Kevin's Tibet
11/29/2002
"If you stay in one place for a long time, you may die there."
Lhasa is a freak show. 12 days was enough to scratch the surface and want to
leave when the man selling monk robes recognized me and joked about dick size in
hand language. The heart of Lhasa, and last Tibetan part of the city, is called
the Barkhor which is a rats maze of cobblestoned streets lined with shops
selling everything from cassettes to carcass and vendors hawking everything from
prayer wheels to yak butter. At the center of the Barkhor is a temple named the
Jokhang around which pilgrams circle clockwise in the thick haze of pine smoke
wearing their sunday finest, mumbling mantras and killing time. This is the
place to see and be seen. Nomad women from the north have hair to their feet,
braided in knots with silver hair-barrets and big ivory beads and wear filthy,
black, yak-hair-lined cloaks with orange swastika's embroidared around the
cuffs--all set on cheeks burnt red from the sun and hands black from dirt. Kempa
women from the east wear turquoise jewlery that drapes all the way down their
back and hangs around their kneck in raw chunks. Red coral is worked in randomly
and a massive chunk of amber is worn square in the middle of their forehead.
Kempa men wear a red sash tied to the end of their ponytail and wrapped around
their head. They also wear daggers at their sides and are infamous for fighting
and stabbing. Men from the west wear hats made from a full fox hide standing a
foot and a half over their head. Mixed in with the fashion is the pious. Old
women speak nothing but prayers, work rosary beeds with one hand and spin a
prayer wheel with the other. The most devout pilgrams prostrate the entire way
around the temple mumbling mantras with a blot of dirt on their forehead from
touching it to the ground after every step. Absolutely everyone prostrates
infront of the main entrance of the temple, going from standing with their hands
together infront of their foreheads to lying flat on their stomach with their
arms streched infront and praying three times along the way for a grand total of
108 prostrations. I found all this is best experienced pissed drunk and the
Tibetans helped me out by offering home-brew chang (a barley alcohol that tastes
like lemonaid) out of jerry cans in a bowl that gets drained half-way, re-filled
and passed on to the next person. Sort of a puff-puff pass routine with a twist.
"Tibet can be cheap if you ignore all the rules."
This means fuck the establishment in any and all ways possible. And we did. The
two major tourist issues in Tibet are regional entry permits and land cruiser
rentals both of which we found not worth the trouble and chose to completely
ignore. It's tough going without arranged transport in Tibet considering busses
are unreliable after Shigatze 100km to the west of Lhasa and stop alltogether in
Shegar 100km to the west of Shigatze. It's a strange thing sitting on the side
of a dirt highway somewhere in the middle of Tibet surrounded by goats and the
Himalaya's, especially when only five vehicles pass in one day and none consider
slowing down. Patience is the key watching the burning sun cross a sky so robbed
of moisture from the mountains it's a deep deep blue. And apprecieation of the
rediculous situations that pop up. Like pushing kids on primitive ice sleds
across frozen puddles in the ditch only to watch them struggle, cut, out of
frozen water in the early dawn. Or being surrounded by wagons pulled by tough
horses decorted in bright colors, wearing flags and symbols of good luck while
their wild eyed drivers stare unblinkingly at the craziest thing to ever stop by
their patch of dirt. Glancing left and seeing the hissing bubble of crack in the
end of a cigarette and watching the cowboy with a full set of gold teeth pass
into a trance with his head on my bag, one boot off and eyes and mouth wide open
starring at us. The never ending fun of screwing the Chinese by waking up three
hours before dawn and walking 15km's at a forced march to sneak under the bar
across the road at their checkpoint. Looking in the window on the right hoping
the light isn't on because of us and hoping the dog with a deep bark in the
darkness on the left is chained up.
Tibet is all this and more. It's three pairs of pants because of cold and filth
that goes unnoticed. It's beggers holding out their hands and laughing at the
same time. It's sticking out your tongue and scratching your head to be polite.
It's a tortured landscape full of tough cowboys oppressed by authority bowing
down before purple demon gods with three eyes and flames for eyebrows.
We're in Kathmandu now. First world pleasures only rupies away. And proper
porcelin. More on this later,
Kevin