The Journey

On Saturday morning at 9.05am I stepped onto the train in Lhasa, my home for the next 49 hours….

The new train to Lhasa has caused a lot of talk and excitement, it’s opened up Tibet to so many more Chinese visitors but there’s also been discussion on the environmental impact it has had on the region. Now I’m not going to get into a debate on the good and the bad of the new line, as it’s already built and nothing I can do about it besides it gave me the chance to travel across the Tibetan plateau…..

I had thought about trying out the soft sleeper for this trip but when I found out that the soft sleeper cost 1700 yuan compared to the hard sleeper costing 700 yuan, I went for the hard option…..

I was both looking forward to the chance to watch the countryside pass by for two days and dreading the being stuck there in the one place with no-one who understands English….
So what was it like? Well I discovered that being on a train for so long seems to bring out the need to create communities and so I was drawn into the community centred around our set of 6 bunks. The focus and binding agent was a little 3 year old girl who was travelling home with her grandparents.

Now for me when 3 year olds speak they really make no sense at all to me so it was pretty irrelevant what language they actually spoke. She drew me into the group with her persistent attempts to give me things and soon I was one of her many playmates.
No-one else in the compartment spoke English and so we communicated the little we could though the girl. It was a bit like a big family there, we had the grandparents, parents, a layabout uncle (me) and little Shi Shi who had also successfully gathered the other 3 and 4 year olds and their parents nearby to join into the group.

Meanwhile we got to pass through some amazing scenery – rolling hills, marshes, frozen highlands and wide endless plains. All along the way we got announcements telling us about the area we were travelling through, what we could see if we actually stopped and got off possibly more useless for those travelling to Lhasa than for those of us who had just left!

And mixed in with these tourist announcements were information blurbs about how wonderful the new railway was, how it was using cutting edge technology, completely environmentally aware when it built the railway and at the same time saying that they put in thermal rods deep into the group to conteract the permafrost – how this won’t affect the delicate permafrost environment wasn’t quite explained!

As we were on a express-train there was hardly any stops so when we did have one (maybe 2 each day) it was like break-time at school, we all rushed out to play, either to buy something from the hawkers and shops on the platform or just to stand there breathing in the new air!

On the second day I got a bit fed up with the inadequate communication and having no-one to speak English to so in the afternoon I set out to explore the rest of the train and see if I could find someone to talk to. I managed to find a group of Austrians and Germans to chat with for a while.

While I was chatting, a little head peered into the compartment, when she saw me she came over, took my hand and led me back to our little family. Apparently a college student had joined our family and he could speak a little English so the rest of the family wanted to chat. And so I spent the rest of the time in the midst of my train family with Shi Shi directing operations as per usual…..

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Mighty Chomolungma

Tibet, once the home of the Dalai Lama, a place of great spirituality, a magical Shangri-La but that wasn’t what attracted to me to this land, no,instead it was the chance to bask in the sight of the Mother Goddess of the World, the towering Chomolungma, sometimes known as Mt Everest….

While there are roads all the way to Everest Base Camp in Tibet, it’s not so easy to get there. In Tibet it’s all about permits, to get in as a foreign tourist you need a permit, to get to a lot of the places outside Lhasa you need a permit or two. On top of that you need to hire a landcruiser and driver (and for some places a guide too) to take you there.Naturally this costs money so you need to find some friends and so the dating game begins….

All over Lhasa in the hotels where travellers are found, there are noticeboards where people advertise themselves as available, or groups looking for the perfect person to join them ready to experience the next great adventure. Searching through the noticeboards each day becomes second nature and part of daily routine, sometimes you’ve only just missed out on the trip, other times they’re not going quite where you want them to go and other times you just don’t like the people going….After a few missed opportunities I found my group, none of these pesky annoying men, just three women, me and the driver…..

The trip was a six-day trip to the base camp stopping off at towns and monasteries along the way. Of course for some of the girls the monasteries were the focus of the trip and the base camp was just an added extra, I can’t understand some people’s priorities at all! All these monasteries were beginning to blur into one for me, though that said the monastery in Gyantse did have a multi-tier stupa which was the only one in Tibet and looked more Nepalese than Tibetan. On every level on the stupa were rooms filled with art and statues of Buddha.

Another highlight of the road trip was Lamdok-tso, another beautiful turquiose blue lake nestled in the mountains, so many of the lakes in Tibet seem to have this unreal colour, it’s amazing to see.

After three days we got to Rongpuk Monastery the main stopping off point for trips to the base camp and here unfortuntately we stayed for the night. By the time we arrived there were no more rooms at the inn and so we nearly had nowhere to stay, no even a stable but fortunately we ended up staying in a room in the monastery, not quite palacial but one small step up from the stable.

The next day we got up early and started our short 8km hike from Rongpuk at 5000m to Everest Base Camp at 5200m, all along the route we had clear views of the mountain, we were very lucky to have clear skies and good weather, I didn’t even need half the warm clothes I’d brought. The scenery was all very bare and rocky and nothing grew there, though there were still the ever present yaks to be seen here and there.

The base camp itself is a tent village and has an definite charm about it,there are tent hotels where you can stop and have tea or just stay the night with the mountain behind you. There’s even a hotel called Hotel California….

That said there’s isn’t much you can do there but look at the mountain, going further requires guides and expensive permits but it felt good to be there, so we stayed a few hours before heading back down to our car. Instead of walking back we took a more relaxing route….All the way up we were passed by fellow tourists going up and down by horse and cart so a couple of us decided to see what it was like and it was good, the driver sang to his horse all the way and we just sat back and let the scenery flow by……

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A Close Shave

Ever since someone told me that here in China some hairdressers are just fronts for brothels, I’ve been looking at any hairdressers I pass very suspiciously, trying to ascertain which are just hairdresers and which are something more…..

So with my hair getting long and unmanageable, it was time to get it cut. I took a while to walk around the town to select the ideal candidate, I judged that somewhere with guys and girls waving scissors and combs around and actually cutting people’s hair might be good options.

I tentatively entered the selected establishment and with my Chinese dictionary tried to make my requirements clear. As my own barber for the last few years, I knew exactly what was good and bad, so perhaps it was a case of doctors being the worst patients….

They sat me down, gave me some hot water and some time to get over the notion that I knew how to cut my own hair. All I wanted was to get my hair cut, a quick 5 minute job but they had other ideas, first up was a hair wash, usually with the amount of hair that I have even quicker than the haircut but I was laid down on a bed designed for much smaller people, with my head in the basin and the girl proceeded with the wash…..

It was then that I remembered some other traveller telling me that here in China you got a head massage as part of a hair cut and sure enough for 20-30 minutes I lay there having a lovely scalp massage, I would have let them do anything to my hair afterwards….

Sometime later it was time to get my hair cut, I’d forgotten what perfectionists male hairdressers are, he took quite a while to get my hair in a state of perfection that he was satisfied with, and then it was time was another quick wash and massage….

And all that for the price of a Magnum back home….

Afterwards with the breeze blowing through where my hair once was, I strolled around the town and noticed that here and there was groups of people (mainly women) dancing or exercising and each group seemed to be doing something different, there was tai chi, fan dances, ballroom dancing and many more I couldn’t identify….

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One false move…

While I was in Nam-tso I met this lovely little German girl called Fee, who was sweet and found beauty in everything she saw there, the people’s customs, the colour of the lake, the sunrise – everything was just magical for her there……

And that’s pretty much the way she seems to be as a person but as we chatted while trying to shelter in a hut on a windswept, rainy hill over the lake I discovered that her time in Tibet hasn’t been as rosy as she’d wanted it to be and that the trip to Nam-tso was a momentary escape from a difficult experience.

About 3 weeks ago she was sitting in Potala Square in Lhasa, enjoying the view and sketching the palace, there was a kid beside her playing and when she got up she accidently bumped against the kid, he fell and hit his cheek against the ground and that’s when her holiday ended and her Tibetan experience began….

The mother was nearby and accused her of hitting the child, the police were called, statements were taken and it was off to the police station for her. The mother asked for money in compensation (which was a lot of money, not much less than what you’d be expected to pay if you kill someone), the mother asked for an apology which she gave but the mother didn’t accept, the whole thing dragged on with the mother not accepting that it was an accident and the police stuck in the middle of this mess.

I became involved after a week of this going on when Fee was to go to the police station to get it all sort out for once and for all, she wanted me to come along for moral support. It wasn’t good. At first it looked like the police were on her side and were just fed up with the whole thing, wanting to just get it sorted. One of the big problems was that the policeman translating for her seemed to have made up his own mind and wanted her to stop lying and admit she had actually hit the boy.

We got to see what evidence they had, they had pictures of the cut on the boys cheek which would be emotive to say the least and statements from 10 or 11 witnesses that also claim that say Fee hit the boy. There’s not much you can do against that, accident or not, but admitting that you intentionally hit someone would still change things for Fee so she couldn’t do that even just to resolve things. The parents were there and didn’t look all too concerned about the matter, it was hard to say whether they were interested in Fee admitting that she hit the boy or in the money.

After spending 3 hours in the police station with her, the parents and a selection of police men I really didn’t hold out too much hope for her, her only hope was to make a settlement with the parents, if it went to court then she would lose the case and be made pay compensation and here’s the rub, she has no family and is only a student so wouldn’t be able to pay the money and instead would have to spend a year in prison.

Her embassy was refusing to help, even despite the fact that the police were holding her passport for longer than the maximum 24 hours they were allowed to. It was a terrible situation to be in and I couldn’t see any real solution while the parents were still so unmoving. We left the station with the whole matter unresolved.

We were chatting to a few people that night and one of them suggested that she get her story out, maybe to the papers or to the television stations and hope that the fuss created would help her case in Lhasa. So for the first time since the whole thing started Fee wrote and told everyone she knew about what she’d been through…..

While there were no newspaper or TV reports about Fee, her emails did help, the fuss her friends caused got the embassy involved again which did help move things along by putting some pressure on the police, it also got the parents moving, they went to get the court proceedings started.

The second time I went with Fee to the police station was four days later, the embassy had concocted an elaborate sequence of events that would get Fee her passport back and escape without having to meet the parents.

Like all elaborate plans it only takes something small to mess them up, the police wanted the parents involved so there we all were again no knowing where to look with Fee apologising, making small offers of compensation for 1000 yuan, for 2000 yuan, the parents turning their noses at the paltry offers.

After about two hours the police were getting sick of it, they were under strong pressure to give the passport back so they wanted it all sorted that day. The parents wanted them to hold the passport for another few days so they could go to court. The policeman in charge put his foot down and told them they would not get much more than 3000 yuan in court and that he was going to give back the passport, so they could take her offer or take nothing.

Their pride got the worst of them so Fee got her passport, a small fine from the police and didn’t have to pay a thing to the parents, so she used the money instead to buy a flight to Kathmandu the next day and away from the whole experience.

Even as a bystander it was a very stressful time and I have to say I’ve been a lot more careful when there are small children around ever since…..

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Doing the business

When I meet other travellers I think the most popular topic of conversation is the public toilets here in China. We can talk for hours about them, comparing and contrasting, trying to see who has been to the worst and survived!

There’s two problems with the toilets here in China, cleanliness and privacy. Lack of privacy doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of cleanliness or vice versa. It’s usually with a sense of trepidation that you enter a public toliet, not know what to expect for each experience….

For me the cleanliness is not the biggest issue as holding your breath and stepping carefully can be very effective. Besides, with squat toilets there is no actual contact, it’s that bit more hygenic! No, for me the problem is the privacy issue. To understand this problem I have I would really have describe the many options that could be facing you when you enter a public toliet here….

Option 1: standard cubicles with high walls and doors that close and possibly even lock, this is very rare….

Option 2: standard cubicles with high walls and no doors but with the toilet to one side so that only your knees and head are visible by passers by, this is relatively acceptable

Option 3: Option 2 except with waist high walls.

Option 4: Now all notion of privacy is thrown out the window, the walls are waist high, the “stalls” are completely open, the squat toilets have been eliminated and instead there’s a gutter……

So yeah, there’s a whole world or adventure and excitement when you find yourself visiting a toliet in a petrol station, bus or train station….

You can even get bathrooms with views, it wasn’t just my room in Tiger Leaping Gorge that had a great view, the shared toilets had almost the same one…..

In Lijiang I managed to find a 5-star public toilet, it’s like a toliet in a fancy hotel, it’s beautiful, a work of art really – individual cubicles, locking doors, amazingly clean ceramics, sometimes I was tempted to pay the entrance fee just to stare in wonderment at it….

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