached blacktop, and a bit further down reached a town. i stopped
at the opposite edge to check on my map where i was in relationship to
kathmandu, my journey's end. a man
approached me and asked if i wanted
to stay at his guesthouse. i asked how far it was to kathmandu, and
found it was about 80km, probably too far to make it that afternoon. so
i accepted his invitation. his name was rajinder, and he spoke
wonderful english, which was good for me, since i spoke not a word of
nepali. we stayed up into the night discussing the situation in nepal,
the tourist trade, the mores of our respective societies, and food.
i slept well, and was ready for the final ride into kathmandu. the
rain had stopped, though it was a bit cool, and i rode in the morning
sun, happy to be somewhere well above freezing,
looking into pastures
at water buffalo, or into houses at chickens, passing stalls selling
bananas, milk tea, sweets. distinctly not chinese. the place was
considerably poorer than china, everything seemed old, crumbling,
rusting, but this is also a result of the tropical weather, which which
china, and tibet particularly, doesnt have to contend. i began the
climb to the kathmandu valley, after passing monkeys in trees and men
breaking stones on the beach of the now large river i was following.
my tube was leaking slowly, so i stopped to patch it for the 13th
time (literally). when this was done, i inflated the tire, and it
exploded, unmendable. my ride was over. i grinned to myself: after all
of this struggle, after holding together the bike and its parts (and
neglecting more serious maintenance when i should have attended to it),
i was going to take a bus into kathmandu. i shrugged, walked back to
the nearest village 10 minutes away, and was almost
immediately picked
up by a passing bus. i and my bicycle were taken up top, and i enjoyed
the scenery the rest of the way on the luggage rack, 4m above the
road's surface, as we climbed into the valley kathmandu lies in.
the pollution, in spite of the recent rain, was horrible. cows and chickens vied with vehicles and pedestrians on the road. everything looked like it was ready to crumble. the government ministries looked disheveled, untended. weeds, green, grew everywhere. there was washing hanging from a window of the supreme court of nepal. the pavement was cracked, broken, uneven. large muddy ditches lay in front of presumeably middle-class homes. the airport was in the middle of the city. NGOs plied the streets in their new landcruisers. men without legs craned their heads about on the sidewalk to beg alms. there was energy, though it was lethargic, bundled up due to the (relative) cold.
i got down from the bus, and asked directions for "thamel", the only
placename i knew in kathmandu, and the main tourist district. it was
easy enough to find, since the bus driver assumed correctly that that
was where i was going. i was unprepared for what waited for me: a
district that went on and on, english signs everywhere,
hotels, shops,
internet cafes, men asking if i wanted hash, marijuana, herion -
"brother?". i walked one street and just decided it was hopeless to
distinguish between them. i chose lhasa guesthouse, thinking i would
like to support the tibetan expat community as part of a parting with
tibet. the folks were tibetan, and the room was cheap, and had running
water, so the deal was made.
i washed off 2 weeks of grit, cold, snow, sweat, and had a look
around. rickshaws pestered, more offers of drugs, and few white faces.
the place was on hold, waiting for the
tourists that werent coming.
over the last few days i have discussed and read up on the situation in
nepal, which is quite volatile and unlikely to get better. the maoists
rebels control an entire swath of nepal in the west near the indian
border (where the movement began),
and there is continuous fighting
along several fronts with the security forces. both sides kill
civilians consistently. boys and girls are pressed into service and
then killed by either side. the country's economy, never robust, is
falling apart, the fault of a massively corrupt government where the
king disbanded parliament years
ago, the military smuggles across the indian border, the us supplies
the security forces with weapons that they immediately lose when the
maoists overrun their outposts, there are bandh's (general strikes)
called in some part of the country, or several, every day. it is an
interesting situation to look at, but tragic for the people. it is a
place where the king has the support of 6% of
the population, and the
maoists 14% (their program most closely resembles that of the sendero
luminoso, "the shining path", of peru, another mountainous, desperately
poor country with a military dictatorship, wracked by civil war for two
decades where the peasants are caught in the crossfire, and western
"democracies" prop up a dictatorship which arbitrarily detains and
executes people regularly).
it was a good trip, a long one, and one that
continually (last paragraph notwithstanding) affirmed my faith in
people, even in the face of the ugly things we manage to do to one
another.