Across the Himalayas

Tibet’s been part of the People’s Republic of China for over fifty years, but it still feels like an armed occupation in Lhasa. There are military checkpoints at every intersection, patrols navigating the maze of alleys in between, and a phalanx of foot soldiers always marching the main square outside Lhasa’s monastery. Every few hours a patrol of three tanks trudges slowly through the streets with soldiers in black SWAT outfits keeping a wary eye out from the gun turrets. The sheer amount of firepower is hard to understand given the current peacefulness; apparently it’s a response to a series of large-scale protests and riots last year.

The soldiers look tense as they stand on patrol, you can smell how unappreciated their presence is, and they can smell it too. There’s a palpable and fierce unit loyalty that you can see in the terse nods they pass amongst each other; these guys have each other’s backs, someone to trust in this place, a family of sorts. And I can’t help thinking of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, how hated they must be there and how fiercely they must cling to each other in that distant place, the same tense look in their eyes. To me and other passing civilians these kids are polite when possible, but you don’t want to cross them. Accidentally take the wrong snapshot, for example, and you can have your passport revoked and your ass sent summarily back to wherever you came from.

Tibetans are a world away from the Han Chinese of the coast. They look more like Mongolians or Native Americans, with long, ornate hair braids, weather-beaten faces and peasant dress torn from some distant century. The culture is similar to Mongolia’s, reflecting longstanding cultural ties. It was the Tibetans and their llama form of Buddhism that was exported to Mongolia, and before that they shared a common shamanic religious system, which is called Bon here. There are the same prayer flags and prayer wheels for the auto-enlightenment of the illiterate (a lot of religious practice here is rote), Buddhist gift-wrapping to an animist system of thought. The similarities are so striking you get the sense of a people who once roamed over all of Central and Northeast Asia in prehistory and were pushed back to the most mountainous and least accessible parts of Asia over several millennia.

Overriding first impressions of Lhasa – aside from the military presence – are the flood of devout pilgrims from all rural points of Tibet making their way every day to the downtown monastery in their traditional woollen garments and their handheld little prayer wheels, and the warren of crook-backed little streets that pass all manner of little storefronts – the ones I remember most are the open-air dental shops with examples of metal fillings displayed on signboards out front – and markets selling great big chunks of yak butter and meat, and fresh vegetables. In front of every house is a fold-out, low-tech solar panel that heats the tea kettle in the morning. The streets are packed with cavernous sweet-tea shops where patrons sit together on long wooden benches and loudly throw down cards, play music on ancient string instruments or simply gossip. Also noodle shops with yak soup, snooker tables, taverns with house guitars that anyone can play, corner restaurants with spiced chicken wings and yak “sizzlers”, and one good espresso shop that I track down by smell on my first day.

You can see why popular culture has glommed onto Tibet as a center of otherworldly mystical experience, and why so many visitors come here expecting to encounter some manner of larger-than-life “enlightenment”. There are few things more intoxicating than watching hundreds of primeval peasants prostrating themselves on prayer mats before an ancient building, amid chanting and candles burning yak butter, with mushroom clouds of incense wafting everywhere and the intermittent tolling of the temple bells. The monastery temple has just re-opened after an eight-day closure during the 60th anniversary to prevent any outbreak of protest, and a long line snakes through the main square thronging with petitioners seeking favors from various manifestations of the Buddha: the demonic Protector who holds the entire wheel of life in his arms, the multi-headed, multi-armed Future Buddha who can shift the course of events through the distance of time, and dozens more, each with their own little shrine. It’s a cosmogony that’s complex enough to make it not worth learning in detail, and each manifestation is showered with large amounts of small-denomination Chinese currency by poverty-stricken local petitioners as they pass through.

Late afternoon you see the shorn, red-robed monks tallying the day’s take from their changing area in the center of the temple, which given the extreme poverty makes the whole thing seem more like an ancient, low-tech televangelist operation. Those little amounts of money showered over every section of the temple add up; all you have to do is wander several blocks to witness the Potala Palace at night to see that – the Dalai Llama’s winter home, a truly massive structure set high on a precipice in the center of town, probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen, excepting maybe Lalibela in northern Ethiopia. How do you describe something like that? Or fathom the wealth it took to build at a time when Tibet was composed entirely of illiterate herders and peasants scraping barley out of the moonscape? The llamas were living well before Communist China took over; each of their tombs in the palace are crammed with tons of solid gold and thousands of jewels. And though the current Dalai Llama seems like an excellent person, the old order looks ugly in its way as the current one.

The architecture and art at these religious sites is amazing. Our government-required guide, though, is a nightmare, blathering on loudly in places of worship, conveying little of interest but doing his best to destroy the ambience, trying to rush us from spot to spot without experiencing anything other than the nails-on-chalkboard grate of his monotonous cawing. This despite the fact that he spent several years studying to be a monk. I basically have to ditch him at every stop.

Lhasa is 3,500 meters altitude, we’re headed 5,400 meters high and beyond, driving across multiple mountain passes and through the heart of the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp, over the Nepali border and thence Kathmandu. The land on the Chinese side of the border is bleakly beautiful. As the Indian subcontinent bores into Asia these peaks have been muscled up from the bottom of the earth into the farthest, thinnest tip of the planet’s atmosphere. You can see deep scars on the sides of these monstrous rocks from where they’ve been forced up into the light of day, and ridgebacks of rock where the wind has wiped off whatever small margin of topsoil originally covered them.

Some mountains don’t seem to belong next to one another. Some have thick deposits of mud, others are sandy and enigmatic as pyramids. At times there are long red ridges out of the American Southwest that lay out the earth’s timeline in red-and-orange strata, and then there are these alien, jet-black behemoths that have had all the history smashed and melted out of them in the earth’s furnace, covered with little crystallized burrs like mineralized porcupine quills. All of them spat out at random from deep inside somewhere, and rising four more inches every year. But even at the highest points there are locals selling deep sea fossils from before the time of the dinosaurs, from when these highest rocks on Earth were embedded at the bottom of an ocean.

The place is majestic but it really doesn’t look meant for human habitation. Yet there are people everywhere in the narrow valleys. The tree line is far behind us, and the only plants that scrape out an existence here are nasty, hard-scrabble little minimalist weeds that cling fiercely to the side of the rock and crabbily say “fuck you, I’m gonna live.” But appear to take little pleasure in it.

The people live in pretty little traditional Tibetan villages but scrape out a tough existence sowing barley with yaks and threshing it by hand with sickles. They drive by packed onto the backs of tractors, or on bicycles carrying massive bales of hay. At one point we stop at a little millinery where they use the river as power for a primitive mill that grinds the barley into a traditional wheat called tsampa. The locals offer us “barley beer”, which is strong as hell and probably not very hygienic, as the man of the house writhes in pain from some growth in his belly for which there is scant available modern medical attention. At other stops locals clamber over to us in search of a bit of food, and we accommodate them as best as we can; god knows how they make it through the winters. The temples are pretty much done away with and instead you have these piles of stone arranged in the shape of a stupa so that you can see the evolution from Bon to high Mahayana architecture.

There is a lot of larger-than-life beauty out here; there are a couple of shockingly beautiful blue lakes that wend between the mountains and follow the trail of our road for several kilometres, and mostly dried out river beds with trickles of half-frozen water trilling through them.

All of this is a prelude to the brutal transcendence of staring up at Everest from base camp. The barren moonscape of so much of the range was unexpected because I anticipated those endless snowy Himalayan peaks that really only get going along the border with Nepal, though you see a spectacular one here and there along the road south. Getting to Everest is a slap in the face. My god, what a beast. After ascending the steep curving road to the first tent encampment, taking a bus and then hiking up to the actual base camp you’re in some of the most barren territory on earth, gasping a bit for some of the scarce oxygen and staring at a glacier-crusted monster that is the closest thing to a god that you'll ever see in this life. It’s head is an impossibly large piece of abstract Egyptian statuary, placed too far on the left shoulder. From it’s right arm issues a series of jagged rock peaks that seem themselves impossible to climb, on the left is a long ice cliff in a semi-circle that looks sharp as a knife’s edge along the top, with an amphitheatre of snow beneath the semi-circle that would be an apt setting for judgement day. The terrible wind is shearing off a thundercloud of snow from the peak as we gawp up at it.

If there’s anything remotely like a spiritual experience to be had in Tibet, it’s here, though it’s in no way comforting standing in the face of this inhuman force and its train of lesser ice-capped mountains trailing off in the distance, visibly shrugging us off as if we were gnats.

"for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."

-- Rilke