TrekFeet

Tibet Part I: Chasing Shangri-La April 2, 2007

After a bus ride from Hong Kong to mainland China, I hopped a teeming two night/three day train through some astoundingly beautiful countryside – steep valleys sloping down to river beds and yawning wet fields, sheer cliffs pierced with the glowing caves of workers camped down for the evening. The trip was like a rolling tour of every village featured in “the hero returns!" scene of every epic Chinese movie filmed in the past ten years.

It was a long quiet ride in a sea of Mandarin and I arrived at Chengdu — a pretty little town and the hopping off point for journeys to Tibet – ready for camaraderie.

Fortuitously, Chengdu is renowned for making mates out of strangers.

As part of their ongoing campaign to fastidiously govern Tibet and happenings therein, China has tightly restricted routes and methods in and out of the state – severely limiting overland public transport entries to an often unfeasible approach from the distant northwest. (NOTE – I’m happy to report this trip was taken before the trans-Chinese railroad from Shanghai to Tibet was finished. Not that the idea of hundreds of tourists shipped in like fresh cattle to trample this sacred plateau on a daily basis is unappealing or concerning or anything…) 

Most visitors – even the ever-frugal backpackers – typically concede to fly in from the nearest Chinese hub: Chengdu. To circumvent the additional Chinese requirement that all visitors to Tibet be part of a formal tour group, entrepreneurial guest houses in town collect teams of backpackers, sell them cheap airline tickets up in to Lhasa, a tourist permit and van service to and from the airport – thus constituting a package deal to satisfy any prying government eyes. 

I met my group at a far too early hour at our beautiful Ming era hostel on the morning of our flight to Lhasa. While the entire crew enjoyed a bit of banter through the interim of our flight and van rides, a small and unusual fraternity of us eventually broke off and quickly solidified.

We were an odd and international squad: A slightly dazed and incredibly well traveled Ukranian named Vladimir who lived in Moscow and was forever disappearing without warning for extended communion with the monks; an at once girly and intrepid engineer who worked in Antarctica half the year and enjoyed exotic travels for the remaining six months; Jason, a Canadian engineer working in Beijing for a year and his demure and feminine Chinese girlfriend; and my previously mentioned friend McKay, an avid outdoorsman and mountaineer who eventually talked me into leaving my better senses in Lhasa for a five day trek over two mountain passes in virtual wilderness. 

 But first we had to catch our breath.

We spent the 45 minute truck ride from the air field into Lhasa proper in a communal awe-struck trance. The car flew past indigo lakes framed by tattered strings of prayer flags and craggy leafless trees. We strained to capture blurred photographs of roadside murals of the holy Buddha etched on to boulders – not yet knowing we’d pass a dozen more on every hike and drive. 

Tibet is one of Those Places, and we were feeling it. We’d picked up and carried ourselves into Shangri-La and we were heady on dreams of silent monasteries and Himalayan peaks, the Dalai Lama’s motherland and the face of religious oppression. The car was thick with that palpable sensation I’ve described before – that unshakable feeling that you’ve sneaked past the guard or outsmarted the laws of society or limits of human nature in order to land at such an unthinkable pinnacle. For those first few minutes after touchdown, Tibet was Timbuktu and the source of the Nile, Siberia and the Milky Way – and we were driving into the shroud of an enigma to capture its reality.

I don’t mind that the description surely seems melodramatic. If you’ve traveled to a dream, you understand what I mean. And if you haven’t yet, I am all too happy to assure you it is every bit as intoxicating as you’d dare to imagine.

Even now, so many months later, I keep Lhasa preserved as a miniature kingdom in my mind.  A snow globe of cold-pressed scents – the chill of thin air and the drifts of incense leaking from every corner’s monastery, the thick warmth of yak momos frying and the comfort of hot, sweet jasmine tea. It is hazy hushed mornings, afternoon bike rides on ancient models, the thunder of unexpected flurries and the chant of monks futilely and formally debating as they have every day for centuries.

But all that is yet to come.

For today, we leave the story as it begins. A quixotic band of traveling misfits, migrating from across the globe to reach this hub of imagination together…