tafang

or in English: landslide.

And that’s all the two following posts are about - a bunch of landslides. Nothing really exciting happens. No one dies - although Bing did look like he might. My macpac doesn’t end up in the river - even if at one point I was sure it would. I don’t get in a fight with a broken beer bottle - I don‘t even come close.
And yet … I could have said even more. I didn’t mentioned the two cages of black Tibetan puppies that belonged to one of the drivers and were stacked next to his seat, or the weird, stylish French family with the extrovert wife who pull up in a land cruiser just before the second disaster is averted, and with whom the Deguos bond in record time.

Anyway, before I make it longer...

One doesn’t ask how many hours the bus from Lhasa to Deqin takes, at least not seriously. I was told two days. It was more than that, three I think, but my memory is fuzzy. Time took on a surreal and irrelevant quality.
I know we left in the morning, and then it was morning again, and then things get blurry.

During the first night after the evening meal stop, the driver called us off the bus three times so he could negotiate dangerous patches of road without a full load. The first time was because of a big rock. But it didn’t take much time for us to extend some ground around it the vital number of inches, using clumps of grass, soil, and stones that had come down with it, and a couple of concrete markers which were uplifted, then carried over. The next stop was at a skinny wooden bridge about fifty metres long. There were gaps between the planks and the bus lights shone from behind as it revved, impatient, I imagined, for Bing and I to get across to the other side where everyone else was. Poor Bing, always last out and last back on.

Morning. The bus has stopped. There are voices. I crawl out into the dawn. We’re next to a roaring muddy river sided by rocky mountains, their barren tips just touched by sun, mist rising in patches. This pristine beauty is just what I’d hoped for - so much better than the official truck-stops which encourage dingy clusters of over-priced restaurants, each with a blaring T.V, and nestled in a circumference of litter which doubles as a toilet.

I wander up the road to the landslide. There are only a couple of trucks in front of the bus. A waterfall gushes down the mountain and over what had been the road, to the river not far below; sludge and huge rocks fan out. In this still, clear dawn, the scene looks so solid and permanent, that its hard to imagine that all this suddenly whooshed down in the night - or that it will be cleared away any time soon. Some women from the bus have gathered at the place where the water is hitting the road. I carefully pick my way over to them. They’ve brought soap and toothbrushes and make a space for me to perch on a rock and wash my face in the cold torrent.

Some blue horse trucks strung with prayer flags and talismans have also stopped. Men, whose jet black hair is plaited with shanks of red cotton and looped through large bone rings, forage for wood. It’s wet from rain in the night but they still manage to get a roaring fire going. I help, and am rewarded with smiles of approval and even a marriage proposal. It's embarrassing how little a foreigner has to do to impress, or rather what low expectations people must have that we are capable of doing anything practical. Big pots and teapots filled with river water are soon boiling. Sacks come out; handfuls of what looks like bark, salt, and then yak butter are added. By now I’ve pulled up a rock and am settled with my book and plastic cup. I lean over to have it filled with tea, add an instant coffee sachet and stir it in with a twig. There is much laughter and talk, in both Tibetan and Mandarin. I understand very little. It’s way too fast and the accents confuse me. But I can pick up on the mood without any trouble; its like a big picnic.

A few monks and nuns zip windbreakers over their red robes - in response to the morning chill.
Bing emerges briefly, waves, has a piss, then disappears back into the bus. The two other foreigners from the bus wander over. They previously haven’t acknowledged me and have conversed to each other in German. They sit down with a group of men who are mixing a tsampa paste (barley flour and Yak butter tea) in their palms, and start chatting in Mandarin. Mandarin? An onslaught of jealousy and self-recrimination hits as I gauge that theirs is better than mine, followed by (very) mild (almost non existent) guilt at my childish reaction. I look in their direction but again, no acknowledgement. I console myself that these young upstarts have almost certainly benefited from the luxury of full-time language study without having to work. And no doubt studied Chinese in Germany(Deguo) before coming to China. Finally I turn and break into their conversation, speaking to them in Mandarin. They've been at Beijing uni for 1 year and yes, studied Mandarin throughout their degrees in Germany. They don’t ask me about myself - how, for example, my Chinese is so great - but I settle back, smug and vindicated, convinced that I too would be a brilliant conversationalist given similar unfair advantages.

Vehicles are piling up. More pots filled with water are appearing. One of the Deguos is taking photos and showing people their digital images. I have another Yak butter tea (su you cha) and Nescafe and start to read my book. I think maybe I'm onto something with this drink. Maybe there's a niche market out there waiting to be tapped. Sadly, Black Earth, the book about post Soviet Russia has been completed. I left it at the last guesthouse ruthlessly plundered (in keeping with the subject matter) of the pages with quotes I’d especially liked, and the front and back pages which I’d written all over. Now I’m onto my last book of the trip: The End of California, a contemporary American novel in virginal condition, clearly unread. What will it be like by the time I' ve finished with it? I found it at my local café where I'm forced to get most of my reading material by swopping two for one.

Little groups have formed around tsampa, kettles, and boxes of cooked meat, potatoes and bread. I dip a piece of da bing (large round flat bread) in my drink. The men use long, straight knives to hack the side branches off larger pieces of wood for the fire.
And then, from the other side of the landslide, accompanied by soldiers in camouflage gear who look to be about fifteen, a smallish grader appears. Now the sun has reached the river. Bing emerges once again and we take a slow walk until he finds a slab of concrete to stretch out on. His back is bad. I turn and look back at the colourful groups around the fire, feeling a little guilty at how much I’m enjoying it all, while he's in such discomfort. He looks up and gives me a stoic smile, then checks his special watch and tells me we‘re at 3500 metres. I make a long shadow. The Peruvian looking Tibetan hat we’d picked up from a stall in Lhasa is now misshapen from being squashed in the bus. The other Deguo strolls past, deep in conversation with an engaging young girl.

The grader huffs black smoke with gusto, but appears ant-like in proportion to its Herculean task. And as I scrutinise the painstaking manoeuvring, I find myself thinking that if they’d only let moi at the controls I’m sure I’d have it cleared in no time. As you do. The boys in green work without a break, calmly and methodically lifting rocks one by one and tossing them down the bank. In fact, no one appears to fret or complain, maybe because landslides in summer are integral to this stretch of road. But even so, I’m unable to conceive of same experience in a Western context. People would be so, so uptight.

And then, by mid afternoon, the tafang is finally cleared, but no one seems to be in a huge hurry to get going. Traffic intermittently trickles across. People are entertained by the occasional over laden motorbike wobbling down into the now slow moving water, and then whizzing up in a touch and go flourish of spray and anxiety. Finally its our big green bus’s turn and I call Bing from his ledge. By the time he gets to the bus door, everyone else has piled on, and hands reach down to pull him up the steps.

moving on

It's overcast, which feels almost exotic after the weeks of blue skies that have blessed us. There's time for a walk around the temple before the bus leaves at 10. Bing's back is still not good, and I'm sipping my coffee, so we walk slowly through narrow alleys, dodging the long witches brooms and the morning activities of stall construction. I buy two little flat breads with red dots in the middle.
Mist is rising off the hills, incense puffs out of the burning mouths of white bulbous...ovens? (what do you call them?) where our alleyway connects with the main path. It's 8am and people are walking and rotating prayer wheels at a brisk pace. We merge into them. It seems fitting that this last morning is shown in muted colours.

When we get to the temple entrance we instinctively move to a empty area and stand apart from the activity:- the rows of people prostrating before the entrance, the moving tide still on their round, the buyers and sellers of pungent fuel for the fires.

And then something very small happens, which now when I think about it, reminds me of my last hours in Mumbai in 2002. Then, it had been a spring evening just before the monsoons. I’d said goodbye to the two friends I’d made in the previous week. The three of us had drunk chai at a rooftop restaurant which shared the same views as the sumptuous Taj Mahal Hotel a few doors down. And now I was down by the water, wandering aimlessly past the boats. The sun, a vague pink, blurred by the haze of pollution and humidity, was almost gone.

There were the usual Sadhus around The Gateway to India arch, hassling people to pay for a ritual blessing. And for once, softened by the awareness of imminent departure, I stopped and looked directly into the eyes of one of these holy charlatans. We smiled and before I knew it, had bargained a price. He said 150 rupies, I said 5, he said O.K, tied a red string round my wrist which I held out meekly, dropped some chalky white sweets into my palm, which I tipped into my mouth and swallowed, then marked my forehead with his dusted thumb.

The last strand of the string fell from my wrist a little over a year later. I’d been hoping to get back before that happened…another incident of sentimentality, where I secretly fashion a hybridised personal significance out of an ordinary moment - giving some definition to my typically western life, devoid of its own native culture of rituals and beliefs.

And now, there’s a young girl standing in front of me, looking determinedly up into my eyes and holding out a plastic bag of leafy branches for 1 kuai. I’m half way though saying ’no’ when I pull out a kuai and we make the exchange. For a few seconds I’m no longer an onlooker; I walk over to one of the smouldering fires and clumsily up-end my bag into it.

your path

(Looking from Wenbi Shan to Yu Long Xue Shan, Lijiang)

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step,
you know it's not your path.
Your own path you make with every step you take.
That's why it's your path.

Joseph Cambell

Mapped out

Maps make everything simple.
They eliminate uncertainty
and assure you that everything you need to know
is one dimensional.

I love pouring over them
and plotting destinations with my finger.
Each place is labelled with an interesting name
and they're all so close together.
I can go everywhere
from this god's-eye view.

It's only when you're dropped on the ground
that the ambiguity really hits you
that the straight and narrow
is filled with un-named forks
requiring endless blind choices and rejections

that left might be right
and foward might actually be back

Lhasa, settling in

Our second guesthouse doesn’t take too much finding, and I love it. I want to stay there, if not forever, then for months. It’s - yes - cheap, and the location is perfect. Our room is big, light and on the second floor of a 3 storeyed building which is wrapped around a sky lighted courtyard set in the tangle of laneways behind the road, just minutes from Jokhang Si (temple) . There are sheets and pillow cases on the twin beds. And not only that, they’re clean. Verandahs long enough to run along run outside the rooms and we feel comfortable leaving our door open to let the breeze and incense flow through. The boys who bring boiled water and empty the bins, occasionally duck their friendly, smiley heads in to see if all is well and maybe take a quick peak at the foreigner.
There’s a public shower down the laneway at the hairdresser’s, ( I get and inch cut off) and a toilet on the next level below along with a wash area, beneath a vast one-person-high, two-person-long mirror (and that’s a foreign, not a Chinese-person).

The manager is from Qinghai where Bing hails from, and as I’ve witnessed many times before, this common province of origin thing seems to carry a lot of weight. They behave like blood brothers.
A striking middle-aged Tibetan woman is in charge of the daily running. In the mornings she chants at the mirror while braiding her hair amongst the bustle of mostly Tibetan guests washing and chattering. Children stand on chairs to see themselves in the mirror; a little boy earnestly pats down his hair with water. The elderly are helped in and out of the toilet by younger relatives. They all turn to look at me, but quickly disguise their surprise and continue with their ablutions, sometimes stopping to ask where I was from.

The tables below in the courtyard soon fill with people, eating, joking and praying. The noise is soothing. I look longingly at their impossibly gorgeous clothes and the women's long snakey plaits tied together at the back. Am I being vacuous? Do I have to ask? I love those deep red woollen robes edged in bright multi-coloured, woven braid, and held together by belts studded in silver disks.

From the window opposite ours a small school-room delivers sounds of a Tibetan taught English class. I get all nostalgic to be back at work and voice dedicated intentions to wow them with a visit, but somehow don’t get around to it. And Bing doesn’t hear me anyway, he’s been fed with 3 bright yellow Chinese medicine headache pills and is fast asleep.

I wander, quickly getting lost in stall-lined alleys, and then caught up in the rabble following a clockwise rotation around the temple. They swing copper prayer wheels, finger prayer beads, and chant or talk. All along the path, people are buying and selling. Soon I’m at the main entrance to the temple. Smoke and incense beltch out of fires as they are fed juniper branches and barley seeds. I close my eyes to inhale the smell and absorb the sound of small hand-sized squares of cardboard or rubber sliding back and foward over the concrete as rows of people prostrate their bodies over and over, some bearing the grey stigmata circle on their foreheads caused by touching the ground an endless number of times.

They sell vegetables and spices outside the courtyard beneath our guesthouse. In the evening Bing buys grated carrot, zuccini and chopped mushrooms which he delivers, along with the olive oil, to our eating-place. He's starting to feel better.

The next day we circumnavigate the outside wall of the Potola deciding that at Y100 a ticket, it'll be more fun than filing around inside shoulder to shoulder with the stream of Chinese tourists and getting caught in their photo flashes. Bing notes that many of the long rows of the copper prayer wheels which were set along the wall last time he was here, have since been pulled up. Hopefully they have been put somewhere safe and will be replaced after some work has been completed. I stop to watch a chain gang of workers throwing stones onto the back of a truck and singing in time to the rythme of their bodies.
We make it most of the way round until we come to a high, plywood barrier blocking off the path. After climbing its supporting scaffold from opposite ends and poking our heads over the top, we see there's nothing on which to rest our feet going down side. The path at this point is sealed off on both sides, so we try the side opposite the monastery wall, rather than turn around. We end up on a roof and drop down onto some's wood pile in their backyard, appologising profusely as they come out to look at us. From there, we're able to eventually get back on track and complete the circle.

The day after, we circumnavigate the outside wall of another monastery out of town. I forget the name. From the cliff above and behind we get a birds eye view of all the tooings and frowings within, as if looking down on a doll's house with no roof.
Mostly our time in Lhasa is spent just wandering around the lanes, congratulating ourselves on the amazing weather and how wonderful our guest house is. I buy two silver bangles for friends and a pendant for myself. I find a western cafe I like and a few mornings go there to drink nescafe and read my book and just burrow into a corner. On my way out I chat with the owner's brother, who escaped Tibet as a child, was adopted by a British couple in India, then ended up settling in California. In a few years, when fully retired, he hopes to be back in Lhasa permanently and help with his niece's school. Bing is happy to stay at home and do washing or fluff around with all the noisy plastic bags which fill his pack.

Once after using the internet at an expensive hotel, I glance at the notice board in the foyer filled with requests for one or two extra people needed to complete group trips bound for places like Kang Rimpoche (Kailash), Nangze tso lake or Qomalangma feng (Everest). I feel a little wistful but I know Bing could never afford it, and my finances would be stretched to their limit. And anyway, we'd spend most of the time sitting in a jeep I tell myself. It's interesting just being here. I don't mind. Maybe next time... Our last day is spent trying to find a bus to Deqin. Each long-distance bus station has no idea what the other bus station is doing - but are sure they do. They either tell us there's no bus to Deqin, or direct us to the wrong bus station. We go to all four, or was it five? and the one we want is the last one.

On our final evening, we wander into a big Thanka shop aimed at the rich tourist on a buying spree. We move past rows of glass cases filled with artifacts to the back of the shop where rooms are lined with intricate floor to ceiling paintings of serene buddhas encircled by galaxies of heavenly beings and karmic stages far beyond my comprehension. An unusually discreet shop assistant mentions that they are painted by the monks. We don't speak; she backs off quickly, summing us up as not the buying types. The atmosphere is palpable. My feet tread small steps over the carpet. I'm awed by the skill and patience evident in the zillions of tiny figures, all acting out their own unique dramas against a patterned background of identical swirls. I'm glad that someone has had a wealth of time, and such an alternative approach to it, to spend it on such an activity.

I wish I could have seen such works back when I was a pathalogically shy graphic design student at Wellington Polytechnic. My parents thought they'd cleverly steered my disturbing artistic inclinations into a practical career. But I was quite out of step with the criteria required by advertising execs who directed the subjects, and who favoured bold slabs of shape and colour that could be quickly assimilated by the eye from far away. Realism and detail were considered fussy and archaic. Three years later I'd lost my way.
But the mass of line and pattern celebrated in those symetried, statuesque portraits, allowed me to feel like maybe I could find it again.

Then I notice it - the presence in the room. As well as the buddhas, there's silence; how long has it been since I've experienced it? Far back from the hustle of the lane...utterly quiet.

Can you say that silence is mystical? An academic friend recommended I read a book called Virtual Tibet which critiques and dismantles the 'mysticism' Westerners imbue Tibet with. I will, but I also found myself wondering if he were coming from a starting point where mysticism is automatically assumed to be implicitly and inherently a manufactured entity, without even acknowledging the assumption. There would then be no attitiude of inquiry, no sorting fake from true.

Lhasa

We fell off the bus in a tide of sweaty bodies. Beneath the glare of the midday sun, and amidst the cut throat scuffle for bags, all camaraderie was long spent. After extracting ourselves from the bus station, we did, what had by this time in our travels become a standard routine on dazed arrival in a new place, we wandered along the street and found a place to dump our bags, eat and rejuvenate before thinking about anything else.

We quickly found a little restaurant on the main street where we would continue to eat once a day for the rest of our stay. This also, was often the pattern. If we liked a place, having only the humble requirements of cheap, fresh vegetables and friendly service, we saw no reason to search for new eateries to frequent. The woman who placed our paper cups of green tea down, had a wide smile. Bing dug in his bag for a large, ridiculously heavy bottle of olive oil and disappeared into the kitchen to supervise the vegetable cooking. I’m left wondering to myself as to the origin of this new ostentatiously vegetarian-weirdo behaviour. He was a meat eater two weeks ago. As for me, I mutter to myself, I may be a vegetable eater who doesn’t like too much oil, but I’m flexible, I’m tolerant, and most of all, I so do not draw attention to myself. 'Women bu chi rou' (We don't eat meat') I hear him boom from behind the flimsy partition. But I have to admit, after a few more succulent meals under his directorship, I cease from cringing. The aberration is occasional, and the cooks don't seem to mind - on the contrary they bask in his praise and repartee. After they've finished cooking, the bottle of olive oil is always brought out and placed reverently on our table.

We had visits from four beggars and two lute players in the course of our meal. The musicians would do the rounds of the cheap eateries every evening, shouting and thrashing at their instruments until they were given something. It was understood by both parties that they were not being paid to play but to leave immediately. And I’m afraid their strategy was by far the most successful at divesting me of my change.

As a child I’d pulled the 1st edition hardcover of Seven Years in Tibet off the shelf of my father’s study, and have reread it a number of times since. Heinrick Harrier would’ve wept to see Lhasa now, and probably did in 1984 when he was among one of the first tour groups allowed to enter Tibet after its ‘opening’ up.
Bing had a little joke over the next few days where, every now and then, he would chant ‘Lhasa, Lhasa,Lha lha sa’, re-evoking the excitement of the bus-trip, and then ’women zai shenme difang? oh... Lhasa' (where are we?) it’s anti-climax. It was pretty funny. He doesn’t have much time for all this devoutness. He’s Hui Chinese (a Muslim minority group) and although he asserts his upbringing was not at all fundamentalist, he has rejected it in its entirety and it seems to have engendered a strong (but not stridently expressed) cynicism towards all forms of spiritual expression.

My first impression had not been good. The Potola was diminished and inconsequential behind buildings and traffic in the foreground as the bus had rolled in. But even amidst this discomforting awareness of the glaring banality caused by occupation and desecration, being in Lhasa was inevitably thrilling. Later on that first evening, when I stood directly beneath, looking up at the Potola, feeling so fortunate just to have made it there, my first assessment was forgotten.

After eating and taking stock, we’d wandered round searching for a CHEAP (you will meet this word many times in the following account) guesthouse. On the bus, I’d scrawled down some addresses from the Japanese guy’s Lonely Planet but everywhere was full or expensive. We ended up far away from the action, deep in the comparatively modern, un-atmospheric, Muslim quarter of town. There, we left our packs in a room filled to the brim by a small double bed and the essential T.V. The toilet was downstairs and trucks rolled past outside. I received looks not of curiosity but suspicion. But at Y15 each, who could complain? After paying, we quickly set off to find a public shower.

When we returned at 11pm, they were just about to give up on us and pull the roller-door down. Back in ‘the room’, I fleetingly noticed that the ceiling ran well above the walls leaving a large gap half hidden by a tinsel Christmas decoration and plastic grape vines, the TVs on either side of us were blaring, and that the bedding was like being on the bus at the end of the trip…then I was swept down a black tunnel into one of those anaesthetic, dreamless types of sleep.
Next morning the TVs were still on, or had started up again, but there was a thermos of boiling hot water by the door, I had some naan bread saved from the night before, and my book on Russia was waiting to be continued (the amazing Black Earth). I’d run down stairs and the toilet had been free, so everything needed for a good start to the day was supplied. I sat up in bed with my book and drank instant coffee out of the paper cup supplied by the establishment while Bing went out side to find a tree as the toilet was now not free in a big way.

Here I am, I thought, in Lhasa, staying amongst Muslims and my head is filled with Chechnya. How typical. When Bing returned I dictated that the morning's activity would be to find a (cheap) guesthouse close to the smell of incense and the sound of chanting.

Out on the street minutes later I found a joker, so we decided the guesthouse of our dreams was imminent. This practise of joker-finding was and is just a light hearted and corny game, but it’s fun. I’ve copied the habit off a friend who does the same, based on a book she lent me, in which a pack of cards come to life. China is the best place to find cards of any denomination as for some reason they are lying everywhere, on streets and mountain tracks, in rooms and gutters… I’ve taken to imbuing my jokers with good fortune, but I also find the diversity and surreal nature of the images ‘strangely compelling‘.

A foreign friend was a little bothered by all these discarded cards and decided that a mysterious custom must be at the bottom of it. No one he asked had any answers and this caused him to become convinced that the reason was a huge secret of conspiracy proportions. I’ve suggested that it’s probably just because people play cards out on the street and maybe the wind blows them away, or they like to use new packs and just abandon the cards after a game. But even so, he’s right, it does seem odd that when asked people don't seem to have noticed, or maybe they think that cards just lie around on the ground in every country...

My rule, which I usually stick to, is that I should not actively search for jokers. They must simply lie in my path, face up - actually seeking out and turning a card over I deem to be too obsessive. During our trip, Bing entered into the spirit of things and always professed surprise and amazement when a new joker appeared. From Lijiang to Panzhihua to Chengdu to Lanzhou to Xiahe to Xining to Geermu and now to Lhasa, I so far had nine, all different.

Thinking back from Deqin

Where do i start after so long?
Not at the beginning that's for sure.
So many thoughts and experiences have emerged, grown huge and overblown, and then faded into the undergrowth as more and more events and imaginings have sprung up. I've tried to snip at things with words - on scraps of paper, the insides of book covers and emails - but I haven't been quick or tidy or diligent enough. The trouble is that all these thoughts when left to their own devices - unrecorded, unprocessed and unused - don't just vanish, but instead, clog up my unconscious so that when I come to make something of it all, I'm faced with a vast chaos of clamouring voices.

Excuses, excuses...

I'll start with now, dear reader, (there should only be 3, at most 4 of you) and then range all over the place, leaping abruptly between a muddle of starting and ending points, tipping my hat to Pete's recent comments on the illusion of linear time.

When I think about my month long trip, which peaked in Lhasa and then came to a semi halt when we crawled into Deqin (a Tibetan town a few hours into a Tibet autonymous prefecture in Yunnan) at about 2am, I think of plaintive, yet energetic and melodic Tibetan singing. And while writing this in a Deqin guesthouse, as if on cue, a man in the next room starts. It's not a tune I could easily pick up, as I often can with Western popular songs. The notes move in unfamiliar directions and span greater range.

My Chinese friend, Bing, who has placed his bedding on the floor as a makeshift orthopedic measure, is still shell-shocked from the Lhasa-Deqin sleeper bus. But then, he never really got over the previous bus-ride from Geermu (Golmud). He's travelled that road many times before, but the other times were in trucks, where it was possible to sit up straight, and once on a bicycle. In the sleeper bus, whenever we hit a bump (seriously often) a collective whimper would resound down the aisles as we were each and every one of us flung against the ceiling or the bunk above.

We had tried to get on a truck in Geermu after the bus drivers had rejected me, but the truckies too, just looked at me and shook their heads, muttering about permits, fines and 'waiguoren' (foreigners). At last, just when we were ready to give up and go somewhere less mystical and a lot cheaper, a bunch of Muslims standing around their bus agreed on a permit-free price and gave us one hour before departure at midday.

So we scoot back to Bing's friend's bicycle club basement, park the bikes, grab our stuff, race back to the bus in a taxi, and we're off! yay!... round the corner to a workshop, in a particularly godforsaken region of the town where tired, greasy men work on the front left wheel for 3 and 1/2 hours. Then back on the bus! yay!... down the road to where, 10 minutes later it stops again. The two foreigners - me, plus a cool Japanese dude - and 8 Tibetans who are taking the bus over it's legal capacity, are ordered frantically off the bus and squashed into a mini van. Bing comes along for the ride. People are sitting on other people's knees, steaming up the windows and chattering excitedly. No one seems to know what's happening. We are driven about 45 minutes out of town and then dropped at an abandoned petrol station. Bing (following instructions from the driver, he says) officiously directs me and the jap to hide behind an ancient tractor until the bus appears within the hour. There's much cheering and congratulations as it draws to a halt and we jump back on.

And finally, at 4.30 pm, we really are off. Into the mountains. The bus is full of enthusiastic Tibetans. Chants of Lhasa, Lhasa, Lhasa, break out at every stupor, and at other times for no particular reason. They wave to peasants and herders in the fields. And they sing. I clap, sway and hum. The hills and pristine colours are stunning. It's early days. People have made a long bed of the aisles. Bags hang from every protrusion.

At 10 pm we stop. I slither down from my top bunk and gingerly place my first foot on something below, then duck under bags and scuttle over shifting bodies to the door. It's cool; snow on the nearby mountains; still and starry. The men stand, legs apart pissing down the bank beside the bus. The women walk further up the road and squat over the opposite bank. Then we wander into a muslim truck stop and are served piping hot noodles in clay pots from young girls wearing headscarves.

We lurch, sway and crawl onward. I'm in a middle bunk which has no sides so am unable to relax into sleep. I push my feet against the bed end, and grip the bar at my head to stay on. The driver's white fez is intermittently illuminated by the distant, silent sheet lightning. The singing and laughing continues, punctuated by droning prayers.

The next morning the stormy weather reaches us. Clouds film the mountains and wind buffets the bus. The rain starts to come in thru the sun-roof above Bing's bed. He has maintained an enigmatic silence for the course of the trip behind his beard, dark glasses and cap, nursing altitude sickness and back pain. Conversely, I think I must have what is termed 'high altitude genes'. The jap and I had earlier succumbed to the wishes of the mob and both sang a song indicative of our mother lands. I'd chosen a maori chant. But Bing would not be persuaded. He had remained curled shly in as much of a foetal position as possible in our coffin sized bunks while they whispered speculations as to whether he might be Korean or Japanese.

Now all and sundry scramble to staunch the flow of water onto his bed. Toilet paper and food wrappers are stuffed in gaps, and when this fails, a plastic bag is awquardly held under the leak by no less than 3 people until tied in place. For the rest of the trip long after the sun has come out again, it swings, forgotten, precariously full of water, in motion with the vehicle. Occasionally I look up at this orange hernia and wonder apathetically if it will burst.

The bus is now filled with rubbish, food scraps and dirt tramped in. All this time, the new and technologically ground breaking train whizzes back and forth over it's unique, elevated track, rubbing in how painstakingly slow and inadequate our progress is. I imagine its passengers languishing, clean, fed and toileted in pressurised carriages. It's hot and I'm dehydrated as a result of being afraid to drink in case I need to piss which would require crawling to the front of the bus and asking the stony faced driver to stop.

Finally, well into the next day at 1 pm, we limp into the flow of traffic of a seemingly typical Chinese town. I see Chinese signs, Chinese flags and lots of ugly tiled buildings. There is no more singing or chanting. Where are we? I ask Bing. Lhasa, he replies.