by David Eimer
Walk, stop, go became my mantra as I hauled myself step by twisting step up to the pass, gulping air greedily. I could manage only twenty to thirty metres at a time, before being forced to pause, both leg-weary and short of breath. A yak train came through, pushing everyone to the side of the track. The shaggy-haired beasts were loaded with boxes and stumbling for grip as their handlers drove them upwards. Despite their size and horns, they were alarmed at being near so many humans, their eyes startled and wide open, and they veered hurriedly away from anyone who got too close.
Finally, after what seemed like an age but was actually about an hour, I was standing on the Dolma La at the heady height of 5,650 metres. Draped in prayer flags, so many I had to lift up the ropes they flew from to get to a position where I could take a photo of the mountain, it was narrow and crowded with pilgrims praying and resting. There were whole families up here, including grandparents and children – three generations united on the Kora.
Staying long was not an option. Close up, Kailash’s east face is less impressive and sinister than its counterpart to the north. It looks more like a conventional peak from this angle, lacking the elemental magnetism that had made it so hard to tear my eyes away from the north face. The Dolma La was exposed too, windswept and cold, and although Tenzin muttered an incantation under his breath, I wasn’t here to make merit like the pilgrims. We headed down, with deep snow on either side of the track, already more than halfway back to Darchen.
Any exultation in knowing that the climbing part of the Kora was over didn’t last long. A fifteen-minute scramble at speed down a near-sheer slope of shifting rock, which Tenzin said would be quicker than following the path hugging the contours of the east face, proved fatal for my left boot. The outer sole was almost completely ripped off by the descent and soon I was walking on just the inner sole. Having thought I could be at our destination for the day in a couple of hours, I realised I would have to go slowly to ensure I didn’t end up walking in my sock alone.
While Tenzin moved ahead, I limped along putting my weight on my right boot and constantly scanning the track for the water I thought would seep into my left boot. It was a dull ten kilometres to Zutrulphuk, a Dirapuk-like hamlet with a monastery and a few brick houses. Kailash was mostly hidden from view and the hike was enlivened only by the marmots popping their heads up from behind rocks to look at the people passing by, before swiftly ducking out of sight again. By the time I got to Zutrulphuk, I had blisters on both my big toes, and my right boot was showing signs of distress too.
Trekking slowly back on the final day, dipping down the track in bright sunshine, until finally rounding the east face to meet the southern side of Kailash, gave me time to contemplate the meaning of the journey I was about to complete. I struggled, though, to comprehend the true significance of the mountain for those who treat the Kora as a spiritual rite of passage, rather than a mere physical challenge in one of the world’s remotest spots.
But as I walked the final few metres down Darchen’s main street, while a convoy of land cruisers loaded with Indian pilgrims drove past, I thought at least I had done the Kora the way it has been done for thousands of years. More than that, I had come to the one part of Tibet still free of real Chinese influence. Kailash stands as an unchanging testament not only to the power of belief but to its supremacy over the diktats of the CCP – just another of the dynasties that have risen and fallen throughout Chinese history.
14
Going Down
There is a unique intensity to travelling in Tibet, at odds with the empty landscape and a people who subscribe to the fatalism inherent in Buddhism. Just being on the move all the time, shifting huge distances between towns that appear far more significant on the map than they are in reality, is wearing. And every day of the journey seemed to bring some new drama, whether it was incorrect permits, misunderstandings or an incident as insignificant yet vital as the disintegration of my walking boots. After almost a month in Tibet, I needed a holiday.
Tenzin suggested a rest cure of sorts: a drive further west along 219, where few travellers venture. It would take me as close to the Indian frontier as I could get, and there was the tantalising prospect of visiting a rare Bon monastery. After a hot shower in a public bathhouse, my first since Shigatse, and with the sky a commanding blue I felt more relaxed as we set off down the deserted 219, accompanied by herds of antelope running parallel to us on either side of the road.
To the right, there were tremendous views of Kailash’s south face, its ridges so extreme that I doubted any climber could make it across them. Then, on the left, the western Himalayas appeared, dominated by the unmistakable, double-peaked Nanda Devi, the highest mountain in India. Despite being so visible, Nanda Devi is also sufficiently secluded that it took decades before a route through the valleys on the Indian–Tibet border to the starting point for its ascent was discovered. The men who achieved that feat were the intrepid explorers H. W. Tilman and Eric Shipton, long before their adventures in Xinjiang.
Speeding on, the land cruiser savouring the smooth tarmac of 219, the only properly paved road in western Tibet, we reached the hamlet of Tirthapuri. Wu Jing jeeps were parked up, checking trucks coming in the opposite direction from Xinjiang. A local bus sat waiting for passengers. I asked where it was going. ‘Ali,’ replied the driver, the last town of any size before the disputed region of Aksai Chin. He gestured at me to get aboard. I smiled and shook my head, tempted as I was by the prospect of travelling on.
Turning off 219, a rutted track took us into the Garuda Valley, once the capital of the ancient Bon kingdom of Shang Shung which ruled western Tibet – with Kailash at its heart – more than 2,000 years ago. A solitary village marked by a cairn of white stones and yak horns and surrounded by barley fields, irrigated by the Sutlej flowing down from Kailash towards India, occupied the valley plain. But the hills overlooking it were austere and lunar-like, a hint of the extreme landscape that lies further north in Aksai Chin. Shaded a dirty yellow, they were pockmarked with caves and strewn with stray rocks, many of them pure quartz.
High up on the far hillsides, ruined monasteries were visible, a reminder that much of what is now Tibetan Buddhist culture originated in Shang Shung. Stretching north towards Xinjiang and west into Nepal, it was so powerful a state that even King Songtsen Gampo, who united Tibet briefly in the seventh century, had been obliged to offer his sister as a bride to the kingdom’s then monarch.
A sole Bon monastery survives still in Shang Shung. It is one of the few functioning ones left in Tibet, although there are others in western Nepal and Bhutan. Fewer than 10 per cent of Tibetans have stayed loyal to the Bon religion, most of them Ngari people. But, initially, nothing distinguished the monastery from its Buddhist counterparts. Prayer wheels ran around the exterior, a giant spider’s web of prayer flags covered the hill behind it and a swastika adorned the entrance to the prayer hall – all symbols appropriated by Tibetan Buddhism after King Songtsen Gampo imposed it as the country’s primary faith.
Inside, though, the prayer hall was far less ornate than its Buddhist equivalents with fewer statues and thangka, or paintings, of deities. The skins of a leopard and wolf hung prominently, a legacy of the animist origins of Bon. Early Tibetan Buddhists traduced Bon adherents as members of a wrathful cult, known for bloody rituals and sacrifices, despite it also being a faith ultimately centred on the search for enlightenment.
Those distinctions made no difference to the Han, who sacked both Buddhist and Bon monasteries during the Cultural Revolution, according to the middle-aged monk, his close-cropped scalp bare in places from alopecia, guiding us around. ‘I think the Chinese see Buddhists and Bon as the same essentially, except that they sometimes refer to our religion as “primitive”. They don’t understand us,’ he said.
The second stage of Tenzin’s post-Kora relaxation plan was still to come. A few days at Lake Manasarovar – the opportunity for a break from both trekking and the interminable hours we spent in the l
and cruiser. Two hours east of Darchen, Manasarovar is one of the highest freshwater lakes in the world, a body of water ninety kilometres round sitting just above 4,500 metres. As we descended towards it, the lake was cobalt blue in the sunshine, its shores gently sloping grassland. Behind us, the distinctive diamond shape of Kailash stood out like a beacon amid the mountains ranged around it.
Manasarovar is almost as sacred a spot as Kailash and is linked inextricably to it. Buddhists identify it as Lake Anotatta, where Maya, the mother of Buddha, was brought by the spirits to bathe in its waters before giving birth. Along with Kailash, Manasarovar is the only place in Tibet the Buddha is said to have visited. Some of Gandhi’s ashes were scattered here, and for Hindus the lake signifies ultimate purity. Bathing in it to cleanse themselves of sin, as well as sometimes drinking its waters, is an essential part of their Kailash journey.
Indian pilgrims were walking back from the lakeshore as we arrived in Chiu, Manasarovar’s main settlement, a line of low white-stone houses sited right by the lake and overlooked by a small monastery on a craggy hill. A tall man with a ponytail, moustache and dark-brown face emerged from one of them and shook Tenzin’s hand. Tashi was a former monk from a nomad family. After the death of his parents, he sold their herd of yaks and settled by Manasarovar to run a guesthouse with his wife, who looked almost Native American with her broad, high-cheekboned face, pulled-back hair and fingers covered in silver rings.
An erudite man, Tashi spent much of the day in his study where the walls were lined with the thangka he painted. He liked to tell stories of his time as a monk, picking precise holes in the arguments the CCP employ to justify their role in selecting the most senior tulku. In addition, he was a welcoming host who brewed the finest chang I drank in Tibet. His wife, too, still had some yak meat left to liven up the fried rice I ate twice a day. My room was the usual concrete box, but I could reach the shores of Manasarovar from it in less than a minute.
I enjoyed the peaceful existence by the lake. Each morning, I climbed up to Chiu’s monastery under the near-perfect blue skies that now appeared every day. Perched precariously on top of a prayer-flag-covered hill that offered spectacular views over Manasarovar and towards Kailash, it was home to six ancient monks. Hundreds of similar monasteries – tiny and isolated – are scattered across Tibet, manned by skeleton crews of lamas determinedly maintaining them despite the CCP’s constraints on their numbers and practices.
Before the Cultural Revolution, there were eight monasteries sited around Manasarovar. Now, the five left are mere shadows of what they once were, even if Tibetan pilgrims still circumnavigate the lake on a Kora route that hasn’t changed for thousands of years. But Chiu’s temple was a superb vantage point, and luxuriating in the sunshine and looking down on the lake was an easy way to pass a few hours. In the harsh light of the midday sun, it appeared almost anaemic. By the late afternoon, though, the lake turned a rich blue again that made me long to jump in it for a swim, although I knew I wouldn’t last long in its icy waters.
Killing animals, except for food, is prohibited in Buddhism. Nor do Tibetans eat fish; at least, I never met one who did. Manasarovar, like all Tibet’s lakes, teems with life, its clear waters making the fish easily visible. When I waded in to see just how cold the water was, I was soon surrounded by fish of different sizes and colours, brushing and nibbling my legs and pulling at the hairs on them. It was an unusual but not unpleasant sensation.
Buddhism’s strictures on the taking of life mean also that stray dogs far outnumber humans at Manasarovar, like everywhere outside Lhasa. But not even their random howling could disturb the supreme serenity of the lake. It is especially magical at night. Chiu is far smaller than Darchen or Saga and not on the electricity grid. The only lights at Tashi’s place ran off car batteries and, once the sky had turned a black so inky and dense that it redefined the colour, we might have been invisible. I would step outside and listen to the water lapping against the lakeshore, while gazing up at more stars than I had imagined it was possible to see.
Elsewhere in Tibet, clouds had cloaked the constellations, or I had been in places lit up enough to dilute the effect of a star-filled sky. At Manasarovar, the nights were clear and the view was a canopy of stars that stretched for ever. I gaped at what appeared to be the entire Milky Way, thousands of little white dots so close together they seemed to merge into one colossal star glowing intensely bright. Just as I never got bored of looking at Tibet’s never-ending sky during the day, I ended every night at Manasarovar staring upwards.
Climbing back into the land cruiser and departing from the lake felt like the end of my Tibet adventure; with the Kailash Kora completed, the only remaining task was to leave without being rumbled as a fake tourist by the authorities. But there was still time for more excitement. Soon after departing from Manasarovar, Tenzin, Lopa and I were standing by the car on a forsaken stretch of 219, peering at the engine and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working any more. Lopa diagnosed a problem with the distributor. He called a friend in Darchen and asked him to come out with the part to rectify it.
Waiting for hours by the roadside didn’t appeal. Having expected to spend the day inside the car, and lacking even vaguely clean socks, I was in bare feet and flip-flops, not the most suitable footwear when you are exposed to the wind at 4,800 metres. I decided to hitch a ride to Saga, leaving Tenzin with Lopa, counting on my Mandarin to explain why I was without my guide when I reached the Wu Jing checkpoint I would have to pass through before Paryang.
Hitching on a mostly traffic-free Tibetan highway is easy: the moment a vehicle approaches you rush out into the middle of the road and make it stop. That was my tactic anyway and it worked. A land cruiser full of rare Han tourists returning from Kailash, probably intrigued by the bare-footed foreigner, kindly offered me a cramped space alongside their luggage in the boot.
Their Tibetan driver fuelled himself with cans of energy drinks, lurching around corners so fast I thought we would turn over. But seven uncomfortable hours later I was back in Saga, the Wu Jing having given my passport and permit only the most cursory glance. Squelching through the familiar mud of the main street in my flip-flops, trainers in hand, I found a shop selling socks, which I put on straight away to the amusement of its owner.
One final stretch on 219 awaited us after a night in Saga, before Lopa’s revitalised land cruiser turned south on an unsealed road leading to Nepal. It ran through a lonely valley of grassland, interspersed with exquisite, turquoise-coloured lakes, heading towards a long, unbroken line of splendid peaks: the spine of the Himalayas. I glimpsed Shishapangma, towering over the mountains around it, before we entered the western end of the Everest National Park.
We were still over 4,500 metres, and rose for one last time above 5,000 metres to cross the Tong La Pass. Everest was to the left, disappointingly obscured by clouds. But I jumped out of the car for a final look at the mountains that could be seen. The wind howled across the pass, busy with tourists in land cruisers coming from Nepal. This was their first proper stop on the high plateau, and they snapped pictures eagerly while talking excitedly about the altitude.
Going down was far quicker than driving up. In less than an hour, we were below 4,000 metres and the barley and mustard fields we had driven through in U-Tsang reappeared. We stopped for lunch in Nyalam, where Indians on their way to Kailash perused shops run by Nepali migrants selling the widest range of merchandise I’d seen since Shigatse. It was a shock to find places that didn’t just offer instant noodles, water, beer and cigarettes. Nyalam is far cleaner than the towns of the far west, and I became conscious of how dirty and dishevelled I was in comparison to the people just arriving in Tibet.
It was thirty-two kilometres on to Zhangmu, the border town, zigzagging down a dizzying road which followed the contours of the deep gorge leading to Nepal and the Kathmandu Valley. In the time it took to get there, we dropped to 2,350 metres, the lowest altitude I had been at for a month. The air was suddenl
y heavier and stickier, the sides of the gorge covered in pine trees and lush green vegetation, among which purple and yellow flowers stood out – a delight after the high-altitude desert of western Tibet.
Zhangmu has by far the most spectacular setting of any border town in China I have visited. Spread out along the sides of a narrow road sloping sharply downhill towards Nepal and running along the left-hand side of the giant gorge, with the houses and shops rising up the hillside behind it, it was crowded with Chinese and Nepalese trucks waiting to cross the frontier. The spices of the subcontinent floated in the air, and Han and Nepali traders outnumbered Tibetans.
Being so low was invigorating. I charged up Zhangmu’s steep street like an athlete who has been training at high altitude before descending to race at sea level. Sadly, the effect wore off after a couple of days. And for the first time in weeks, I was in a genuine hotel room with both a shower and a sit-down toilet. Lying on a bed with clean sheets and a real mattress felt as good as staying at the Ritz.
Demob happy at the prospect of leaving, I was taken aback the next morning when the Wu Jing soldier inspecting my passport at the frontier handed it to an officer who then disappeared. I had never seriously considered that, after the deceptions involved in reaching Tibet, I might have a problem getting out. I tried to convince myself that this was just a routine extra check, while doing my best to appear relaxed yet also a little annoyed at being held up – the natural reaction of any traveller anxious to move through a busy border as quickly as possible.
Ten nervous minutes later, my passport was returned with an exit stamp and I walked across the bridge that leads to the other side of the gorge and Nepal. I found a shared taxi and for five hours wound lower and lower through the Kathmandu Valley, with the temperature and humidity rising all the time, until we reached the frantic streets of Nepal’s capital, where cars, bikes and pedestrians jostled for space. Tibet was already a memory, the mountains far behind me.