Tibet Trip Day 4

Lhasa, Tibet

Today was the long bus drive to the capital city of Lhasa, but on the way there were two touristy stops. The first was a valley forest park with a waterfall, and I guess the tourist highlight is that alongside the waterfall in the rock is a naturally formed image of the Buddha's face.

8:38 a.m., at what are they gawking?!

8:42 a.m., camera zoom answers

Again, I couldn't get a scope of the whole area since we were shepherded just to see certain things. The nature of tour groups is that you get taken to a place, you gawk at something for a limited duration of time and then get ushered on to the next thing to gawk at. Really dumb. But I noticed the path going to and past the base of the waterfall and said, fuckit, I bet I could walk the whole thing and still catch up to the old folk as they hobbled back to the bus. So I did.

8:54-8:58 a.m., the last shot is the far view of the previous shot

The second stop was Basumtso Lake, called Cuogao Lake in Chinese, which was a bit of a detour off the road going to Lhasa (G318 on the map), and again, just another dumb touristy treatment of a place that might have been really cool to explore or take in more of the beauty.

11:21-11:42 a.m.

It was a long way to Lhasa. Including those two tourist spots and a stop for lunch, a Chinese-style, multi-course banquet, it took something like 11 hours. We ended up getting there after 7 o'clock.

1:23 p.m., pretty sure that's a Communist Chinese checkpoint to monitor and regulate the locals and whoever is passing through.

1:23-4:16 p.m., various travel shots through Tibet.

I guess the most interesting thing that happened during the trip was during a bathroom stop at the highest mountain pass between Nyingchi and Lhasa. I think we were at 16,500 feet, a guaranteed altitude to suffer from lack of oxygen.

The mountain pass is considered sacred by Tibetans, indicated by the thousands of colorful prayer flags strung up there. The photo below is the actual place. I took it from the moving bus right before we stopped, not knowing we were about to stop. I just saw we were coming up to the place and into a turn and I saw the prayer flags so I whipped out my camera and shot without even trying to avoid getting a reflection of the camera in the window.

4:23 p.m.

But then we stopped, and I was already feeling woozy, and then I really felt it when I stood up to get off the bus. It was so bad I had to turn off my iPod because it was distracting me and I felt I really had to concentrate. So by the time I got off the bus, I was already in an altered state of mind. And my iPod was off. And the wind was blowing something fierce up there.

As to what happened, there is a literal perspective of what actually happened, and then there may be an other-worldly, alternative aspect or impression that is more just feeling than anything else.

What it may have looked like to other people was that after I got off the bus, I got set upon by 3 possibly unscrupulous Tibetan hawkers, 2 adults and a kid, who took advantage of my dizzy state and confusion in the wind, and they got me to buy prayer flags that they told me to write my name on and then helped hang up. They also got me to buy printed prayers in a stack of colored paper that they told me to just throw into the wind.

Both of these practices, mind you – the hanging of prayer flags and flinging printed prayers – are legitimate, I knew that much, so I'm kidding when I call them "unscrupulous". They weren't selling me a bridge. And while I felt I was being harangued by them, I did have the presence of mind to slow things down, and I knew that instead of writing my name on the prayer flag (using a Sharpie he provided), I wanted to write my cousin's family's names, as well as their nanny, Faye, who I consider a friend, and also her son's name and his family in the Philippines.

Then he held the flags to my head and recited a prayer and I started chanting om mani padme hum, and he laughed seeing that I knew it, and then he went off and hung the flags.

Actually, part of my confusion during this episode was regarding those names.

The night before leaving for China, I was at my cousin's house, and she gave me a bunch of stuff for the trip, hoping, if I got the chance, to procure some blessings for her and her family. She gave me a leather wallet-like pouch with some Chinese money (renminbi), less then US$10, to donate at monasteries if I got the chance. She gave me a US$100 bill for the same purpose(!). She gave me a protective amulet, and some images of Tibetan deities, and a picture of the Dalai Lama, and I forgot to mention this, but I almost got in trouble at Chengdu Airport because of this!

Fucking China. I had trouble at Chengdu Airport, and I've never had trouble going through airport security until fucking China. And the main source of the problem was my own fault, but it's not wasted on me that the time I had a lapse, it had to be at a fucking Chinese airport.

The first trouble was that for some reason, for the first time ever, I put my lens cleaner in my carry-on. Liquid, no go. And I can't do without lens cleaner so I couldn't just throw it out. Fortunately, my cousin was quick thinking and told me to take all my valuables out of my carry-on and go back and check it in as luggage. That worked for me.

But then going through security for the second time, one of the "valuables" I took out was the leather pouch my cousin gave me, and one of the deity images was printed on a metallic backing that set off the metal detectors. So the security person was inspecting this thing that kept registering as metal, and I was thinking, "oh shit, she's going to find this outlawed picture of the Dalai Lama".

I don't know if she actually saw the image and let it slide, maybe she is sympathetic to ...whatever. Maybe she looked in the pouch and saw that whatever was setting off the metal detector was absolutely not on the list of things she was looking for that could endanger the flight, but she let me through.

Anyway, the last thing my cousin gave me was a piece of paper on which she scribbled the names of everyone in her family, and she told Faye to do the same, so I had those slips of paper in the pouch, too.

Back at the mountain pass, I left the pouch on the bus, and was wondering in my confused, wind-buffeted state whether I could get to the bus and get the list of names. I decided quickly I couldn't and just wrote down as many names as I could remember, which was Audrey's nuclear family, Faye, and her son's last name. And then my own name. Hell, if this blessing thing works, you think I'm going to bypass the chance?

The Tibetans got 200 renminbi from me for their services, about US$30, a pretty good take for them, a total rip-off scam to others.

For me, it wasn't a rip-off scam. The money doesn't matter and it was well worth it. Besides, I had a bunch of renminbi that one of my uncles provided, and my goal was to make sure to spend it all to give money to Tibetans (and also because I didn't want to take home money that has Chairman Mao's face on it :p).

The alternate version of what happened starts as soon as I got off the bus. As soon as I got off the bus, those 3 Tibetans were there. The rest of the tour group disappeared, no one was there to come to my rescue if I was about to be ripped-off, no one to whisk me away from them.

With my dizziness and the effort I was placing to concentrate and the wind whipping fiercely, I did have a feeling I was under assault by these people, at least heavily pressured. I do remember keeping my senses and when he was offering a roll of yellow prayer flags, I indicated I wanted the multi-color roll, which are the type I'm familiar with. In Tibet, I had seen lines of prayer flags of all one color, but outside of Tibet, I've only seen the red, green, blue, yellow ones.

Also, when he touch the flags to my forehead, with the wind what it was up there, I started to have a sense that this was practice for being in the death bardos, similar to that time I was riding down a mountain in Taipei in the wind, rain, and pitch blackness. The death bardos are disorienting, confusion comes easily.

I didn't know who these people were, but they could've been like the perceived "fierce" deities as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But as threatening as I might have perceived them, they were there to help. Even if they were scam artists, the truth doesn't lie in what they are in mundane human life, but in the trust in them that they are here to help, which is why I was going along with them, which is a reflection of myself. That's where the blessing lies.

After I gave them the money, the "storm" subsided. The 2 men disappeared, but the kid remained, harmlessly trying to sell me a string of Tibetan candy for another 10 renminbi in a near comical aftermath. I made my way back to the tour bus and there was the tour group, and I got on the bus. The damn kid was still trying to sell me the candy from outside the bus window.

The rest of the bumpy ride to Lhasa was pretty uneventful. We passed a lot of places where other people stopped, but because this was a tour group on a schedule, we couldn't just randomly stop at interesting places.

6:00 p.m., a stop of historical import

6:40 p.m.-7:05 p.m., the approach to Lhasa

We finally reached Lhasa after 7:00 P.M. with the evening sunlight glowing bright like it was 5:00. We approached from the east, south of the Yarlung River and Lhasa proper and got our first glimpse of the Potala Palace which sits in the center of the city.

7:05 p.m., Potala Palace sighting.

We crossed the river and entered Lhasa, and I don't know whose genius idea it was, but instead of going to the hotel first to rest, we went straight to dinner, a Chinese-style, multi-course banquet. Two of the women in the group were downright sick from the altitude earlier.

7:24 p.m., Lhasa proper, Chinese certainly need their meat. Not sure how common this would be in Tibet without the Chinese occupation.

They say that altitude sickness improves once you return to a lower altitude, but I noticed recovery doesn’t occur until a while after. Or maybe Lhasa’s altitude at 11,900 feet wasn’t low enough. The women couldn’t lift their heads off the dinner table. Of course, their husbands couldn’t eat with their wives in such condition.

The rest of us were in various states ranging from OK to uncomfortable, with no one particularly hungry. I also didn’t want to eat because I was sick of Chinese banquet food and had in mind to try to get out later to see if I could find Tibetan food.

I didn’t understand this coming to Tibet, or going to any foreign country for that matter, and not sampling the local food. But apparently the Chinese thing to do is the exact opposite (and Taiwan is culturally Chinese). You go to a foreign country and not only do you just want Chinese food, but you complain about it not being as good as wherever you're from.

Also adding to the general bad feeling upon arriving in Lhasa was going to the bathroom at the restaurant and seeing urinals overflowing with vomit or explosive diarrhea. How does that even happen? Is that good rear aim or bad? I certainly felt bad for whoever would have to clean it up.

After dinner and checking into our hotel, I did take off to go exploring Lhasa at night. My impression: what a shithole! Lhasa has been rendered a Chinese-style urban eyesore, litter everywhere and armed Red Army soldiers stationed in plain view.

10:14 p.m., that's all I got in terms of proof. Even with garbage bins, no one cares where they throw their trash. Tibetans because they're under foreign occupation. Chinese because it's not their home. 

Traffic, as in Nyingchi, was also ruled by honkocracy, but unlike Nyingchi it was whoever blew their horn the loudest, the longest and most aggressively who had the right of way. I walked through what looked like a ghetto, which I marked for further exploration during the daylight.

I found myself passing by the Potala Palace, which turned out to be just a couple of blocks from our hotel. I marveled at it in disbelief how the people of Lhasa could tolerate such a beautiful, majestic monument surrounded by such urban blight. When I got back to the hotel, I had a headache. I didn’t even want to say anything to my cousin, with whom I bunked the entire trip, and went straight to sleep, just brushing my teeth.

black and white:

the only black & white shot I took that day during travels. I don't remember where or of what. Pentax ZX-5n Nikon N70, Kodak BW400CN