by Kate Harris
—
As we biked toward Lhasa, the most policed stretch of the Silk Road yet, convoys of army trucks fumed past spewing exhaust from tailpipes and propaganda from loudspeakers. I held back the urge to yell Shut up!—another expression included in the historic Silk Road phrase book, evidently as relevant in twelfth-century Tibet as it was today. We raced downhill through a gauntlet of checkpoints, swerving around the vehicles forced to stop at each one. After what felt like hours we sped into the sacred heart of Lhasa, where “the inhabitants of the city all adopted foreign dress, and submitted to the enemy; but each year when they worshipped their ancestors, they put on their clothes, and wept bitterly as they put them away.” Except that this statement, which seems to portray Tibet’s capital city under Chinese rule, actually refers to Tibetan-occupied China.
In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Tibetan Empire conquered a number of Chinese outposts in its quest for territorial expansion. Among them were Dunhuang, and it was that city’s colonized Chinese residents, not Tibetans in modern Lhasa, who are described in the passage from the royal annals of the Tang dynasty. Other documents recovered from caves in Dunhuang reveal the tensions between the Chinese and their Tibetan overlords. In one government letter, a Tibetan minister addresses petitions against the habit of Tibetan officials kidnapping Chinese women to be their wives. “To his credit,” notes Sam van Schaik, a scholar of Tibetan history, “he responded by banning the practice of kidnapping, saying that the women should be able to marry according to their own wishes.” In another exchange, after a Chinese uprising against their Tibetan masters, a Tibetan minister curtly dismissed requests by Chinese officials for greater powers, and instead outlined the strict hierarchy of positions within the government. “The long list is a treasure-trove for those who study the bureaucracy of the Tibetan empire,” writes van Schaik. “But let us just note one thing: the letter makes it clear that even the lowest-ranking Tibetan is of higher status than the highest-ranking Chinese.”
Tibet’s own history, then, is blighted by acts of greed and colonialism. I knew taking sides in any modern geopolitical conflict involves, by default, some degree of historical amnesia. This is for better and for worse: forgiving means forgetting, but also, sometimes, forsaking inconvenient facts, such as the Sino-Tibetan peace treaty signed in the ninth century. In it the king of Tibet and the Tang emperor agreed that “both Tibet and China shall keep the country and frontiers of which they are now in possession,” and that “from either side of that frontier there shall be no warfare, no hostile invasions, and no seizure of territory.” The treaty was inscribed in both Tibetan and Chinese script on a stone pillar near the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, an ancient pilgrimage site, “so that it may be celebrated in every age and every generation.”
Mel and I didn’t pause in Lhasa long enough to take in the pillar, though reportedly it still stands, its treaty text a little more weathered and unreadable each year in a sad marriage of political and geological erosion. A more recent monument commemorates the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet,” but we didn’t stop to see that either. Designed to look like a simplified, concretized Mount Everest, the statue, from the photos I’d seen, bore as much resemblance to Chomolungma—the Tibetan name for the mountain, meaning “Mother goddess of the world”—as the bluntness of a Boeing 747 does to the grace of a bird. Unsurprisingly, the monument’s inscription fails to mention that liberating Tibet involved military air strikes on monasteries. “The Tibetans saw giant ‘birds’ approach and drop some strange objects,” reports Chinese-born writer Jianglin Li, “but they had no word for airplane, or for bomb.” (They do now, at least for airplane: namdu means “sky boat.”) Mel and I didn’t stop anywhere in Lhasa. Our only goal was getting out again.
Alexandra David-Néel didn’t linger much longer, relatively speaking. After spending half a lifetime trying to reach Lhasa, which she did in February 1924, her beggar’s disguise prevented her from moving in the intellectual and spiritual circles that most fascinated her. She and her adopted son, Yongden, left just two months later, but she spent the rest of her life making sense of what she’d seen on the plateau—or not sense, exactly, so much as an evocative written record of Tibet’s magic and mystery, invaluable testimony to what existed on the plateau before the Chinese took over.
I recited her name in a kind of mantra as I followed Mel out of the city, past tourists and police cars, past strip malls and bars and discos, past neon signs insisting on the brightness of everything while advertising brands popular in Beijing. At one point I heard a yell behind me and pedalled harder, imagining myself arrested and forced to confess everything. Yes, officer, I have set off for distant worlds without the means or intention to return. No, officer, I have not taken a single breath of this life or any other for granted.
But nobody noticed as we fled the fabled city. For a while the road followed the Kyi River, a tributary of the Yarlung Tsangpo, the longest river in Tibet and the upper section of the Brahmaputra. After a few hours we saw a police officer statue on the side of the road ahead, his face expressionless, his one concrete arm raised in a stiff command to stop. As Mel rode by she gave him a mock high-five.
—
The river and road squeezed through a narrow gorge over the next few days. Traffic was minimal except for livestock. At one point a yak leapt out of a ditch directly in front of me, so I slammed on my brakes, as did the bus approaching in the opposite lane. The yak was fine, but my front tire hissed flat. I stopped to fix it while Mel kept an eye on the creature, now grazing placidly in the ditch on the far side, sweeping the grass with the black broom of its tail. There was a thorn in my front tire, so I pulled it out, patched the inner tube, and pumped it up, only to discover another thorn in my rear tire. When I tried to extract it, the tube deflated. As I patched this second flat, I saw that the sidewall of my rear tire was ripped and bulging, distending the wheel out of true. This was my “new” tire, lugged all the way from Istanbul and swapped into rotation in Tajikistan when my previous tire wore thin. We had no more spares.
A Chinese cyclist, the first we’d seen since before Lhasa, caught up with us and shared some Tibetan bread slathered with hot sauce. He was also heading to Nepal, he told us in broken English, and we knew he’d beat us there when we heard how far he biked each day. “One hundred, maybe 150 kilometres?” Mel and I stared at him: we were barely managing eighty. The three of us rode together for a few hours, which is to say he left us behind on the climbs on his lightly loaded mountain bike, and we passed him on the descents thanks to the heavy ballast of our expedition gear. When Mel and I decided to camp at two in the afternoon (we’d been biking since before dawn), he seemed mystified. “But what will you do now?” he asked, as if there was nothing to do on a bike trip besides bike. Read, write, nap, we told him. Watch the Tsangpo surge by the tent, that torrent of silt and sound. Rest up so we can wake up and do it all over again tomorrow.
The narrow river canyon widened into a broad valley with a Siberian flair: pale blue skies, spiky clusters of trees, a wide, sluggish churn of water seeking the sea. In some places the river flooded its banks, swamping trees up to their lowest branches, so that they looked like people with their arms raised in protest or surrender. Signs of industrial and military activity were rampant: train tracks under construction, some kind of immaculate air force or military base, mysterious explosions across the valley when we camped at night.
Yet there were fewer Chinese flags on display southeast of Lhasa, especially past the second-largest city of Shigatse, as well as fewer police cruisers. Tibetan villages wafted the incense of burning juniper, sage, and yak dung. Neat fields of wheat and barley flourished in every flat place, and women sang in high warbling voices as they worked in them. Some children ran beside us for the final kilometre up a high pass, barely panting as we breathed hard in the thin air. At the top we saw sharp, glinting peaks in the distance, but clouds masked Chomolungma. The road down twisted and turned beside a turquoise river, th
en stopped just short of Shelkar, or New Tingri, where we waited until dark to sneak across the most daunting checkpoint of all.
According to what we’d gleaned from cycling forums and blogs, all vehicles, including bikes, were forced to stop at this checkpoint to show papers. An Australian cyclist had biked this route with a guide as part of a tour group, looking for loopholes to avoid having one in the future. He concluded that this checkpoint was impossible to sneak across: the military complex had two guardrails and immediately following it was a bridge over a river, so that to sneak around required fording that flow. Earlier that spring, an American cyclist successfully snuck from Golmud to here without a guide or a permit, but he was so daunted by this checkpoint that he gave up and turned himself in. In his case, the guards glanced over his passport, detained him for a while, then let him go, possibly because he was two days from exiting Tibet anyway. But after coming so far, Mel and I didn’t want to risk being stopped now, plus the American had mentioned a promising lead: apparently a dirt track veered off the road just before the checkpoint, possibly offering a detour. The problem was we couldn’t find it. Everything else about Shelkar matched the cyclist’s vague description of the checkpoint: It was just after a rise, in the main town before the turnoff to Everest Base Camp. There was a guardrail, a long corridor of buildings, and a bridge over a river on the far side of town. All that was missing was the dirt track.
To the left of our hiding spot a flock of sheep and goats with bells around their necks grazed, sounding like wind chimes. A scrawny Tibetan shepherd in his teens wandered over to the gravel ridge we crouched behind, trying to stay out of sight until nightfall. The boy sat on his haunches about three metres away, staring at us expressionlessly. If we hadn’t been so exhausted, terrified of the night to come, and worried he might alert someone to our presence, Mel and I would’ve been friendlier. As it was we ignored him, which was easy because he made no attempt to interact with us. He just sat and stared as we wrote in our journals, then dozed, then cooked the usual round of instant noodles for dinner. It was a relief when he finally walked away to tend to his sheep.
Later that evening, though, I ran into him while scoping out a possible “high route” above town, one I hoped might circumvent the checkpoint by hugging the grassy slope to the left of the main road. He waved me over with a friendly grin and offered me his soda bottle, which was full of a white, yogurt-like drink that tasted refreshing and slightly bubbly. He insisted that I keep the bottle and give the rest to Mel, who was back with the bikes, then waved goodbye and hustled over to his flock. I walked back to our hiding spot sickened by the fact that we’d eaten right in front of him and hadn’t offered to share, as if we couldn’t spare the food or the time, as if we’d been wearing face masks for so long they stuck to us even after we’d taken them off.
—
There was no point in wearing face masks or flying the Chinese flags that night. Darkness was the only disguise we needed. It was drizzling when we set off at midnight. Since there was no road or trail we had to heave the loaded bikes across the uneven slope, occasionally flicking our headlights on and off again to glean the lay of the land without exposing ourselves. We stumbled blindly for an hour until we reached the far edge of town, long past the checkpoint, and crossed the bridge leading away. Home free.
A transport truck roared past us, its high beams revealing the twists and turns of the road, which angled gently downhill so that we surged along it without pedalling, without any sense of distance or dimension. So many stretches of the Silk Road were more familiar to me as constellations than countries. When the truck came to a stop a kilometre or so ahead, where some lights flickered, we figured that had to be the turnoff to Everest Base Camp. As we got closer, the lights resolved into a corridor of buildings blocked by guardrails: the checkpoint we thought we’d already circumvented.
Mel and I quietly chorused a range of curse words, then backtracked to search for the rumoured track before the checkpoint. Sure enough, as the American cyclist described, a dirt track angled off from the main road roughly half a kilometre before the buildings. We rode down it until the terrain got so muddy we had to walk the bikes. This turned out to be a good thing, because it meant less weight on the tires when we rolled over the broken glass that suddenly glittered everywhere, a spill of stars. For the record, for the sake of all future explorers, let it be known that this dirt track dead-ends at a dump.
We struck off cross-country toward the river, collecting pounds of mud on our shoes and wheels in the process. As we travelled the dark side of the Silk Road, I had the alarming sensation of bumping up against something huge and shapeless, over and over again. Perhaps it was just my heart trying to batter its way out. We reached the shore only to realize the river was too fast and deep to ford. The only way across was the bridge immediately after the checkpoint, which we could see now by the light of a guardhouse. That same building cast the only shadow available for cover, so we crept into it, unnervingly close to the soldiers I could see milling around inside. I hoped all they could see, if they glanced out the window, was their own reflection.
Mel and I waited at the bottom of the embankment leading up to the bridge. It was maybe ten feet high with what seemed to be a sixty-degree slope, though these dimensions were no doubt warped by nerves. A truck passed, and in the cover of its noise Mel climbed up to the road, then disappeared into darkness across the bridge. I tried to follow her up the embankment but my bike was so freighted with mud I could barely move it. I got halfway up before sinking to my knees, fully exposed in the light of the guardhouse. Then a vehicle started up, and fear volted through my veins. I heaved the bike’s front wheel onto the road, squeezed the brakes to hold ground, and hauled myself up. Only when I’d pushed beyond the glow of the guardhouse did I stop to catch my breath, which is when I saw a wedge of light widening behind me.
I jumped on and tried to pedal, but so much mud embalmed my chain and derailleur that the cranks wouldn’t turn. I clawed at the mud and tried again. The bike lurched forward, gaining speed as it shed weight. There was no sound except for mud hitting the guardrails of the bridge, my heart, some dogs barking, the swish, swish of my splash pants. I accelerated past Mel—who was waiting in the darkness on the far side of the bridge—and into a ditch. She followed a few seconds later, just before the vehicle passed. We looked up to see a dozen Tibetan men and women sitting on piles of stuff in the rear of a pickup truck, staring down at us in astonishment. Every heartbeat is a history of decisions, of certain roads taken and others forsaken until you end up exactly where you are. I raised my hand to wave but the vehicle roared off into the night. Nothing remained between us and Nepal except two breathlessly high passes followed by a four-vertical-kilometre plunge off the Tibetan Plateau, down through the clouds. We arrived in Zhangmu a few days later, just after the Chinese-Nepal frontier compound had closed for the day. It was pouring rain. The warm air smelled of soaked earth and flowers and green growing things, almost honeyed in its richness, its surfeit of oxygen. We stood at the closed gate of the Chinese border compound, soaked and exhausted, until the guards took pity on us and invited us to stand under the roof.
—
“Passports?” one of them asked, so we handed them over.
“Where is your Chinese guide?” another inquired. Mel dug around in her backpack and pulled out a guidebook, beaming a bland innocence.
The guards were not amused, but they were eager to go home. They ushered us into a small office where one of them gestured that Mel and I should sit down on a pair of rather posh leather chairs. We declined, pointing out how wet and muddy our splash pants were: we’d ruin the leather. The officer smiled for the first time and then firmly reiterated that we were to sit down. Once we did, he typed details from our passports into a computer in the office. After a while he disappeared with our documents, closing the door behind him.
Mel and I waited in the tiny room without speaking. The clamminess of my clothes felt wetter if
I fidgeted so I stayed still, though my mind was bouncing off the walls. The most severe consequences we’d heard of cyclists facing after sneaking into Tibet was getting booted out again, but in recent years, few people had managed to travel here independently at all, and Chinese policies changed all the time. There was no guarantee they wouldn’t make an example of us. If it came to that, I vowed to write about Tibet from behind bars if necessary, whatever it took to fulfill my second duty as an explorer. Even Marco Polo had managed to dictate his travel book from jail, and lacking a laptop or paper, I could scratch oracle-bone-like symbols into the walls, conveying thousands of kilometres of the Silk Road with a few symbols: wings, fences, stars, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The guard opened the door and handed us our passports. We stared uncomprehendingly. “You can go,” he clarified in a voice so sincere and large-hearted I was sure he was lying. Mel and I thanked him, just in case he wasn’t, and did our best to wipe the leather seats clean with gloves that were almost as muddy as our pants. Then we scooted outside as fast as we could without looking like we were trying to get away with something.
I kept expecting to be called back, to be scolded, to at least pay a fine, but nobody bothered us as we left the Chinese border compound and wheeled our bikes very calmly toward Friendship Bridge, which links Nepal with Tibet across the Bhote Koshi river. The air was dense and humid, a hot, wet felt against my face. The metal cleats on my bike shoes clacked dully on the damp concrete of the bridge. I thought about David-Néel, tried to mimic the wilderness of sky in her step. I thought about the pilgrims, moving through the world as if their most immense responsibility to it was wonder. The bridge seemed to go on forever, though it was only a few dozen metres long. On the far side Mel and I stopped at the first restaurant we saw and ordered everything deep-fried on the menu.