There were 15 of us travelers; 7 Indians, 2 Americans, 2 Austrians, 2 Italians, 1 Brit, and 1 Australian. There were also 6 Sherpas (they were the guys who did all the work on this trip, from cooking, to pitching camp each night, to all things other than sitting and walking). Four drivers and one Tibetan guide would join us once we crossed the border into Tibet.
Three of the Indians were in their sixties, Mr. Dondh, and Mr. Tundulkar, and his wife, who never did divulge her first name. The other four Indians, who I dubbed the princes, were younger business types who showed up in bright, nylon Nike track suits and carried hard-sided Samsonite suitcases. The Austrians, Willibald (or Willi) and Elfriede (or Heidi, don’t know why), were also in their sixties. The Italians were Guilianna, or Dame Edna, probably in her fifties, and Massimo, a younger guy who had a serious case of bad luck on this trip. More on that later. The Brit was Claire, in her late twenties and taking a year off to travel the world. The Australian was Richard, 46, who is an English professor at a university in Japan. And the other American was Gregg, a thirtyish massage therapist and health nut, who drinks his urine every morning (kid you not!), and was, ironically enough, the first one of us to succumb to, um, microbial infestation.
Got all that? There will be a quiz later.
Our bus rolled up into the mountains in the heat of the late morning. The almost vertical hillsides were ribboned with waterfalls and covered with lush greenery and narrow terraces of rice. We had to stop twice where landslides had wiped out the road, and where we waited for road workers to bulldoze a useable path through the rubble.
Landslide on the Road to Kodari
By about 2:30 we reached Kodari, the border town on the Nepalese side of the no-man’s land separating it from China, and grabbed some execrable lunch at an inn there.
We had to walk about two kilometers to the Chinese side, and by the time we all gathered at the border post at Zhangmu, the Chinese border town, the border was officially closed.
Kodari
All of China exists entirely in one time zone, Beijing time, and that is 2:15 ahead of Nepal time. So though it was still late afternoon in Kodari, it was already evening in Zhangmu. And if you’re late, tough luck, foreign devil.
However, after about an hour of arguing, cajoling, begging, and groveling by our guide, a big wig was summoned, and we were let across into China. But the truck with all of our gear had to stay on the other side.
Our First Glimpse of Zhangmu
At least we’d have a place to stay for the night, though, as rooms for all were secured at nearby hotels. And I use the word hotel euphemistically here. Mine was little more than a flophouse. But even a flophouse/hotel is a dramatic step up from “Guesthouse,” which I will describe later.
My room was cinderblock covered in flowery wallpaper. It had a broken window, only one bare light bulb, and bed sheets that reeked of disinfectant, which meant that they probably hadn’t been washed, merely sprayed down for the next occupant. And my sleep sheet, which I had brought along for just this sort of occasion, was stuck on the truck.
So, with no dinner (the restaurants were already closed), and no shower (when working, the shower was also the communal pit toilet), I tried to get some sleep.
The next morning we spent a good two hours getting our paperwork processed, and the supply truck freed from the clutches of the Chinese border guards.
Then we discovered to our dismay that the trekking agency in Lhasa had sent only three Land Cruisers for fifteen people. These normally seat four passengers and a driver, but in addition to the paying passengers, we were asked to each shoehorn in one of the Sherpas. That meant eight people in my car, which had seats for only six.
The princes were having none of this Sherpa business, though, and they were threatening to force the tour agency take them right back to Kathmandu if they had to share their Land Cruiser. A heated, red-faced shouting match with our head guide Nima ensued, and in the end the princes prevailed, so Nima was forced to sit on the floor of the Land Cruiser which was to become my home for eleven of the next fifteen days
Let me tell you a bit about that Land Cruiser. Riding in it were the Austrian couple, Heidi and Willi, who spoke almost no English, and so relied completely on my broken German to translate any important information or instructions. Their German was really an Austrian dialect, which takes great liberties with high German, slinging vowels all over the place, and dispensing with many consonants you might otherwise consider essential. I often had to make them repeat things slowly several times before I could grasp what they were saying. They also had no one else to talk to for the duration, so guess who got all the focus of their enthusiastic approach to life? And Heidi and Willi were a very, very enthusiastic pair. They marveled aloud about almost everything they saw.”Toll,” or as we might say “Neat,” was Heidi’s favorite word.
Then there was Mr. Tundulkar and his wife. Mr. Tundulkar was a late-sixtyish Indian gentleman from Delhi, with broad mutton-chop sideburns, an almost unintelligible accent, and only an intermittent connection with reality.
His wife, who might be in her early fifties, was almost a cipher. In the whole fifteen days I had but one conversation with her, while we were waiting for her husband to complete the kora. She seemed a very nice, and very patient woman.
And then there’s Mr. Dondh. Ah, Mr. Dondh. As pleasant an old man as you could meet. We shared many conversations in the back seat of the bouncing Land Cruiser, all of them about three subjects: How great a nation India is, how all nations should live in peace, and how India will never give up Kashmir.
Really, if I asked him about his family, or where he had traveled in his life, or about the electrical conductive qualities of various ferrites in relation to their temperature, we’d always end up back in Kashmir. We can NEVER give up Kashmir! How can we give up Kashmir?
My guess is that there is no answer I could off that he'd consider satisfactory.
But Mr. Dondh coughed. And not just any old cough. These were volcanic. They started with a few, short, breathless clearings of the throat, and then quickly grew into that tubercular sort of heaving cough, where the rest of the body just sort of dances along with the chest muscles. You could just see the phlegm churning and boiling inside his lungs like molten lava in a spitting caldera.
This would go on for about ten to twenty seconds, and then he would slowly settle to a low, rumbling rattle before commencing to hock a loogie about the size of a golfball, roll down the window, and propel said golfball-sized loogie out said window.
This happened about every five minutes for eleven days.
In the one of the two remaining four-wheelers were the princes, who were a pretty jovial bunch, except when they felt they were being cheated by our head guide, which was pretty much during all waking hours. Then there was much shouting and head wagging, and threats of letters to very important people. Never a dull moment with these guys.
Interestingly enough, two of them were from Delhi, and spoke Hindi, and the other two were from Bangalore, and spoke a different language. So when the four of them talked amongst themselves, they used English. It’s a strange world, I tell you.
Finally, in the third Land Cruiser was Richard, a soft-spoken, decent sort of Aussie fellah, and I got along with him famously. Claire was good-natured, and was always trying to extinguish the personal conflicts that erupted between Guilianna and Gregg. Guilianna was loud, and very “speeereetoooaaalll.” Gregg offered us insights that only a truly “evolved” person like he could dispense. It was a bad combination.
I guess I really should have known that most of the westerners who set out for Kailas are on a spiritual quest of one sort or another, and that some more-spiritual-than-thou stuff was likely to arise. But I really wasn’t prepared for it. Guilianna and Gregg were definitely one guru too many.
And Massimo, poor Massimo. He’s an engineer at a company outside of Florence that makes machinery for textile factories, and was melancholy most of the time. He had good reason. First his airline lost all of his luggage on the way from Italy, so he was forced to buy all new clothes and supplies for the trip in Kathmandu. Then he got so sick that he couldn’t walk the kora, and he may or may not have made his flight home (which only goes once a week) because of the delays caused by the roads. His travel agent in Italy had booked him on a return flight scheduled for one day after we were supposed to return, apparently not realizing that these sorts of treks are almost always delayed by bad roads, weather, dickhead bureaucrats, or some other such impediment.
So anyway, that’s us in the shell of a very small nut.
At Zhangmu, after the princes and our guide had regained their composure, we began the rapid climb up over a mist-shrouded pass and onto the Tibetan plateau.
The road from Kodari to this point had been just terrible, ungraded and strewn with boulders and deep mud holes. Waterfalls cascaded onto us from the heights above, and the words “bus plunge accident” blinked in front of my eyes every time I looked out the left window and saw the earth plummet almost straight down into the mists below, only a couple of feet from the wheels. In my back seat right over the rear wheels, I was bounced around like a popcorn kernel in hot oil, and hit my head on the ceiling of the Land Cruiser several times.
The thing is, we really weren’t on a road at all, and wouldn’t be for the entire drive, save for two, short, paved sections outside of major military checkpoints. Yes, four-wheel-drive vehicles and big, military-style, tarp-covered trucks drove on it, but it’s not the sort of thing you conjure up your mind’s eye when someone says “road.” Even if they said “rough road,” your imagination would come up short.
Our Landcruisers on the "Road"
The word road implies some sort of engineering. Some surveying, map making, heavy equipment, gravel, maybe tar, that sort of stuff. Straight lines, geometric curves, you know. This road had almost none of these. Mostly it just meandered around, following the line of least resistance as it headed generally west. In the boggy plains, it tried to stay on high ground by skirting the sides of the mountains. But the higher it got in the mountains, the more frequently it was washed out by landslides. And when it was forced up over passes it often got so narrow and boulder-strewn that cars or trucks meeting on it would find one of them compelled to back up to get to a spot wide enough for two vehicles.
And the mud. Everywhere was the mud. The only variable was the mud’s viscosity. We bogged down in it several times a day, at which point the extraction process began. There were the two-wheel extractions, in which our driver showed remarkable skill, and the climb-out-the-window-onto-the-hood-to-lock-the-front-wheels four-wheel extractions, and then there were the everybody-out-we-need-to-lighten-the-load extractions. After a few days it all got to be pretty routine.
Of course, this was still our first day in Tibet, and we figured it was only this bad because it was the road over the pass. Soon all this tiresome jostling would cease and we’d zip along a fine, graded gravel road.
We were so deluded.
No one within living memory had surveyed this route, as far as I could tell. It was probably the same route used by traders for centuries. And it probably worked well for centuries. But a route that provided good grazing for load-bearing yaks and lots of water was not necessarily the best route for a truck.
Please, picture the worst road you’ve ever been on. The absolute worst. The kind where you’re crawling along, stuck in first gear, being tossed around the interior like a rag doll. Then try to imagine it twice as bad, with many a section almost impassable. Rusting hulks of overturned trucks every few hundred kilometers or so. Wide ponds of muddy water of unknown depth you have no choice but to plunge into, river crossings, cross-country excursions, all that. Then try to imagine the road stretching out before you for almost nine hundred miles. Each way. Out there, and back again.
Again, we didn’t realize this on that first day in Tibet. But as the days wore on, and we ran out of things to talk about, and we all began staring bleakly at the horizon for hours on end, and then we started dancing various versions of the microbial merengue, well, the reality of our plight sunk in. We weren’t pilgrims on a spiritual quest, we were a careening Petri dish on the road to hell.
Ten hours a day we’d sit there, bounced around like ping-pong balls in a lotto machine, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, stopping every so often for a pee break. And every five minutes, Mr. Dondh would erupt into a coughing fit, and then the long ssssnnnnnnrrrrkkkk, ccchhhhhhttttt, ptoooo, another three-iron from the fairway. Like clockwork.
And all the time Heidi and Willi kept up a running commentary in their banjo German. Oh look! Snow! Neat, eh? And there! Clouds! Neat! Don’t you think that’s neat? Heidi would ask, prodding me with her elbow. Neat, ja?
Yes, yes. Very neat.
Oh look! Mud! Neat!
At the end of each long day the Sherpas would tumble out of the Land Cruisers and the support truck and set up our sleeping tents, the toilet tent, the kitchen tent, and cook us a bland, but nutritious meal. Lentils and rice, lentils and noodles, lentil soup, lentils, lentils, lentils, lentils.
Lentils.
A word about these Sherpas. I have never been around a group of guys so hard working, so cheerful, and so friendly in all of my life. One of them, a young guy also named Nima, had a high tenor voice that carried a long way, and each morning before dawn he’d be in the kitchen tent banging pots and singing and cajoling his fellow Sherpas, seemingly as happy as twelve dogs to be up and working again. The others would soon be shouting back and giggling and singing with him. It was a good way to wake up.
A couple of the others, Lhakpa and Daleh, the only two who spoke English well enough to talk to us, were great, great humans. They always put our interests first, and even when we were too sick or just fed up with the whole situation to muster much in the way of polite human interaction, I never saw them frown or display any sort of displeasure with us. As I say, great, great humans.
We were not such great humans. After three days I came down with a bad sore throat, which migrated into my nose and ears, then to my lungs, and all the time my intestines were keeping themselves well flushed, as it were. I was in a funk.
The others were in equally bad shape. Or worse. And between the 10-hour stretches of tumbling action, the too-close proximity, the bad water and food, the unending delays caused by vehicle breakdowns or semi-impassible mud, it seemed likely that we’d never reach Mt. Kailas. Or if we did reach it, we’d be so late in getting there that we’d have to turn around without being able to walk the kora.
We were already a day late because of the delay at the border, and we were barely averaging 12 mph on this poor excuse of a road. That’s parking lot speed. And our trip permit allowed for a 15-day trip. Any delay beyond that would cost each of us about $60 per day in fines to the not-so-friendly Chinese security establishment.
And then, on the fourth day we met a group of Japanese returning from Kailas who had been forced to turn around without even seeing the mountain, the weather had been so bad.
Our moods were not good. There was some talk of trying to cut the kora down to two days, but no one found that a palatable option. The high point of the walk, Drolma La (La means pass in Tibetan), was almost 18,500 ft., and in the condition we were all in, none of us was certain we’d be able to handle the rigors of the walk in three days, much less two.
The older members of the group in particular were questionable. Mrs. Tundulkar took about 30 seconds just to get in and out of the Land Cruiser each time, Mr. Dondh was coughing his lungs out, and Willi and Heidi, though seemingly pretty robust (or at least very enthusiastic), were in their late sixties.
Now, I know there are some 68 year-olds who could kick my butt all the way around the kora. But Willi weighed in at about 300 pounds, and Heidi had consumed her share of beer and wienerschnitzel as well. The whole enterprise was beginning to smell a bit iffy.
And then there was our guide, Nima. Up against the princes from the get go, he began receiving hits from some of the others as well. Mr. Tundulkar and Gregg were convinced he was cheating us on the fees paid for rooms at guest houses, and I was displeased that he tried to get me to share a tent or a room at every opportunity, when several others and I had paid for a single supplement.
He spent no time actually “guiding” us, no information about the history, geology, fauna, or native people was forthcoming. Mostly he glumly chain-smoked and occasionally supervised the Sherpas.
On the fourth night of the drive, he tried to get us to stay in a guest house in a small mud-walled compound in the village of Paryang. When we had a gander at the lice-infested beds crowded into depressing cells, we all elected to sleep in tents in the courtyard instead. This in spite of the fact that sloshing diesel fuel spilled from the 50-gallon cans of fuel the supply truck was carrying had soaked all of our sleeping pads.
But the courtyard was strewn with human and animal waste, a diesel generator pounded all night in one of the rooms, and the stench from the open pit toilet (and fuel-soaked sleeping pads) was pervasive.
After getting my tent squared away, I wandered around the litter-strewn streets to buy some bottled water and easily found two other guest houses, which by western standards were still pretty much hell-holes, but a major step up in hygiene from the one we were in. My guess is that Nima had probably skimmed a good chunk of money off of the guest house expense by putting us into Paryang’s Motel Zero.
In the beginning of the drive I had tried to get the rebellious ones to tone down their anger a bit in hopes of getting something, anything, accomplished. But by the end of the trip I too realized he was cheating us at every opportunity, and taking very little pains to conceal it.
Mayum La
But all bad things come to an end, and by late afternoon on the fifth day, we finally caught our first glimpse of Kailas. As we crested the Mayum La (17,108 ft.), it appeared on the horizon like a white diamond. Below us lay Lake Manasarovar, which is holy to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Bons. Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes were scattered there, and it is the wish of every devout Hindu to immerse him or herself in it.
We were almost there. That night we pitched camp on the shore of the lake, and several of us walked to the water to perform whatever ritual we deemed appropriate. The Hindus took a swim (fully clothed, of course), but I just dipped my hands in the water, touched my fingers to my forehead, and stood there in the wind and watched the sun set. The next day would be the last day in the car for three whole days! Oh, bliss! My mood definitely got a boost from this, and my various diseases seemed to be abating a bit as well. Just in time too, I thought.
Lake Manasarovar
While waiting for dinner, however, a Chinese army truck drove up with four young guys in the back, who jumped out and started yelling and gesticulating at Nima. I found out later that they told him we weren’t authorized to camp there (we were, we had the papers), that all of our cameras were going to be confiscated because we were taking pictures in a restricted area (it wasn’t), and that if we didn’t comply (or bribe them) they’d puncture all of the tires of our cars.
Nima apparently dipped into his bribe fund and got them to leave. But the episode was indicative, as far as I could tell, of the general state of Chinese rule in Tibet. Beijing sends out a bunch of young thugs to keep the order, guys who probably would otherwise be in jail for one petty crime or another, and these thugs pretty much rule by fiat. There are no rules here, no officially valid papers. If they don’t like you, or your face, or are in a foul mood, they just make up some fine, or generally obstruct you any way they can. Their domination of the Tibetans in complete, and based on what I saw there, a free Tibet will be a long time in coming.
But I wasn’t there to free Tibet, though I hope that some good will eventually come from exposure to some selected western ideas. I was there to walk around a beautiful mountain. And now, after five days of torture by car, I could at last see my goal.
Tomorrow: the kora.