Train trip

Reading my last post is like returning to another life. A year later in Zhuhai, Bing and I would hug goodbye with tears in our eyes. The I would turn and get on the ferry across the channel to Hong Kong where I would spend the evening wandering Kowloon, and fly to Australia the next day. I did return to Lijiang and see him once more. We had lunch and wandered the streets. It was sad, but a more complete finish, and in that sense gave a wholeness to our friendship.

Now, 2 years later, I'm on a train.
My body is erratically jiggling, quivering, being moved. It's good to be on a journey again, even if it's only from Coogee to a small town on the Hawkesbury river - half an hour on a bus, and then an hour on the train. My small pack is leaning up against me, and my laptop is on my knees.
I'm wearing the marino hoodie my mum bought me in Otaki.
In it's pocket is something I received in the mail yesterday from the South Coast. I've been holding it off and on. I generally try not to infuse things with too much significance - the process feels a bit naff and inauthentic. But if one can remember that the objects are simply triggers or reminders of what is being generated within... Anyway, to me it represents the love of the friend who sent it to me, so I accept this talisman of her care gratefully.

I'm on my way to see someone. We've been estranged for two weeks now and more than anything, I need to make peace. There's a knot in my stomach. Beyond that I don't know. Perhaps this be my last trip and I'll break up with him. Perhaps we've already broken up. I'm already missing being out in the boat. That feeling of being swayed by the sea and the river. There will be pain and loneliness and self doubt, but perhaps also relief. I don't know. But something is no substitute for nothing.

Over the last two weeks, things have come into my life to support me. Z appeared out of nowhere after a 10 year gap. He was my first boyfriend. I first met him 30 years ago. He had a five hour stop over between Wellington and Bangkok and emailed to see if we could meet up. That was just after the telephone argument with my boyfriend. Z looked at me and laughed when we greeted each other. What? I said. Your gestures, he replied. They're exactly the same; they've never changed. Gestures? I'd forgotten what it was like to have someone know me like that. 'The way you move your hands, flick your hair, walk'. I felt like a sun was shining on me and I lapped up it's warmth. We got to Bar Coluzzi and ordered coffee and Portuguese tarts. My spot under the oak tree by the curb was waiting. I said the cosmos had sent him to me today.

He told me a story about when he was in the territorials as a teenager doing 3 months of voluntary army training. A maori guy in his dormitory went AWOL. He turned up 3 days later. His explanation was that he'd woken up in the night with a feeling that something was wrong at home and he had to be there. When he got there his wife was ill and needed to go to hospital. He took her and looked after their son. After a few days he was able to come back.
Z said he wanted to live on those kinds of intuitions; to feel and heed them, not to operate according to some rationale.

Me too.

tafang - the sequel

Long before we make it to Deqin, our three drivers have taken on the glow of comic book heroes in my eyes.

I don’t know how much time passed before we came to the final big slide of the journey. At some point one of the drivers carried a baby down the aisle to the very back of the bus where we'd made our nest on the platform stretching across its width. The mother clambered up, then reached over and took the infant out of his arms. I’m pretty sure that was in the night. The urgent, intermittent calls to leave the bus continued. The baby would just settle into sleep and then start crying when we'd have to get off again.

“Xia che! xia che!" It‘s day time, again - or still. Bing walks in small dragging steps and now cannot stop the pain from showing in his face. I’m always first down off the platform, both from impatience and because its easier to put his sandals when I'm standing and he's still lying down - pretty much the only way I can be of help - and now the young woman hands me the baby before she climbs down.

The slide has been partially cleared and other smaller vehicles have already been over. Everyone wanders in single file through the shadowy gap between the bus and the mountain, to where the road widens and there’s some space to stand. The river rages, dirty and frothy, not too far below. We look back and watch as our ridiculous vehicle lumbers noisily foward, attempting to clear a low, sludgy crest. It almost makes it, then falls back. The driver tries again, but almost immediately, the back wheel slips over the cliff - the bus leans over the water and the driver leaps out. Our collective, high pitched gasp sounds briefly over the roar of the river.

For the next couple of hours there is much discussion and examination accompanied by half hearted digging. Even Bing tries at first to scrape some dirt from behind one of the tyres, but is waved away by a driver with instructions to rest. So, yet again, he wanders a little way up the road, finds a flat stone to recline on, and places his cap over his face, communicating with no one. Trucks and land cruisers have pulled up, but this time there’s no wood around, and so no fire to boil water with. There’s also not the same sense of cohesion. It's hot. It’s been a few hours by now and we’re thirsty. The woman finds some shade behind the wheel of a vehicle and lays her child on a scrap of cardboard.

Eventually a small truck, summoned from the nearest settlement, pulls up. Two wooden posts - the size of baby telegraph poles - are unloaded, along with a flimsy chain and pulley which has been broken and tied together. There are also supplies for sale: small bottles of water, lemonade, chips and other packaged food like spicy tofu and beef gerky. The water goes quickly. I manage to get two bottles of the warm lemonade.
One of the Deguos comments, in English now, that "this is very different to Europe." I have a short choking fit as he continues. "In Europe," he says, "they would have a big crane with eight wheels."

The bases of the posts are buried in shallow holes parallel with the bus's back wheel, between it and the mountain. I spend my time alternately wandering up to look for signs of progress around the bus, then back to Bing, isolated in his pain from the groups around. I’ve left my book on the bus and plan never to do so again. At one point I start to pick up the wrappers and empty drink bottles which have been scattered around in the previous half hour. At first I feel self-conscious as the prissy foreigner, and when I ask about putting the refuse in the back of the truck which supplied it, I’m stiffly refused. But then I find a box and a couple of people even help me.

By now, one end of the chain is hooked to the back window on the mountain side, and the other runs through that window, inside the bus and is hooked to the other window ledge beside my bed. Yet another chain is attached to the back axel and all are somehow looped around the posts. Using the pulley, after about an hour of tiny adjustments, the bus is finally cranked up out of its lean to an upright position so that the back outside wheel is now suspended in mid air, level with the track. Now, the process begins of extending a ledge out by the width of the wheel that will extend over the crest, on which it can rest and then be driven back up onto safe ground.

A bunch of women labourers pull up, hop out the back of a truck, and get to work. A couple of men chip large slabs from the cliff further along the road and load the women with rocks. They carry them low on their backs, harnessed in place by woven cords. I join them, but without their cords must carry the rocks in front using my arms. I carry less than half the weight they do. We must walk about 200 metres up to the bus and squeeze single file over the slippery trail between it and the mountain wall. When we arrive at the back of the bus, men lift the rocks from us and pass them to the three drivers who are perched side by side on the cliff, carefully wedging them into place. The Deguos too, are busy working hard.


Finally everyone stands back, dazed, dirtier, sweatier and thirstier. It feels miraculous, in the dying light, to see the back wheel lowered onto the stone ledge as the bus is tentatively released from its chains before a silent, unmoving audience.
There's is only one participant now - a driver hops up behind the wheel and guns it effortlessly out of the dilemma. With a huge, triumphant smile, he powers past the spectators who have now become a cheering, whistling mob. The seemingly insurmountable task has been accomplished - not with modern machinery- but through patience, good humour, muscle and ingenuity.

We scurry back on the bus waving to the others and drive off into the evening. It's 7:30 pm.
Ten minutes later - I remember clearly checking my watch in disbelief - we hear the 'xia che' call again. It is almost dark. The bus successfully negotiates the narrow patch of track and we're back on the bus again, then ten minutes later off again, then on again. I look at Bing, irritated at not knowing how to help him.
The third time we get off, the bus becomes stuck on another sludgy slope. A truck coming in the opposite direction pulls up and is hooked nose to nose, but despite black smoke and a screaming noise as it tries to reverse, nothing moves. It unhooks and backs up the road to a wider part, manages a precarious u turn then reverses all the way back to the front of the bus. This time it's able to pull it out. We cheer the truck driver.

My bed is at the back outside corner of the bus. There’s mud everywhere from where some one had crawled inside from the other window during the rescue and attached one of the chains to the window ledge beside my bed. The bus is motoring fast through the night. Previously I was laisse faire, but now, every time it sways towards the cliff side on a bend, I shiver. Every time I look out searching for road below and only see the river, I whimper. I‘ve lost my nerve.

At midnight we stop at a few buildings where there's a restaurant. The woman and baby leave us, disappearing into the night. I get out and find a place to go to the toilet. Bing finds a bench and stretches out an inch at a time, into his iconic prone position - an image now indicative for me, of the whole experience. We soon get back on the bus leaving the others to their meals. After being off it for so long, we just want to stay there. I read about small town California by my head torch as Bing tosses and turns.

And then, at 2 am, it’s our turn to leave. We pull into Deqin, a cluster of grey buildings grouped around a long distance bus station - spurned by Lonely Planet and ignored by Chinese and foreign tourists alike in their hurry to get to the mountain viewing point out of town. We warmly shake hands with the drivers, enthusiastically thanking each other. And off it goes, our monster ‘sleeper’ bus, bound for Zhongdian, leaving us under a street lamp. All is still. Bing struggles with his pack for the length of the street and then just gives up, sitting down on the footpath with his feet in the gutter, agreeing without any fuss to wait while I keep looking for a guesthouse; entirely out of character.

The first one I see is open and its corridor lit up, but even though I call out for the service person and bang on room doors, no one will get up. At the second place, which is still in sight of Bing‘s dark, immobile shape, a young girl appears, shows me a big 30 kuai room with two beds, and obligingly hurries off to get a thermos of boiling water. I drop my pack on the floor and walk slowly back along the street to scape up my companion.

And there in Deqin - where many bowls of su you cha (yak butter tea) will be consumed, and many hunks of da bing (bread) dipped into them - I leave us for the time of Bing's convalesence. In the ensuing days he creates a spectacle of himself as he edges each morning from the guesthouse to the cha shop with his red hiking poles swinging and clacking on the pavement, stopping every few metres to squat down for pain relief, and then when he finally arrives, lining up the stools and reclining. Strangers thrust herbs and pills upon him in the street, or grab his arm as they fervently recommend a particular doctor. The woman who cleans the rooms has much advice. Every one thinks he's about to die. And he too, running with all the attention, takes up a refrain of wo hen kuai si le (I will very soon die).
I spend a lot of time in the local internet cafe, trying to disguise the fact that I'm over it.

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.