Harvey’s Himalayan Journal: 1995

14 September
Leave Cumbria , dropping off the cats at the cattery, and arrive at Chichester about 5.00.  Sue has been ill with diarrhoea for two days, not a good start to what we expect will be an arduous trip.  Meet up with Ben for dinner at The Old Cross, and retire early to our tiny little attic room at The Ship.

15 September
Woken at 6.00am by the sound of running water.  The roof is leaking, fortunately not onto our travel clothes.  We realise from the stains on the wall that it is not the first time this roof has leaked, and I complain.  We get an apology, but nothing further, and the receptionist doesn’t seem surprised.  It’s still raining hard, so no leisurely shopping in Chichester .  In the end we decide to visit Petworth House, but it’s closed.  We drive through Sussex in the rain.  At the airport we meet our guide, Lorraine .  There will be about sixteen in our party.

16 September
It’s a long flight but we have some legroom, enjoy the Royal Nepal Airways food, and we both sleep.  We land in Kathmandu at dusk, so the views are disappointing.  We have a snack at the Base Camp and go straight to bed.  And straight to sleep.

17 September
We discover that our hotel, The Himalaya, is actually in Patan, but our first bus tour is Kathmandu and off we go to the ancient temple of Swayambunath , perched on a slight hill.  It’s a strange mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism, and the place is seething with vendors, monkeys, sleeping dogs ~ and even a few monks.    The stupa is built over ‘the light of Swambhu’ (the self-born), protecting it until the day when it can once again be allowed to shine on the world.  There is a man dressed in mourning clothes, all in white, making offerings for a parent who has just died.  In the temple Tibetan monks are sitting in rows, reading from books, some of them (mainly young boys) chanting the prayers.

Then down to the old part of Khatmandu, to Durbar Square , where it is dirty and smelly.  There are some beggars, but it doesn’t strike us as desperately poor.  Take lots of photos, mainly of street scenes and elaborately-carved buildings.  Would love to take close-ups of some of the people but haven’t the nerve.  There are some wonderful characters about, with holy men in rags or splendid robes, imposing faces and long beards; women in colourful saris, many of them arrestingly beautiful; children, some in rags, all looking bright-eyed.   The crowds are good-humoured and we don’t feel threatened, but we have been warned against pickpockets.

We go to the home of Kumari, the Living Goddess.  There are lots of tourists in the courtyard, and in response to a shout from one of the guides Kumari appears at one of the open windows.  She allows us to gawp at her for about 5 seconds and withdraws.  She is chosen at the age of 2 or 3 with the aid of astrologers, and undergoes tests to prove that she is indeed a goddess.  She must be physically perfect, of course, have never shed blood, and must remain serene when faced with horrifying images.  When we see her she is perhaps eight or nine years old, with heavy eye make-up and dressed in red and gold.  She only leaves her home two or three times a year to attend ceremonies.  She has a private tutor (and Michael Jackson videos!) but in the old days Kumari didn’t receive an education.  When she has her first period she will lose her divine status and another little girl will take her place.  An ex-Kumari must find it difficult to adjust to ordinary life, although she can marry.  At one time it was thought that a man who married such a girl would die within six months, and the women had lonely unhappy lives.

Sue seems to be over her diarrhoea but she feels worn out and sleeps in the afternoon.  I walk back to the bridge over the Bagmati river, the border between Patan and Khatmandu.  There are road works everywhere, and the cocktail of dust and exhaust fumes is awful.  Lots of people are wearing masks, or holding scarves or hands over nose and mouth.  I come back to the hotel for a swim and then dry off in the sun, looking across Kathmandu to the hills.  There is a rainbow, and then it’s raining and I go back to the room.  We have an excellent meal in The Chalet and both feel a bit more human.

18 September
Sue doesn’t join me, but I’m up at 5.45am to take a sight-seeing flight to Everest.  The weather forecast is not good, but we take off anyway.  Not for long.  We hear that Everest is covered with cloud, and after 15 minutes the flight is aborted.  We come back to the hotel for breakfast, with a promise that we can try again tomorrow at no extra charge..

There used to be three major cities in this part of Nepal : Kathmandu , Patan and Bhaktapur, each with its own Durbar Square .  Now the cities have run into each other, forming a vast, sprawling conurbation.  This morning, in the rain, we take a tour of Patan, although it also seems to be called Lalitpur.  We visit the Golden Temple , dedicated to the god of business.  This seems strange to our western eyes, used to clear divisions between religion and commerce.

In the afternoon we go to a Tibetan refugee camp, and shed our first tears of the trip.  Probably not the last.  All the workers are sitting on mats on the floor, and they flash us smiles as we walk through.  We buy two prayer mats at US$29 each and learn our first Tibetan phrase, Tashi Delek (hello, goodbye, best wishes). 

We drive through the suburbs, with modern housing and satellite dishes.  A house with two or three bedrooms costs £200/£300 per month.  We are taken to three country villages, Pharping, Daksinkali and Chapagaon.  The bus stops at the last one so that we can walk up the main street.  The entire village seems to have turned out for the occasion, and the children follow us, giggling at the strange sight we must present.  We are equally taken with strange sights; water buffalo being washed in a pond, old-fashioned corn stooks, and corn cobs hanging out to dry like alien trees.  Also some more familiar sights: boys playing table tennis, girls skipping.  The whole place feels primitive, from way back in time, but there is more laughter than we would hear in an English village.

   

Dinner again at The Chalet, which we enjoy again, but back at the room I start with diarrhoea.  I have an awful night.

19 September
Feeling really grim, I get up at 5.45 again but I only make it to the hotel lobby, then rush back to the room to throw up ~ again and again and again.  The flight to Everest is cancelled again, but I know nothing about this.  By the time we are due to meet the rest of the party in the lobby to catch the Lhasa flight I can’t leave the bathroom.  Sue rushes up and down, from lobby to bedroom, trying to work out what happens now.  Fortunately, the Lhasa flight is delayed, and I have more time to recover.  We leave a suitcase behind and armed with sick bags I make it to the airport and survive the flight.  Only just.  When the plane lands I rush to the toilet again.  I am still in there when everyone else (except Sue) has left the plane.  She tries to argue with Chinese soldiers that I need to be left alone for a few more minutes, but they are suspicious and bang on the door.  I stagger out and down the steps.  By now I am weak and dehydrated, and we have just landed at 12,000 feet.  We queue for immigration, but I can’t stand up and there are no seats.  I sprawl on the floor, still retching.  Sue tries to request a wheelchair for me, but all she is offered is a baggage trolley.  She declines on my behalf, but when we get through Customs the guide who meets us has a wheelchair in the bus. 

Visiting Tibet is a kind of pilgrimage for me, but I didn’t prepare for a pilgrimage; no fasting, no meditating.  But my body’s reaction to the food and/or pollution in Kathmandu did the work for me.  Crawling about on the concrete floor stripped me of my usual impediments ~ ego, pride and arrogance ~ and I emerge very humbly from the airport weak as a new-born babe.

We are on a vast plain surrounded by high mountains.  The air is crystal clear, and we can’t tell whether the mountains are near or far.  Our guide, Jetsun, greets each of us with a karta (white silk scarf) as we board the bus.    It is the traditional Tibetan greeting, a symbol of honesty, sincerity and loyalty.  We have never before been greeted this way and although we are expecting it, I shed my first tears in Tibet .  Someone asks Jetsun what the Tibetan national flag looks like.  “I saw one once,” she says . . . .   The Chinese have banned anything that might imply that Tibet is a separate country.  We are in China , in the Tibetan Autonomous Region.  Tibet the country only exists in the minds of the exiles and their supporters.

The journey to Lhasa is about one and half hours, and I’m sick again.   We follow a fast-flowing river, passing through villages with prayer flags fluttering, always surrounded by mountains.  We stop for a photo shoot but I stay on the bus.  At the Holiday Inn Sue has to see to everything and I am put to bed.  Around 8.30 a very young-looking female Chinese doctor comes to see me.   She seems to think it is nothing serious.  My temperature is 37.2 but my heart and blood pressure are OK.  She prescribes pills, although Sue tells her that I won’t be able to keep them down.  We have brought our own needles for just such an occasion, but I’m given pills.  I can’t keep anything in my stomach, not even water (which I now desperately need).  I use an oxygen pillow and settle into a dull constant nausea.  Eventually I sleep.

20 September
I have stopped vomiting but Sue has started.  We have both had headaches in the night (altitude) and Sue’s turned into acute nausea.  Neither of us wants food but we manage water.  I start to come round and take a much-needed shower, but reading gives me a headache   I am content to sit and Sue sleeps.   Lorraine brings us cup-a-soup, which we manage to drink.  We are now drinking water and green tea, so our bodies have something to work on.  By late afternoon we feel strong enough to walk round the hotel, but we need frequent rests.  We don’t need an excuse to sit and admire one view.  We can see the Potola, the palace of the Dalai Lama, perched improbably on a hill rising from the middle of the valley floor.  There is a second hill close by,  We know without having to be told that this is Chak Pori, the Iron Mountain, which once housed the medical monastery, but along with thousands of other monasteries the Chinese destroyed it.  Now the top of Iron Mountain is graced by communication masts.  The Chinese brought so-called liberation to a backward and feudal people, but in so doing they destroyed the educational and medical infrastructure run by the monks.  We look at this very familiar view that we have never seen before and can’t believe we are really here.  The Potola was built for a living god.  It couldn’t have been built anywhere else on earth.  We don’t have much to show for our first day in Tibet , but we feel incredibly moved and privileged to be sharing this experience.

We manage a light dinner ~ real food ~ and go to bed.  Already it’s hard to remember just how awful I felt only a few hours ago.  Sue is still shaky and I still have a temperature and a headache.  With altitude sickness it’s important to breathe deeply, to get enough oxygen to the brain.  I am familiar with Buddhist breathing exercises, but as soon as I start to drift my breathing becomes shallow again, the headache comes back, and I wake up.  I don’t get much sleep, even with the help of the oxygen pillow.

21 September
I use up the last of the oxygen and as soon as I am upright the headache goes.
We manage some breakfast, and struggle to be ready for today’s trip.  We missed yesterday’s excursion, but we are not going to miss the Potala.  Not if we have to crawl through its 1,000 rooms.  It’s only a few minutes drive and as the bus waits at the first gate street vendors cluster round, trying to push their wares through the windows.   The bus takes us up a zigzag path round the back of the Potola, the tradesmen’s entrance presumably, reversing up some of the stretches to avoid turning tight corners.  It takes us as far as possible up the first few hundred feet, but we still have a lot of steps ahead of us.  Lorraine makes sure that we all stop for frequent rests.  Down below we can see the city of Lhasa , on a plain that stretches to mountains in the distance.  We are so close to the Potola walls that we can’t actually see much of the building itself.  Sue and I walk slowly hand in hand up the steep paths and into the palace that we know so well through the books of Lobsang Rampa.  Where would our lives have gone without him?

The rest is a blur.  Rooms and rooms and rooms, corridors and steps, more steps, more corridors.  The steps are more like ladders, and in Lobsang’s days they were greasy with spilt yak butter.  Some of the rooms are vast.  There are statues and murals and ancient books.    There is some electricity, and enormous tubs of yak butter with lots of wicks, but still it is gloomy, and mostly deserted.  A palace that for centuries had housed thousands of monks is now a museum.   Finally we are on the roof, looking out over the city and the plain as The Dalai Lama used to do.  And the empty hill top of Chakpori.  A man is loading a large burner with juniper twigs.  Three girls sit on top of the walls, repairing them, slapping concrete on with wooden paddles while they sing.  A puja is taking place in one corner, with drums and trumpets and chanting monks.  Jetsun has an uncle who is a monk here, and she takes us close, ignoring the Chinese soldier in mufty who has followed us everywhere. 

Our progress has been so slow that we are late leaving.  The rest of the tourists have all gone, and as we go back down through the palace lights are put out as we leave each room, and doors shut behind us.  It is an eerie feeling, and yet the whole experience is familiar.  I cannot tell whether I am recognising things from Lobsang’s books or from a previous life.  If it is just from the books he must have been a good writer.  It is only as we return to the bus that we can look back and finally see the main façade of the Potola in all its glory.   

In the afternoon we visit the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama’s Summer Palace .  Every year the people of Lhasa wore their thick winter clothes until the Dalai Lama made the short journey to the Norbulingka, signifying that it was officially summer, and the people could change their clothes.  The gardens are sadly neglected, but the building itself is not too bad.  We don’t get to see the lake.  I pick up a leaf from a Bodhi tree to take to the Head Lama at the Tibetan Monastery in Cumbria , unaware until much later that Gesha-la has broken links with the Dalai Lama.

We see two monks, one with a shaved head, one with long hair.  The long-haired monk has just returned from a solitary retreat, and needs help adjusting to the outer world again.  There is a guard dog on a roof.  We see a battered old kettle sitting on what looks like a satellite dish.  It comes to a boil with the heat of the sun, reflected and focused by the metal dish.  Solar power, Tibetan-style.  We buy T-shirts emblazoned with the Tibetan characters of Om Mani Padme Hum.

Inside the palace there is a strange mixture of east and west.  There is a radiogram, a present from Nehru; a picture of kittens from London .  In one room a monk is chanting and drumming, and we sit for a few minutes, but it’s not enough.  It doesn’t feel alive.   We walk through the Dalai Lama’s private apartments and audience rooms, with a beautiful gold & silver throne. 

When a monk is ‘off duty’ he might leave his spare robe on his prayer mat, folded into a conical shape, awaiting his return.  The Dalai Lama’s robe sits on his throne, awaiting his return from exile.  There is an enormous mural, showing the history of all the Dalai Lamas.  The mural is unfinished.  The last event depicted is the visit of the Fourteenth to Beijing in 1954.  “And that’s the end of the story,” says Jetsun, almost apologetically.  “Perhaps it’s not the end,” I say to her, more in hope than expectation.

It has been an amazing day.  We are light-headed from our sickness, light-headed from the altitude, and the experience is almost hallucinatory.  It is not that we have fulfilled a life-long dream; when we read Lobsang in our teens Tibet seemed as remote as the moon.  They used to say, see Naples and die.  For Naples read Lhasa .

We both eat a good dinner.  Sue reckons this thin, dry air suits her.  Then we pack rucksacks ready for an early start in the morning.  We have left one suitcase in Kathmandu ; we will leave our second at the Holiday Inn.  As with all good pilgrimages, we shed burdens along the way, and tomorrow we will travel light.  Again, I don’t sleep well.

22 September
We have an eight-hour drive ahead of us, but we set off late.  One of our party is suffering so much from altitude sickness that Lorraine has to arrange for her and her husband to fly back to Kathmandu .  It’s 9.30 when we leave, with a rucksack each and a few carrier bags. 

We head west, back towards the airport, but soon turn off this road, over a bridge, and say goodbye to tarmac.  The bus climbs up this rough, pot-holed road passing masses of wild flowers, mostly blue and purple, to the Kampala Pass at 5,000 metres.  We stop for photos, looking down at the villages by the river on the plateau below.  There are yaks, being watched by two girls.  The 12-year old is responsible for 7 animals; the younger girl has 4.    Traditionally, girls are sent out as yak-herders from the age of 6, and they are out from dawn ‘til dusk.  They fire stones from slings to keep the yaks under control.  The girls are too shy to show us, but our driver demonstrates. 

Prayer-flags mark the highest point of the pass, and we are now looking down the other side of the mountain at a sacred lake, Yamdok Yuntso.  It seems quite narrow, but stretches as far as we can see in either direction, an amazing shade of blue, like the Aegean .   There are mountains everywhere, some snow-capped.  The bus takes us down to the lake and we drive along side it, stopping for a picnic on the shingle beach.  It is our first taste of yak meat.  Surprisingly, it is tasty and tender.  There are vast herds of sheep and goats on the beach, although there doesn’t seem much for them to eat.  The herd boys, and other hangers-on, are keen to take our leftovers, so perhaps that is why the animals are not enjoying green pasture higher up.

The bus continues its bone-shaking drive by the lake for what seems like hours, stopping only briefly for toilet breaks.  Gents to the left, ladies to the right, find your own boulder to hide behind.  Lorraine calls them pit stops, which Jetsun mis-hears.  She thinks we are stopping for pizza. We climb again to a high pass.  This is the Karalla Pass , at over 5,000 metres.   Jetsun tells us that if we walk up a slight hill we will be able to see a tented village, at the foot of a glacier.  I can walk up hills in Cumbria, but after a few yards my legs feel like jelly, I can’t breathe, I have a splitting headache, but I get to see the nomad tents and the glacier.   The nomads rush over to us (no altitude sickness for them) and follow us back to the bus.  The children want food, and we hand out more leftovers.  Jetsun tells us they would like anything we have left and gives them our rubbish bag with cardboard containers, bits of string, apple cores, empty water bottles, half-eaten sandwiches.   The children fight over it.   Nothing is wasted here.  The mothers ask for money.

We drive down the other side of the pass, and the bad road gets even worse.   Every few hundred yards the surface has been washed away, and sometimes we can’t imagine how the bus will make it.  On one occasion a bulldozer is working on a landslide and has to clear a way for us.  The constant jolting and thin air make for unpleasant travelling.  My headache persists for several hours.  One couple is quite ill but refuse oxygen.  We leave the road and drive through a quarry, a site for a hydro-electric station.  We don’t know whether it is a short-cut or a long diversion.  Eventually, at 7.00pm, we arrive in Gyantse, weary and exhausted.  Our hotel, the Gyantse Hotel, seems grim and Spartan, more like a barracks.  We sit down for a buffet meal as a party.  I don’t eat much.  Our room is very cold but we have snug quilts.  Our bodies still feel o be vibrating.  It has been a dreadful, unbelievable, unmissable day.   Sue sleeps for almost 10 hours.

23 September
Breakfast not very appetising.  I have rice gruel.  Then we visit the Palchor Monastery.  The courtyard is full of dogs.  The monks are tolerant of them in case they have been monks in previous incarnations.  There are statues of Buddha and other Bodhisatvas, and grainy copies of photos of their spiritual leader.   We have been warned against handing out photos of The Dalai Lama; the Chinese regard him as a splittist and have banned his photos, books and teachings.  This is a living monastery, not a museum, and the monks are cheerful and joke with us.   There is an octagonal building with a golden dome known as Bakhor Chorten, the chorten of 100,000 Buddhas.  Outside are huge brass prayer wheels.  Inside are five floors, each with side chapels and rows and rows of Buddha statues.

We are given the chance to walk up to the fortress on Dzong Hill.  Sue can’t face the climb and stays to wander the streets of Gyantse.  I plod slowly up, stopping on the way to photograph the view some nuns sitting in the foreground.  They are wise to me, and want me to pose them while one of them borrows my camera.  The fortress is famous for an incident in 1903 that as an Englishman abroad makes me feel uncomfortable.  The British Government thought that Tibet provided a channel through which China and Russia could attack India and sent an expedition led by Francis Younghusband to negotiate with the Dalai Lama for a British legation in Lhasa.  Younghusband was accompanied by over 1,000 armed soldiers.  Not surprisingly, the Tibetans thought they were being invaded and resisted.  Gyantse had a fortress with artillery, and the British laid siege..  When it became obvious that the Tibetan soldiers could not withstand the siege many of them threw themselves off the battlements to their death rather than surrender.  Ironically, on his retreat from Tibet , Younghusband had a mystical experience that suffused him with love for the world and convinced him that man is divine.  He went on to found the World Congress of Faiths.

We have lunch back at the hotel and then set off for Shigatse, a two hour journey which takes three.  No mountain passes this time, we pass fields of ripened corn, and haymaking.  We ask Jetsun about village life and she makes an unscheduled stop to show us.  Sue feels this is intrusive and doesn’t go, but the photographers in the party can’t resist the opportunity.  We are taken to the house of the village headman.  The courtyard walls are covered in pats of yak dung, slapped on to dry out.  The residents do not seem at all put out by this sudden visit, and we are given an impromptu tour.

We arrive in Shigatse in time for a short walk round the market before dinner.  The traders are quite aggressive, clutching and pulling, and some members of the party are unhappy.  Sue doesn’t like the atmosphere.   I buy two carved figures, a man and a woman.  The trader assures me they are carved from yak bone, but it looks more like plastic.  Unwisely, I reckon that out here yak bone is probably easier to get than plastic, and it is only later that I see a ridge running down the side of the carvings, left by the mould.  I don’t mind.  I feel I am putting some tourist money into a Tibetan’s hands rather than into Beijing ’s coffers.  After dinner we take another walk, just to look at the light on the mountains.

24 September
Sue has a bad night with diarrhoea and nausea, and has difficulty breathing.  She takes homeopathic remedies and I get her some oxygen.  She doesn’t feel like breakfast (I have rice gruel again) but she has recovered sufficiently to visit Tashilunpo Monastery.  This is the home of the Panchen Lama, the second highest after the Dalai Lama, but he also is not in Tibet .  After the last Panchen Lama died his next incarnation was recognised and confirmed by the Dalai Lama in exile.  The young boy was brought to Tashilunpo for training, but Beijing feared a potentially strong bond between the two high lamas that would attract a following both within Tibet and in the wider world.  They denounced the boy as an imposter and took him to Beijing .  He has not been seen since.  The regime in Beijing then ‘discovered’ the real Panchen Lama and took him under their wing. A strange move for a communist regime that doesn’t believe in reincarnation, Buddhism, or religion of any kind.  The Chinese nominee had recently visited Shigatse and there had been trouble, and we had fully expected that we would not be allowed in, but things had quietened down again.

We are late leaving the hotel.  We assemble in the lobby and hand over our keys but we are kept waiting until hotel staff check the rooms to make sure that we haven’t damaged anything or smuggled a towel in our rucksacks.  Tashilunpo is worth the wait, a huge monastery more like a village, built for 5,000 monks.  There are crowds of people, and even though there are only 800 monks now, the place feels really alive.  We walk across a huge courtyard where the Chinese-selected Panchen Lama recently addressed the monks and into an assembly room which seats 2,000 monks, the floor crowded with snaking lines of empty cushions.  It is dark and vast, paintings adorning ceiling and walls, it feels medieval.  There is a tomb stupa for each of the previous Panchen Lamas, and a 26.5 metre statue of the Maitreya Buddha, the future incarnation, built by the ninth Panchen Lama.  In an inner courtyard what appears to be a jumble sale is attracting attention.

Then we leave Shigatse for the drive back to Lhasa , following the Nyang Chu river.  We travel across plains, mostly cultivated, and through wild gorges and deserts. The road surface is mostly good.  We see a yak-skin coracle making a river crossing, similar to the one the Dalai Lama used during his escape.  We stop for another picnic, and again there are people waiting for our leftovers.  It takes six hours to get back to the Holiday Inn.  Sue and I have had quite enough of the rest of the party, and we have dinner by ourselves in the Hard Yak Café. 

25 September
Our 28^th wedding anniversary.  Who would have thought it?  We celebrate by joining Lorraine , Jetsun and the party on a visit to Drepung Monastery, although Sue has had another poor night.  This is a large sprawling village of a monastery.  I think Lobsang said its nickname was the rice bowl, because it looked like a heap of rice spilled onto the mountainside.  This was also destroyed by the Chinese  but belatedly they realised the tourist value of colourful monasteries and this is in the process of being repaired.  We notice a small monk sitting by the roadside.  He looks as though he is doing a bit of last-minute homework.  In the courtyard, a traditional debate is taking place between young monks.  Part of a monk’s education is to learn his subject so well that he can debate it from either side, and as each monk makes his point he smacks his hands together.   The exertion is too much for Sue and she goes back to the bus, but I carry on with the rest of the party through an enormous assembly hall. 

We stop off at a carpet factory on the way back to Lhasa .  In the bus, Jetsun tells us some of her experiences.  She is unwilling to talk in public because tour guides are under constant scrutiny, but on the bus she is safe.  She was sent to China for her education, and when she arrived she was teased for being an unwashed backward Tibetan.  When she returned to Tibet she felt she did not know her own country.  She can hardly believe that some of us have seen The Dalai Lama.

We have lunch in our room and then go to the market, where Sue buys 7 scarves and 2 bowls.  We leave the party to do our own thing, we missed the Jokang on the first day and want to se it before we leave.   This is the people’s monastery, very ancient, the destination of countless pilgrimages.  Some pilgrims do the last stretch with prostrations.  They lie down, full length, in the dust, stand up, take one step forward, and repeat the process over and over, hour after hour, sometimes day after day.  Tibetans believe that the balance between good and evil is only maintained by keeping evil in check.  They see the landscape as a manifestation of these forces, and the goddess of evil is controlled by building religious edifices on her strategic body parts, such as her wrists and ankles.  The Jokang is built on the heart of the goddess.   

Inside, the Jokang is almost deserted, and we just glimpse the occasional monk or pilgrim.  It’s our anniversary and we have the place to ourselves. There are the usual prayer wheels, religious images and statues, candles, losing their novelty factor but this place feels very spiritual, very special.   Outside, a storm hits Lhasa , and we wander through the dingy rooms with thunder crashing and echoing all around us.  It’s very eerie.  We are not sure where to go, what we are allowed to do, but eventually we emerge onto the roof just as the rain stops, with spectacular views of The Potola.   We have to make our own way back to the hotel so we take a rickshaw ride, costing 20 yuan for 25-minutes.  We stop twice to take photos, and when we get back to the hotel we ask the driver to take our photo sitting in his rickshaw.  He is delighted, and shares the joke with some of the other drivers waiting for fares.

The party is taken to a traditional Tibetan house for dinner, although I guess this is larger than most Tibetan houses.  This is the real thing, with yak in every course, and although it’s all rather greasy we manage quite well.  I think of the Monty Python spam sketch.  We are offered buttered tea, but I am the only one who drinks it with any enjoyment.  

The experiences of the last few days are stacking up, leaving us almost reeling, and no doubt we will be months assimilating them, but being on our own today in the Jokang somehow felt like an affirmation of our journey together, not just in Tibet but over 30 years, from our Yorkshire back streets to the top of the world.
 
26 September
We are woken at 4.45am and leave the hotel at 6.00.  This feels like the end of the holiday.  We have had enough of communal meals and would be happy to go straight home, but we are flying back to Nepal .  Somehow, Sue has been nominated to arrange a collection for Jetsun and the driver.  She makes the presentation with a suitable Buddhist quotation, although it’s probably wasted on most of our party.  We have been surprised at the lack of interest in Buddhism and in Tibet itself.  For most of the party it was just another country to tick off.  One lady held her handkerchief to her nose whenever we went round a monastery.
 
The airport is chaotic, and we queue for an hour before the desk opens for check-in.  Being British, we are prepared to queue in an orderly fashion, but we get bustled and jostled by travellers who are not quite so patient.  Lorraine tries to physically restrain some of them, but she is no match for a German group.  In consequence, we get the last seats to be allotted, near the back of the plane.  Behind us the plane is empty, and we spread out to take all the window seats.  As we fly past Everest, with spectacular views, the Germans from up-front plead with us for a chance to take photographs.  The pilot banks and makes the most of the fly-past for our benefit.  It’s just another mountain, but somehow this is another moving experience, very humbling.  Perhaps we are just wide open after Tibet, but one of our party sums it up.  “God is very close.”

Sue had toyed with the idea of going straight to the Himalaya Hotel just for two days of peace, but we don’t have what it takes to try to make it happen.  Instead, our suitcases are sent to the hotel and we are taken to Dhulikhel, a mountain retreat.  But this is a tour, and we have more sights to see along the way. 

After the thin and clean air of Tibet it is hot and humid.  We have scarcely left Kathmandu airport before we stop at Pashupatinath.  This is a scared Hindu site on the Bagmati river.  It is a total assault on the senses, with vendors, children and monkeys all vying for attention.  On the opposite bank there is a temple dedicated to Shiva, with a large representation of his linga, but we are not allowed there.  Two funerals are taking place, the mourners wailing round the corpses on their pyres.  The men handle the bodies, infinitely tender, and the women retreat before the fire is lit, traditionally by the eldest son.  It takes between three and five hours for a body to burn, shorter for a good person; longer for a bad person.  Then the ashes are swept into the river, where children are playing, to be carried down river, eventually to reach the Ganges .  We in the west use the words ‘in the midst of life there is death’ but we prefer to look the other way.   Here life and death are closely entwined, and it all seems perfectly natural.  Except for the white people with their cameras.

We have one more stop, at the Bhuddist stupa at Bodnath, with the large eye of Buddha painted on it.  Sue and I make our circumnambulations, three times in a clockwise direction, then look at the shops all around.

We arrive at the Dhulikel Mountain Resort Hotel at 1.15, a cluster of red brick and thatch buildings on a steep hillside looking over green valleys and ridges to the distant snow-clad summits of the Himalayas.  The Tibetan border is 50 miles away.  Can we see Tibet ?  Who knows.  A border is man’s invention, a line on a map.  There is no difference between a mountain in Tibet and a mountain in Nepal .  The hotel has terraced gardens with ginger lilies and frangipani.  It is beautiful and peaceful.  We should have come straight here from the airport.

We have a huge European lunch, and then the party sets off on a communal walk.  Sue and I head in the other direction.  We are picked up by several small children who want help with money for their school books. 

  We sit on the terrace with cocktails and watch dusk creeping over the valleys below.  Finally, only the snowy mountain summits are sunlit, and then they disappear.  We have to be sociable again before and through dinner, European food again, and can’t wait to go to bed.     

27 September
We both sleep well, but I wake early.  I am sitting on the terrace at 6.00am, with orange juice and coffee, watching the sun rise through the swirling mists.  The Himalayas, those ‘Far Pavilions’, appear momentarily and then disappear again.  I am joined by more of the party, who have been up on the ridge for the sunrise.

We have time for another walk after breakfast, with more small children, and leave Dhulikel at 11.00 for Bhaktapur, the third of the ancient triangle of capital cities with Kathmandu and Pathan.  The party is given a quick tour with a local guide, through the street market, past the pottery where the pots are drying in the sun, past women spreading grain out to ripen,  and then we are allowed to do our own thing.  Bhaktapur is ancient; old, old buildings with incredibly intricate wood carvings.  We go inside one, upstairs, now a café, and gawp at the whole of Nepal passing in front of us down below.  We walk and walk, and shop, and we are picked up by two small boys.  They take us up winding dark alleyways to see the famous 500-yearold Peacock Window, and although we don’t encounter any more tourists we do see local life.  Everyone is friendly.  We are told why.  Back in the 1970’s Nepal was on the Hippy Trail, and an infrastructure developed to keep tens of thousands of tourists happy.  Now tourist numbers are much reduced, and the traders value any business that comes their way.  We buy a carved turquoise statue, a wooden stupa, a T-shirt, a red dress and some jewelry.  But what we really want, and didn’t find in Tibet, in a thanka with a medical tree.  We don’t find it here, either. The boys arrange a taxi for us, back to the Himalaya Hotel, and we tip them $1 each.  Back at the hotel we have a simple dinner, just the two of us, at Base Camp.

28 September
The twice-aborted Everest fly-by is called off for the third time, and we all get our money back ~ even though I didn’t even get up to try for this one.  This is our last day and we have to check out of the hotel, although we don’t fly home until evening.  We take a taxi to Durbar Marg and look round some up-market shops, buying our final souvenirs, then walk to Thamel, which seems much more touristy.  Lunch at Annapurna Hotel, then a taxi back to Bodnath.  We walk round the stupa again and it comes on to rain.  We take shelter in a shop and strike up a conversation with the owner.  He has just started in business.  He was born in Darjeeling to Tibetan parents but is now a Nepali citizen.  He has never been to Tibet.  Finally, it is time to head for the airport.

Post Script
I use the word ‘Chinese’ rather loosely in this journal.  When I talk somewhat critically  about Chinese policy in Tibet I am, of course, referring to the political regime in Beijing. When travelling in China itself I always found the people just as friendly as in Tibet.

We had agonised long and hard over making this trip.  Were we playing into the hands of the Chinese, by ‘rewarding’ them for their invasion and occupation of Tibet?  We felt that by showing an interest in Tibetan culture and Buddhist shrines and monuments we might in some small way be encouraging Beijing to recognise the value of preservation rather than eradication. 

Whilst condemning the brutal Chinese invasion of Tibet, we recognised that Tibet was perhaps in need of liberating from its old feudal ways.  Fifty years on Beijing had certainly improved roads and some infrastructure, but the villagers and nomads appeared still to be living at subsistence level.  And yet, life in the countryside was not dissimilar to life in the countryside in Guilin or Sczechwan.  Beijing was not singling out Tibet for special treatment; this was simply the Chinese way.

Ironically, in attempting to wipe out Tibet’s feudal ways and superstitions Beijing had adopted a sledgehammer approach.  When they smashed Tibetan Buddhism the monasteries broke into a thousand splinters which scattered all over the world.  Tibetan lamas fled over the Himalayas and founded new monasteries in India, Europe and North America.  Tibet is dead but Tibetan culture is alive and well.

Is there a solution?  I think so.  The West is unwilling to bring pressure to bear on Beijing and so Beijing is unlikely to release political control of Tibet.  But with encouragement from the international community Beijing could turn Tibet (or the TAR) into a Spiritual National Park, a Chinese version of National Heritage status.   They could allow the Dalai Lama to return as spiritual leader in return for the Dalai Lama’s promise to relinquish all political ambitions.  Beijing could gain international acclaim for such an innovative move whilst retaining control of Tibet’s valuable mineral resources.  Tourists would flock to see this wonder of the world and to spend their tourist dollars.  And the people of Tibet would have the protection of tomorrow’s world’s super power whilst retaining the freedom to practice Tibetan Buddhism.  I put forward this idea in an article for The Tibetan Journal in Autumn 1999.  But the people of Tibet are still waiting.