Kingdoms of Experience

by Andrew Greig

  On the Loose in Lhasa

  10TH – 16TH MARCH

  ‘Yes we’re going to a Lhasa party …’

  This is it at last. Tibet, the high country, the Forbidden Kingdom, the near-mythical land resonating from childhood books. We stand blinking in the fiercely bright early morning sunlight on the tarmac at Lhasa Airport, and look for fifty miles across the brown Tibetan plateau and its flanking hills. I look up into the depths of the dark blue empty sky. The jet engines wind down.

  ‘This is the business,’ Jon says quietly.

  The four-hour coach ride to Lhasa itself is joy for all except Malcolm and Andy Nisbet. Our leader had distinguished himself by occupying the airplane’s toilets both taking off and landing, and now hangs white-faced out of the window, looking down at the dust. ‘Must have been 1,000 that 1,000-year-old egg,’ he groans again. ‘A thousand beers more like,’ Liz retorts firmly, resolutely unsympathetic. The rest of us are raised, light-headed and high, high on altitude and the excitement of the new. The altitude of 3,600 metres has a noticeable effect when one flies straight to it. We begin the three-month discipline of breathing slowly and deeply, moving economically, monitoring ourselves all the time.

  The road follows the mirror-smooth river Tsang Po towards Lhasa. Sunlight flashes from the oars of an inflated hide raft; someone waves and the gesture remains etched in the air long after it’s over. At every bend in the road and river, every bridge, at the corners of the fields, there are little cairns of stones, and on them prayer flags attached to bamboo twigs. They bob and ripple in the breeze: red, yellow, white against the sky, colours strong and simple as our joy. Our heads are turning, turning, wanting to miss nothing. A flock of miniature sheep; Red Army soldiers looking cool and pissed off in shades as they supervise the road-building, carts piled high with Tibetan road-workers. A tall, shy girl laughs as a young man pulls off her dusty face-mask for the camera. They wave, or stare back at us with equal curiosity. These are mountain people: high cheekbones, a slight ochre-mahogany about their complexions, strong noses, almond eyes like a classic Buddha’s or glimpsed in Archaic Greek statues, long black hair coiled up on their heads. Their racial and cultural connections with the Nepalese, Afghanis and Baltis are evident; they also echo features of the North American Indians. Like other mountain people, they laugh, stare directly, seem unburdened by their hard lives.

  Sandy leans forward behind me and murmurs, ‘It’s getting so I feel more at home out here than when I’m home. The mountain villages are my home.’ He could be reading my heart, which is full with a sense of returning, of coming home to a world I’d known in Baltistan. Mountain living and mountain people; transparencies of light and colour; clarity of thought and feeling, a way of life uncluttered as the landscape; a sensation of elevation and lightness even while the body is made heavy and weak through lack of oxygen. The mountain villages of Tibet, Baltistan, and Nepal, seem like the last remnants of an original world, one long since flooded, leaving only these fragments clinging on in high places.

  Dave The girls have brilliant pink or emerald green head-dresses. They are so alive – mahogany faces with a blank look until you wave or say hello and then they all, without fail, grin all over with glistening white teeth and transformed, pretty faces. And they are very pretty – and shy, many hiding as soon as you produce a camera, with the men young and old asking for their photos to be taken. Total poverty.

  A shattering experience – the air – the mountains – the people, all in one morning. The transition from 707 to a dirt track in 160 feet, from an airport to medieval dwellings in half a mile. Yet the most natural warmth I’ve ever seen, better than the mercenary warmth of Rio.

  Meanwhile Sandy muses to himself what his life would be without climbing and expeditions. It’s been so long now, he can only remember that ordinary life was not enough. Yet climbing, one expedition after another, can become its own sort of treadmill. Hey, youth, you’re nearly 30, what are you doing with your life? These moments of doubt … Then, looking out across Tibet, certainty.

  We entered Lhasa in the afternoon, a hotch-potch of half-built hotels and wide, planned streets on the outskirts; concrete, corrugated iron, narrow alleyways and traditional Tibetan houses clustered in the old centre. Their walls incline towards each other and would meet at some blue unmarked apex several hundred feet up; the windows repeat that configuration, which at once suggests great sturdiness yet elegance in its tapering line. The colours are strong and simple: dazzling white, black surrounds, ochre, green, yellow, and blue on the eaves and shutters and awnings.

  Then someone points and for the first time we see the Potala – former residence of the Dalai Lamas, home of the living incarnation of God, the ancient centre of government of feudal Tibet. It is lodged high on a rock outcrop in the centre of the city, looking like a great ocean liner run aground; brilliant white trimmed with black and a particular sacred shade of ochre beneath the eaves, deck after deck rising to flat roofs on many different levels, topped with what look like gold funnels, glinting in the sun. It is quite unsymmetrical, the result of organic accretion rather than planning, yet the result is harmonious. It is one of those few buildings that transcend building altogether and hit straight to the heart. The coach turns down a wide boulevard and the vision disappears.

  Our hotel is a row of rooms strung together along one side of a dusty compound. The rooms are pleasingly plain and clean, but we’re being charged £90 per person per night for them. These exorbitant rates are set for expeditions and organized groups, though enterprising individuals can find rooms for around £2. That and the transport charges make expeditions in Tibet prohibitively expensive.

  It was here that the famous Chinese efficiency fell apart, precipitating us into our first major crisis. The news was broken in typical fashion. Through Jack, Luo warned us this was the windy season and we should wrap up well going into the mountains. We thanked him for his kind thoughts. Then came the punchline. ‘Unfortunately, due to this bad weather, some of your luggage is delayed in Chengdu.’

  What?! Why didn’t they tell us when we were in Chengdu and could have done something about it? They probably didn’t want to lose face and admit something had gone wrong. The luggage in question turns out to be some 200 boxes, including many barrels of climbing gear, the oxygen cylinders, and all our camping gas – the consignment we’d rushed desperately to have sent out a month in advance, because the Chinese wouldn’t carry gas or oxygen on internal flights so they had to go by road and rail from Peking to Lhasa.

  Jack and Luo are embarrassed, while the local CMA man smirks, unconcerned and unapologetic. We insist on a phone call to Chengdu, from where we are assured that our luggage will be flown promptly to Lhasa. How long will it take? ‘Three days’ is the reply. This will not only cost a deal of extra money in hotel bills, but also foul up the transport arrangements from here on in. Above all, we are worried about the gas and oxygen. If the Chinese stick to their ban on transporting it by air, then it would take three weeks to arrive by road – in which case we might as well go home. But we dare not ask directly about this volatile consignment in case they’ve overlooked its nature.

  Tense times in the hotel Reception. Dave Bricknell is in his element. As Pilkington’s Company Secretary he’s been involved in delicate and stressful negotiations all over the world. He knows one must never back the Chinese into a corner where they may lose face. Instead pressure must be applied softly softly, with the velvet glove of compliments and the merest hint of the iron fist beneath.

  This sort of thing: ‘We in the Pilkington Everest Expedition are very grateful for all the help and co-operation offered by the Chinese Mountaineering Association, in meeting the arrangements made in Peking.’ (This to remind both Luo and the local CMA man of their bosses in Peking, and of their answerability if anything goes wrong.) ‘Now we are told some of our luggage is delayed in Chengdu.’ (The merest hint of a reproach in that ‘now’.) ‘We accept that this is not your fault.’ (He is
offering them a face-saving way out, while at the same time that ‘accept’ as opposed to ‘know’ hints at the opposite of what it says. He follows this up and underlines the point.) ‘We believe that this is because of bad weather.’ (Meaning, we don’t necessarily believe this at all, but we’re prepared to accept your excuse.) ‘We need your help in sorting this out quickly, for the protocol agreed on in Peking allows only for two days here. We are confident that you can help us resolve this situation.’ (The repetition of ‘Peking’, reference to our previous financial agreement, the first suggestion that any costs outside that should be met by the CMA, the scrupulous ‘confident’, at once flattering and sceptical. A masterly performance all delivered clearly, carefully, politely but with considerable firmness.)

  The Chinese assure us that our luggage will arive here soon. They suggest we leave on schedule for Everest and our luggage will catch us up. Dave looks at Sandy, who’s effectively Leader because Mal’s out of it with his hangover. Sandy shakes his head firmly. Without oxygen, gas and personal gear we can do nothing; we can’t move on till it comes.

  The Chinese assure us again that our luggage will be arriving soon, but ask what alternative plans we have if it doesn’t. This is very worrying. Sandy clears his throat ‘Our alternative plans are we go home.’

  A meeting is arranged for the next morning. We discuss the situation in our rooms; Dave sets out the various power ploys at our disposal. We can threaten to call off the trip – that would certainly look bad for the CMA and the Chinese Government (Dave has casually mentioned the media coverage of our Expedition). Trouble is, they know this is something we have no intention of doing. We can argue that the considerable expense of delay here must be borne by the CMA so it’s in their interests to hurry it up – but they can reverse that argument and say seeing it’s our expense we should set off and let our luggage follow. And there’s the ticklish question of the gas and oxygen.

  A crisis like this happens on practically every expedition. Very occasionally it means the end. Always it means anxiety. We had begun to think China would not be like that. Sandy sums it up as we disperse for bed, worried and slightly headachy, ‘It’s not a problem … Actually, it’s pretty bad!’

  We woke to uplifting Chinese music from the army barracks over the wall, and sparrows quarrelling in the dust. I lay with a mild altitude headache, watching the curtain-shadow flicker on the blue ceiling and wondering when I’d lie here again and after what experiences.

  Resting at altitude is like convalescing after illness; there’s the same sense of light-headed clarity and almost pleasurable weakness. From now on we had to discipline ourselves to drinking at least 9 pints of fluid a day, which, along with husbanding one’s resources and not becoming hassled, is the crux of looking after oneself at altitude. The raw, inflamed throats and mucus-filled sinuses, the irritating and inescapable symptoms of being at altitude, had already started though we were only at some 3,600 metres.

  I drank three mugs of tea while Allen Fyffe did his daily yoga routine. His self-discipline and quiet organization marked out the old hand. He seemed less grim and forbidding now, gifted with a Scottish, sardonic humour. We discovered a mutual liking for what Jon calls ‘old hippie music’ and talked for hours about obscure bands of the ’60s. If anything irritated or upset Allen, he kept it to himself. Mature behaviour: expressing negative emotions is not appropriate to long expeditions, where tolerance, tact and self-control are more important than emotional honesty.

  Over breakfast, Dave Bricknell was cosseted like a prize-fighter for his meeting with the Chinese. In the event, they assured us that our gear would arrive that night or the next day, so there was nothing we could do but wait and hope and acclimatize. And explore Lhasa …

  The Lhasa bazaar is one of the last great ethnic experiences. It has been going on essentially unchanged for centuries, though it may well not survive the planned onslaught of Western tourists. It centres round a quadrangle in the heart of the old town, backing on to the Jo-Kang temple. It is this mingling of pilgrimage and trading that creates the character of the place.

  The people: Red Guards both Chinese and Tibetan, shaven monks in ochre robes, the tall Lhasa girls with jet-black hair and almond eyes, traders and shop-owners, pilgrims prostrating themselves in the streets, local wide-boys dealing in style and black-market currency, nomadic families in from the hinterland on their annual visit to sell skins and produce, going to the shrines, and buying the few necessities they don’t make themselves. The varied crowd moves clockwise round the rectangle of streets, clockwise being the religious direction, the direction in which the universe turns. We walk anti-clockwise, meeting Tibet face-on, overwhelmed by colour, sound, smell and sights. Soldier, monk, trader, farmer, nomad, all the immemorial trades jostle here. And now we climbers, the only Westerners in sight. To wander the streets of the Lhasa bazaar is to walk past all the ways your life might once have been.

  The nomadic families are sheep-on-two-legs, clothed mostly in skins and smelling strongly of them. They are dark and weathered, at once shy and aloof, as if carrying something of the silence and solitude of the high Tibetan plateau around with them in the midst of this crowd. Many men carry a long knife on one hip and a short skean dhu type knife on the other. Both sexes wear their shining hair long, commonly braided up on their heads with a string of turquoise beads and real or artificial coral. Some wear big lumps of turquoise hanging from their ears, so heavy that a loop is sometimes worn over the ear to stop the lobe being painfully stretched.

  We were stared at as much as we stared. Our clothes and beards amused the locals, while crowds would gather round to examine Andy Nisbet’s wild red hair. Allen’s balding pate was also found to be very entertaining, and several people ran their hands over it with giggling curiosity. We were obviously still something of a novelty, particularly at this time of year. Not for long. The Chinese expect 5,000 visitors to Tibet in 1985, 40,000 the next, 100,000 the next – making one tourist for every ten Tibetans. Thus the huge hotels being built on the outskirts of Lhasa in such labour-intensive, furious haste.

  At staging-posts around the bazaar, huge pot-bellied incense burners puffed the smoke of sacred aromatic shrubs into the air already redolent with yak butter, meat, joss sticks and drying skins. We pushed our way slowly into the human flow in a daze of sensory over-stimulation, past the stalls and shops selling daily produce, plastic gewgaws, religious offerings, souvenirs and texts, prayer-scarves and prayer-flags, books, new and antique knives, silver, brass, pewter, bells, bowls, incense-burners, candles, teeth and scriptures and Abba cassettes.

  It’s a place to which one needs to return several times – once to take pictures, once to haggle and buy, once to participate, once to observe and once for the sheer delight of it. We were frequently approached by money-changers wanting to exchange Chinese renmindbi for our official tourist currency to allow them to buy goods in the Tourist shops that accept only the tourist yuan (30–50 per cent extra remimbi is a reasonable rate to bargain for). Locals and nomadic men and women want to sell knives off their hips, necklaces and lumps of coral and turquoise, rings off their fingers, yak bells and medallions. We felt ambivalent about buying these personal possessions.

  Negotiations attract amiable and curious crowds of onlookers; it is slightly claustrophobic being so surrounded, but in fact the situation was always hassle free. One has to enter into the spirit of bargaining as a game. Prices were written on the back of the hand; one would shrug, register sheer disbelief, regret or amusement at the price, then write another on the seller’s hand. He or she would then reel back in smiling astonishment, but quickly come back with another price. At that point one reveals that one knows the difference between yuan and renmindbi, and serious bargaining may then take place. They were scrupulously honest, even in the mildly illegal money-changing, which frequently entailed the other fellow holding your money as he bargained and counted out his. A woman pursued me through the crowd to return 5 renmindbi change I’d
forgotten to pick up.

  Dave Elsewhere in the streets you see a mixture of Tibetans in traditional dress, in Chinese dress, and Chinese. But in the bazaar virtually all were in traditional dress of various types – heavy black multi-layered skirts, jackets and aprons, with bright head-dresses; very heavy sheepskin jackets and trousers, marvellous fur hats – some with gold and silver embroidery. Fascinating and fascinated. You only had to stop for two minutes and a crowd was around you, offering goods, wanting to have their photos taken, all happy and delighted to see you. I’ve never been so relaxed.

  Allen, Bob, Sandy, Urs and I all bought cowboy-style hats to protect us from the wind and fierce sun of the Tibetan plateau. They particularly suited the small and slightly bow-legged Allen Fyffe and his larger side-kick Bob, and from then on the duo were known as ‘the Glenmore cowboys’ from the outdoor centre at which they both worked.

  Expeditions develop their own fashions as well as catch-phrases. On this one it was cowboy hats and prayer-scarves knotted round the throat. They were felt to be ‘good joss’ and wouldn’t be removed till we arrived back in the UK. Most of us had our talismans. Bob’s was a felt mouse, a childhood toy of his wife Anna. It had already been to the top of Kalanka and Baghirathi. Mal’s was a champagne cork, but for the first time he’d forgotten it in the rush and pressures of putting the trip together. He tried to attach no significance to this. Rick wore a necklace given to him in Kathmundu. With Sandy it was his Peruvian hat, for Jon his Rasta hat. Dave Bricknell had Jewish lucky money from his wife Ilush. One becomes superstitious, reading significance into the smallest event, when life may depend upon luck and an indefinable intuition as much as skill and rational judgement. I fingered the round stone hanging from my neck that Kathleen had placed there with briefly serious tenderness that last night in London …