The insoluble pancake

I’m back in Paris now. I have been back for a week now. At last I can actually see the posts I wrote whilst in China. Although I was able to upload my posts from Beijing and Xining I could not actually to see them – blogspot.com is blocked, as well as a few other sites. Their filtering mechanism is quite sophisticated: some sites just time out (like bbcnews.com), whilst for others (like the wikipedia page on ‘Lhasa’ for instance) one is presented with a brutal ‘network connection lost’.

But total control of information is a Chinese speciality. We visited the site of Ganden monastery on the last day of our organised tour. The chinese tour guide reluctantly admitted that the monastery was ‘slightly’ damaged during the Cultural revolution; while he told us this I was reading in my Guide routard that they had blocked the exit roads of the monastery with tanks, bombarded the buildings with cannons and aeroplanes, and machine-gunned any monks trying to escape. Hm! A slight discrepancy. When I asked our tour guide, “So, this place is full of Tibetan separatists is it?” he replied cooly, “You will have to ask the chinese government that”.

In my second to last day I actually met a plain-clothes monk, a friendly man on his way to Nepal who wrote for me in my notebook in Tibetan, “I like tibetan tea” (he spoke quite good English). On my last day in Lhasa I made an epic hike into the hills around the city and visited two remote monasteries. The people I met were very friendly, even thought we had very few words in common. At the second, I showed the words written for me in my notebook, and bam! I didn’t get out of there until I had drunk at least four our five cups of yak butter tea! Yum! I confess I like the stuff, but after four cups I started to feel a little queasy. The descent down to Lhasa however, in the clear mountain area, soon calmed my stomach.

Some of my photographs of my trip to Tibet are here.
Technorati Tags: China, Tibet, voyages

I left Lhasa this morning. In the street outside my room, the hotel porter traced in sooty water droplets on the cab roof how much it would cost me to get to the airport. OK! And then we were speeding off through the rainy streets of Lhasa, past the imposing bulk of the Potala, down broad avenues and out into the countryside.

It wasn’t clear to me where one could construct an airport in Tibet; there are so many steep ravines and mountains. After an almost hour of speeding down narrow roads snaking past valleys and mountains it was still not clear just where exactly the airport was hidden. Then suddenly we passed into a long tunnel drilled through the hillside, over a bridge and then another bridge and the airport was there. More incredible Chinese feats of civil engineering. A few hours later, as the aeroplane pulled very steeply away from the runway, I could see we were flying along a vast flood plain. Lakes and rivers far below glittered in the oblique morning light. Steep mountains crowded the cabin windows on each side of the aeroplane. In another half an hour or so, the Tibetan plateau had vanished beneath the clouds.

But returning to Lhasa: once we were free from our Chinese tour guide, I had three days to explore the city. As I said, I changed hotel to one in the centre of the old Tibetan town, and not the new Chinese city, which is utterly without interest. Although our tour guide had warned us about ‘tall handsome Tibetan men’ as they were apparently the most dangerous and avaricious, I was not frightened! I spent the good part of two afternoons walking around the narrow streets and looking into the shops, visiting the occasional temple.

Of course the main feature of Lhasa is the barkour, a series of concentric circles pilgrims make around the city’s most important temple. A great mass of people circles around and around, ebbing and flowing throughout day’s passage. Most of these are pilgrims, old faces tanned to a deep, heavily wrinkled brown by the plateau’s harsh ultraviolet radiation, twirling prayer wheels in one hand and counting beads in the other. Softly chanting under their breath. The women wear long skirts patterned with the traditional Tibetan colours, often with white cloth hats to protect against the sun’s rays. The men are dressed in dark suits. There is not the slightest hint of modernity, there is no location in time. If I were to fade to monochrome the pictures I made and airbrush away the tourists, they could have been taken at any time this century. The churning crowd at times is enveloped by blue clouds of burning incense. Most of these pilgrims are old, but the monks in their red robes seemed to be much younger. I imagined that this is what it must have been like in the crypt of St. Denis in the middle ages, when the relentless and unending flux of the faithful led Abbe Suger to invent gothic architecture…

Everything in the city centres around the barkour, from the countless souvenir stands which line its route to the markets in the streets around. Nearby, I found a shop specialising in prayer wheels. A small weight is attached to a metal cylinder mounted on a wooden pole. Inside the cylinder, prayers are written on a tightly coiled spiral of paper. A slight circular motion of the hand is enough to spin the wheel and prayers are emitted towards heaven. Modifications on demand! When I passed the shop, pilgrims were crowded around the owner who was shortening one prayer wheel whose pole was slightly too long.

Towards the periphery, the streets become slightly more frayed, the pavements more uneven, the buildings slightly less well maintained. Streets too narrow for any kind of motorised vehicle. One can see all manner of things. On the ground here, the bloodied carcass of a yak, for sale; against a building over there, monks chanting in prayer. And asking for money! I suspected that there not real monks. A faint whiff of unpurified sewage hanging in the air. In the markets, every imaginable type of produce is offered, many of them unidentifiable to western eyes. I suppose all of this is what the streets of European cities might have been like a hundred, two hundred years ago.
Technorati Tags: China, Lhasa, Tibet, voyages

I am in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. I’ve been here for four or five days, and in two further days I will leave to return to Beijing, and then to Paris on Sunday. It’s now two weeks since I left home.

I’ve changed my hotel room. I came here on a guided tour organised as part of the conference I attended in Xining, and that tour finished a day or so ago. In in the space of three days I saw an incredible amount of sights, but now at last I have time to absorb it all before I head west. Our tour company organised things efficiently for us but, alas, without almost any sense of aesthetics. We were booked into a clean, modern Chinese hotel in the new part of Lhasa. All our needs were catered to. Our guide was slightly incredulous that we had no interest in eating (Chinese food) in the hotel’s (almost) subterranean dining room facing the parking lot when we could be wandering the ancient streets of Lhasa and eating momo and drinking yak butter tea.

My new hotel is infinitely preferable to my older one. I am in the centre of town on almost the last floor. It is a damp morning, like most mornings here, and the mountains surrounding the town are wreathed in cloud. A fine misty rain is falling. Heavy storms rolled over the city last night and this morning, which is a little hard to imagine, as we are already at an altitude of 3,400m. From my hotel window I see a chaotic jumble of rooftops, slightly strange here for Lhasa as almost all the buildings have flat roofs and are almost all the same height. My small hotel room is filled with intricately patterned traditional Tibetan wooden furniture, which is a great relief after weeks of anonymous Chinese hotels.

One metre across the narrow street I see a rooftop garden with dozens of flowers in pots. An elderly lady emerged only a few minutes ago to water them. On a old iron drum nearby there is a blue thermos which I know is probably full of Yak butter tea. A few meters further to left to the left I see many coloured cloths tied to a pole high on the roof. These are prayer flags, each scrap of cloth contains incantation after incantation, lines and lines of prayer. The closer to the sky these prayer flags are, the more powerful they are. The mountains around Lhasa (some of which reach more than 4,000m) are covered in them. The air is full of the sounds of horns and bells, Lhasa’s chaotic traffic. The street where my hotel lies is a market street, full of every imaginable kind of produce. There are people there until late into the night.

This is where I am; in the next day or two I will try to recount where I have been.

Technorati Tags: Lhasa, Tibet, voyages

So the story to tell now is how I traversed the great empty spaces between Xining and Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. In the past, the only overland route for such a journey would have involved days on a crowded bus over narrow treacherous roads, if you were lucky enough to get a travel permit. Lhasa is high on the Tibetan plateau, at an altitude of 3400m, and getting there in olden days was well-nigh impossible. Tibet was a real mountain kingdom, a distant inaccessible land.

Of course all that has changed. In the last year the Chinese government has finished an enormous construction project, costing billions of dollars, with the ultimate aim of linking Lhasa and Beijing by railway. The part of the railway between Goldmud and Lhasa was opened this year, and now each evening at ten a train arrives carrying voyagers from the other side of the Tibetan plateau. This was the train that I took, from Xining. A voyage which lasted around 25 hours and reached in places altitudes of 5000 metres…

Last Friday evening a small group of us assembled on the steps of Xining train station and were taken to the train by our Chinese guides, through an incredible press of people. The train was making a brief stop in Xining before continuing on to Lhasa, and this was where we boarded. There was around twelve of us in our group, and all of us had been in Xining for a conference. I found easily enough my narrow bed, one of six, in a small cabin. My cabin companions were polite but spoke no english. Although it was only 10.30pm in the evening, the easiest thing to do was to do go to sleep; there was nothing else to do. And sleep came rapidly, thanks to the rocking of the train on the rails. We were travelling at a leisurely sixty kilometres an hour towards Lhasa. A short time after I had stretched out in my bed (miraculously I had space enough for that) the wagon guard drew the curtains and turned off the lights.

The next morning I awoke somewhat abruptly to the muffled strains of Chinese martial music. The lights were on once more, the curtains drawn. Time to wake up. I struggled from my bed and peered out. An arid, desolate landscape scrolled past the windows, flat and uninhabited. Absolutely nothing was visible in all directions. At each window down the length of the car, Chinese tourists were avidly taking photographs and video footage. Or preparing breakfast. Each wagon featured an abundant supply of hot water and throughout the journey passengers were constantly making tea or noodles. None of that for me! I located an electric socket on the train and before too long I was preparing espresso in my ‘moka electrika’; real coffee is almost impossible to find in China.

The train stopped at Golmud, and the public address system informed us in great detail (with many precise statistics) of the virtues of this completely lost city, what mineral resources were available, how many people lived there. How it was an essential staging post for the construction of the Beijing-Lhasa railway. We had a few minutes in the rain on the platform before before boarding the train once more. I don’t think anyone got on the train. Between these public service announcements throughout the voyage we were subjected to a bewildering variety of music, from Chinese pop to pseudo-tibetan folk music to marching music, all at an ear-splitting volume. Luckily I had my ear-plugs. I suppose the music selection was designed to inspire us when confronted with this vast land. I soon realised that many Chinese on the train were humming the airs sotte voce throughout the journey.

Our altitude slowly increased. I became gradually aware of a hissing noise everywhere throughout the train. Although the cabins were not pressurised, they were oxygenated, and a steady flow of gas came from nozzles in each cabin. I began to feel slightly light-headed from the thinness of the air. I am sure that our week in Xining, altitude 2000 metres, had helped us to acclimatise, but still.

Now there were salt flats sliding past the cabin windows, great expanses of the whites and browns. The PA system informed us of the immense difficulties that had been overcome to lay train-tracks over this barren wasteland. Every so often, we passed a row of green huts and trucks: Chinese military barracks, each one more remote than the last. I imagined sleeping and working there, the extreme remoteness of it all. It was the only form of habitation we saw.

Next there were mountains with snow; and then were surrounded by snow-fields and glaciers. Freezing clouds enveloped the train; our altitude was now well above 4000 metres. We were higher than the summit of Mauna Kea. We were travelling over the permafrost, and the cabin loudspeakers told us what a feat of engineering it was to lay train tracks on ground which shifts and melts, which isn’t really solid at all.

The snow receded, we were crossing grasslands. A lake, an enormous limitless lake appeared, beautiful blue-green waters stretching impossibly far away. The world’s highest freshwater lake, we were told. After that, signs of habitation became visible. We stopped at brand new stations constructed in the middle of unending wilderness; the train doors did not open, presumably because of the incredible altitude. Passengers might faint on the platform. Station Na Qu, for example, at 4,513 metres above sea level. I felt almost as if I was in a spaceship, travelling through hostile alien lands with no breathable atmosphere.

A few more scattered habitations became visible, huts lost in the plain. I remember seeing two men lying beside their motorcycle, watching the train go past. I tried to imagine what life must have been like in this land before the train arrived. What life must be like now. Then darkness fell, and after another six or so hours of travel, we arrived in Lhasa. The train station, an enormous modernist structure, was brand new, and far outside the town, so we had no sense of the city when we arrived. That would have to wait until the next day.

Technorati Tags: China, Lhasa, Sky Train, Tibet, voyages