CHAPTER ONE

Take the Next Train to Tibet

On a break from Dartmouth College in the summer of 1979, I went mountaineering in Kashmir, Northern India. It was monsoon season, the season of if’s, and port-wine clouds followed me up the valleys like bleating lambs until they exploded over the mountains in a frenzy of wind and torrential rain. My guide, Gulam, made rice and vegetables in the evenings and asked about the day’s climb. He also inquired about how much money I made, how much money each material possession I had cost, and how much money I had left. Every night.

“I am thinking, Sahib,” Gulam said, eyeing my camera covetously.

“Please don’t call me Sahib, Gulam.”

“As you wish, Sahib. I am thinking that you must be very tired of getting wet like this. You will be going to your home country soon.”

Gulam was right. It was too dangerous to climb alone in the rain. But the mountains were beautiful during storms: warm wind heavy with moisture breaking into translucent waves across an ice ridge; waterfalls leaping off the moonscape of sculpted snow; glaciers trembling under the rain’s weight. “What does this have to do with my camera?” I asked.

“You are a rich man, Sahib. I am a poor man. So why are you not giving me your camera when you leave? A present for all that Gulam has done for you.”

“I need my camera to take pictures.”

“You can get another camera in your country, Sahib. A better one. I cannot get such a camera in India. You could be selling it to me.”

“No thanks, Gulam.”

“What is thanks? I am telling you. I am a humble servant of God. All I am asking—”

“If you are a humble servant of God, you shouldn’t need material things to make you happy. I am not as fortunate. I come from the most material of worlds. I need my camera to be happy.”

“Perhaps there is something else,” Gulam continued. “Something that you are wanting very much. Something only Gulam can give you.”

“I doubt it.”

“For instance, Sahib. I am knowing that the mountains in Tibet are too high for the monsoon. Tibet is a high-altitude desert, I am telling you. It never rains in Tibet.” As Gulam kept talking, I remembered reading T. Lobsang Rampa’s The Third Eye as an adolescent. My mind still harbored vivid images of monks who meditated in caves for years and diagnosed diseases in their incipient stages long before they became manifest. As a boy I knew very little about Tibet, but I had always wanted to go there.

“Gulam is knowing a secret pass.”

“How high is the pass?” I asked, trying not to sound interested.

“16,000 feet, Sahib.”

“And where might this pass be?”

“Very near, Sahib. Perhaps for your camera, I could be showing this pass to you.”

I kept my camera. Gulam kept to himself the location of the pass. Tibet would have to wait.

It took years for me to convince John Ackerly that his destiny included going to Tibet with me. While we were students at Dartmouth I first appealed to John’s sense of adventure with a copy of Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet, the epic journey of an Austrian mountaineer who climbed Nanga Parabat in Pakistan during World War II and was imprisoned by the British in Northern India. In what must be one of the greatest adventures of all time, Harrer escaped from prison into the Himalayas five times, spent years with nomads, and became a friend and tutor of the Dalai Lama. John loved the book, but not enough to keep him from going off to American University’s law school in Washington, D.C. After graduating he worked as a civil-rights lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi.

While I, in turn, attended medical school, I found myself longing for some sort of adventure. I relished the memory of John convincing me to withdraw from Dartmouth as a senior in order to hop freight trains across the country. We lived by our wits and ate out of dumpsters, sleeping in missions, boxcars, and by the side of the road. With this in mind, in 1985 I enticed John with a train-hopping mini-reunion from Jackson to New Orleans during a summer break from medical school. Hopping trains would be a celebration: time to exaggerate our memories of the climbs we had done together in the Andes and Yosemite National Park; time to embellish our search for the Great American Hobo; time to plan our next expedition; and time for me to convince John to join me in the Himalayas.

As we rode southwest, southern Louisiana’s pine forest yielded to tidal estuary and a windswept ocean of tall grass, brown in the autumn sun. As the train screeched slowly to a halt in a mosaic of cattails, the steady hum of insects replaced the boxcars’ clatter. The swamp lost its charm as a cloud of mosquitoes descended upon us. I slapped the first mosquito that buried its proboscis deep into a vein. John was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the open boxcar door. He looked relaxed, more like a sannyasi than a lawyer. Insects never bite John when I am around.

“We have to sell plasma, for old time’s sake,” John said.

The thought of a needle burrowing in my arm made me cringe. Even when we found five-dollar bonus coupons in the local paper, this would only entitle us to twelve dollars each for our blood plasma. I hated selling plasma, and had stopped doing it after getting a golf-ball-sized hematoma years before in San Antonio. “It’s easy money,” John said. “We have to do it again, just like in the old days.”

“Imagine a yak-intensive pilgrimage to Himalayan cliffs higher than El Capitan,” I said, trying to change the subject. “We travel light, like Harrer, moving at night and hiding during the day.”

“Where have you been?” John said. “The Chinese are starting to open Tibet. But even if I did want to go to Tibet, I can’t leave my practice. Not until I learn how to sue doctors.”

“Then how about after I finish medical school?” I said. “That’s two years before I can malpractice on you.”

“I’ll still have clients that depend on me two years from now. I couldn’t just up and leave them.”

“Of course you could. We’re talking about the conditional tense. Two years from now. Plenty of time to ease out of your job.”

“It’s more than easing out of a job,” John said. “I’ve got professional responsibilities.”

During the next two years I fueled John’s interest in Tibet by appealing to his literary penchant, first with a copy of Alexandra David-Neel’s My Journey to Lhasa. In some ways her story was even more remarkable than Harrer’s. As a mountaineer Harrer was used to the rigors of altitude and travel under inclement weather; David-Neel was a French society woman with no prior experience in the mountains. Nevertheless, she learned Tibetan, dyed her hair black, and traveled disguised as a Tibetan woman, with a revolver stashed under her robes. On one of her first forays into Tibet, she was caught by the authorities and expelled from the country. Like any seasoned, self-respecting traveler, she ignored the expulsion order, outwitted her captors, and proceeded with her journey.

I finally broke John down. In the summer of 1987, he agreed that we would try to climb as high as we could on the Tibetan side of Everest—if we acquired warm clothes, shelter, and food as we needed them. During a brief pre-flight stop in New York City, we bought condoms, had our pictures taken with a cardboard cutout of Ronald Reagan, and stopped at the Office of Tibet. A one-way flight to Hong Kong and a high-speed train brought us to Western China. From our first-class compartment we surveyed the lush patchwork of cultivated fields. We also cut the. speaker wires in our compartment to avoid being assaulted by a shrill, continuous socialist reveille, courtesy of the Chinese government. Torrential rains followed us from Kunming to the Taklamakan Desert and the caves at Dunhuang. It was still raining when we reached Golmud, the end of the train line and the northeast gateway of Tibet.

If the air-conditioned, Japanese-made tourist bus we boarded next didn’t become mired in the flooded plains, and if we didn’t get killed crossing the Kun Lun or Tanggula mountains, it would take us two days to travel from Golmud to Lhasa by bus. But the seasonal monsoon had migrated north of the Central Himalayas for the first time in forty years. Daily rains turned the 12,000-foot Tibetan Plateau into a jeep-swallowing quagmire. Long lines of vehicles waited on both sides of eroded embankments and engorged rivers. Going into Tibet were buses, jeeps, and Land Rovers from the China Travel Service filled with tourists; trucks loaded with Chinese vegetables, Hami melons, and video cassettes; and People’s Liberation Army trucks packed with soldiers. Coming out of Tibet were trucks hauling timber; tourist buses; and more soldiers.

Once we left the salt marshes on the Qaidam Basin to wind into the mountains, seven passengers began vomiting regularly out of the windows. They suffered from a wicked combination of altitude sickness mixed with motion sickness as the bus groaned toward a 16,000 foot pass. I was more alarmed by the foxholes I saw dug into the serpentine bank of a river, the bunkers on the high slopes, and the stone barracks surrounded by barbed wire.

Finally the clouds began to clear. Dawn broke over the mountains in great columns of light, cinnabar and orange, teasing snowcapped peaks and tongues of ice from dark silhouettes. Even through our muddy windows the mountains appeared as cathedrals of light and beckoned for us to hike past the yaks dotting the frozen hills to their serrated tops. A hanging glacier angling up toward the sun’s first rays tempted us to imagine different routes to its summit. We did this continually from Golmud to Lhasa; with 6,000-meter peaks along-side the road, neither of us was able to pay attention to the other passengers’ infirmities, or to our own aching muscles, cramped from being folded unnaturally into seats designed for Japanese. We had been waiting so long for this first glimpse of sun that we were caught unprepared. How can one prepare for an avalanche of light?

The clouds stole the light back from the mountains as quickly as it had come. Suddenly the bus hit a bump that launched passengers into the luggage racks over their heads. Moans and obscenities in several languages filtered up to our seats in the front of the bus. A Chinese man wearing a full-length green army coat pulled his ashen face inside his window. He looked like he might throw up again at any moment.

Patrick, a loyal British subject on a three-week holiday from teaching English in Yunnan Province, also looked ill. I gave him some aspirin and my water bottle and asked him to offer them to the Chinese man. The man did not take the aspirin, but he wanted to talk. According to Patrick, the government had offered the man work in Tibet at double the wage he could have earned in the mainland. He also could apply for government loans to start a business, and his children would be guaranteed a place in school.

“We should be hitchhiking,” John said, staring out the window.

“We got out of shape riding soft-sleeper,” I said, referring to China’s trains.

“First class!” Patrick said, with the flair of an Elizabethan actor.

“That’s traveling in a style more befitting gentlemen in your professions.” Patrick said the Chinese army was “brilliant” to have built the road we were on with polypropylene, which would withstand the area’s temperature extremes.

“The PLA built the ‘Friendship Highway’ in the mid-1950s to invade Tibet,” John said.

“Where did you get that misinformation?” Patrick asked.

“It’s in the Tibet guidebook,” John said.

“Do you believe everything you read in the guidebook?” Patrick challenged. “I’ve been in China for a year. The People’s Daily has frequent articles on a number of socialist reforms and development in Tibet.”

John and Patrick argued whether the People’s Daily was a propaganda tool of the State. I grew tired of the sound of these two Westerners arguing out of ignorance and boredom, fueled as much by being cramped into the same bus for days than by anything either of them had experienced or read. I wondered if after four decades of occupation the Chinese were still “liberating” Tibet; many of the vehicles on the Friendship Highway carried soldiers.

The first bus in our convoy charged up an unpaved section of road and slid, wheels spinning, into the mud. As soon as our forward motion stopped, queasy passengers dashed off the bus to vomit, the typical beginning to a communal bathroom break. Men relieved themselves by the side of the road; women sought what shelter could be afforded behind a tuft of grass or hillock. The second bus swung wider than the first and plowed ten feet farther into the furrows from previous tracks. After consulting with the two other drivers, our bus driver then veered even farther from the road—and deeper into the mud.

Livid passengers cursed at the Chinese drivers for getting all three buses stuck at the same time. “The worst drivers in the world,” an Italian man shouted from the front of the bus. A Frenchman wearing thick glasses agreed: “You’d think the Chinese would have learned to drive.”

“On the contrary,” Patrick said, rising to the drivers’ defense. “These men are masters of the sodden road. More times than not they have saved us from becoming mired in this god-forsaken baskerville.” When the Frenchman shouted obscenities at our driver, Patrick resorted to ad hominem attack: “You’re blind as a bloody mole with those glasses. I’d like to see you do better.”

“Fuck you and your imperialist country.”

“Why don’t we get out and see if we can help?” Patrick said.

Without anyone’s help, the drivers quickly hooked a braided steel cable to the front of the first bus. Patrick directed fifty people to line up on either side of the cable. Another fifty people surrounded the bus. With Patrick shouting encouragement to members of the myriad nations who pushed, pulled, and kicked each bus in turn, none moved.

“Bloody hell,” Patrick yelled. “We’re all bloody stuck.”

When all efforts to extricate any of the buses from the quagmire failed, travelers resumed their verbal assault on the drivers. Patrick continued his defense of the Chinese drivers, populace, and government. Two hours later, two young soldiers who came by in an army truck towed each bus back onto the People’s Highway

We stopped in the late afternoon at Wenquan, the world’s highest town at 16,830 feet. Some of the passengers yelled “Zou! Zou! Zou!” (“Go! Go! Go!”) Wind howling through the valley gave a lonely, desolate air to the place. A dog chained to a shelter of corrugated tin barked at two Chinese children, who pelted it with rocks. The dog frothed at the mouth and lunged at the children, only to be jerked back by the chain, which seemed as if it would snap at any moment.

When a Chinese man emerged from a run-down cinderblock building and handed the driver an envelope of money, which the driver counted, he said that we had to pay fifteen yuan (three dollars) each to stay the night. “This is extortion!” Patrick said. “Hotels cost five yuan. We have daylight left. If we stay here, we will never make Lhasa tomorrow.” I told Patrick that he could also die at this altitude. Patrick pleaded with the driver to continue to the next village. He became furious when the driver left the bus.

“Zou! Zou! Zou!” Patrick shouted. Other passengers joined in, tourists alongside Chinese immigrants, chanting, “Zou! Zou! Zou!” which reverberated inside the bus and drew in people from the other busses. “Zou! Zou! Zou!” until the sun slipped behind a hill and the temperature dropped below zero. Two Frenchmen pulled out sleeping bags inside the bus. The rest of us paid fifteen yuan each and were led into the hotel’s dark rooms, where the bunk beds smelled of mildew.

Outside, near the icy chatter of the river, John and I talked about Robert Ford, the only Westerner living in eastern Tibet when the Chinese invaded. In 1949, Ford sent coded radio messages from Wenquan to monks in Lhasa. His last transmission on March 10,1949, simply said: “The Chinese are here.” Several months later, Ford was captured by the Chinese and accused of being a British spy. He spent the next five years of his life in jail.

John was a talking guidebook, and he shared with me his enthusiasm for the Yangtze River, tumbling out of the nearby glaciers to wind 3,430 miles through China, farther than any other river in the world except for those draining into the Nile and the Amazon. Tomorrow we would be in the Brahmaputra River drainage system, which emptied into the Ganges and flooded the plains from Calcutta to Bangladesh, and the Mekong River drainage system, which fanned out through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam into the South China sea.

The next morning three tall, stoic men waited by the bus. They wore long sheepskins and daggers tucked into rope belts. Red tassels braided into their hair and wrapped around their heads enabled John to identify them as Khampas, from eastern Tibet. By reputation Khampas were a hardy people who had waged the most determined armed struggle against the Chinese in the 1960s. John pointed out that Khampas continued their isolated attacks on army convoys even after 1972, when Nixon and Kissinger formally halted the CIA funding of the Tibetan resistance.

After everyone else had boarded, the driver let the Khampas sit in the last row. Altitude sickness, and being launched into the roof each time the bus hit a pothole, had proved too much for five of the Chinese immigrants, who had not gotten back on. The Khampas sang and laughed each time their heads hit the roof. This annoyed some of the other passengers, but I was in awe of these proud people. I also made sure to get off the bus every time they did, to make certain our packs did not disappear. By reputation, Khampas are also bandits.

Rock cairns with strings of faded prayer flags marked the Tanggula Shankou pass, the highest point in our trip. Two more people threw up. I heard Patrick moan as we crossed China’s “official” border into the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

Each bend in the Lhasa Valley’s patchwork of barley fields awaiting the harvest, each expanse of steel scree and magenta slope beneath an amphitheater of cliffs, each snowcapped mountain that tore at the indigo clouds seemed more magnificent than the last. The cramps from the two-day bus ride were forgotten as we approached the ancient city. Guidebooks appeared as passengers tried to decide which hotel they would try. As if by magic, thunder from the low-lying clouds accompanied our first glimpse of the Potala Palace rising majestically above the cinderblock buildings. Thunder rattled the bus windows and the pit of my stomach, thunder that, we learned later, turned out to be the Chinese Army using artillery to liberate the monsoon from the clouds.