CHAPTER THREE

On Pilgrimage

The smell of hashish mingled with the smell of the drenched travelers who had waited in the rain for two hours at 4:00 in the morning for the bus that would take us to Gyantse, the first city in the direction of Everest. I was crammed in the back of the bus between a blond-haired German man wearing red felt Tibetan boots with thick yak soles, and a PLA soldier in uniform. The German passed a pipe of hashish past the soldier, who did not notice, to Patrick.

“I have never tried hashish,” Patrick said excitedly. “What will it do?”

“It makes the mountains come alive,” the German assured him. After smoking it, Patrick stared out the window at barley fields lush with the monsoon’s promise of bumper crops against barren slopes of red clay.

“There’s a dragon in the clouds,” Patrick said. “Do you see it?”

The German saw the dragon. I did not, more out of principle than from not really seeing it. I wanted to lose myself in the moment. Watching air condense out of flared yak nostrils was in itself completely satisfying, as were the subtle hues of vermilion shimmering on eons of sedimentary rock, and impossibly blue Lake Yamdrok Tso.

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Gyantse exported caravans of yak and sheep wool to China and Nepal. Gyantse’s preeminence as a trading center ended in 1904, when Younghusband led a British military expedition into Gyantse in order to force the Tibetans into a trade agreement. The damage done by Younghusband, however, was negligible compared to that done more recently by Chinese artillery. Now the fort on top of the ridge that looked out over the town lay in ruins, and only three of the Palkhor Monastery’s buildings had been reconstructed. When the bus driver would go no farther than the Chinese hotel on the outskirts of town, we trudged through sneaker-stealing mud past a military compound of one-story barracks surrounded by barbed wire.

“If you want to know the truth about Younghusband,” Patrick said, “he was sent here to see if the Russians had invaded.”

“Bullshit,” I said, and prepared for battle. “The Brits just used the Russian threat as an excuse to have wool socks made for their navy.”

“I read Younghusband’s account of the expedition,” John said. “After killing over 600 Tibetans, the British gave medical assistance to the wounded. This dumbfounded the monks. The Tibetan generals wanted to surrender but the local monks wouldn’t let them! They ordered the generals to fight. The monks got creamed.”

“What does that tell you about the peace-loving Tibetans?” Patrick asked. “They were ruthless.”

“More ruthless than Younghusband?” John asked. “Younghusband recorded the deaths of eighty coolies in the fighting under the heading ‘animal casualties.’”

“Kuchi kuchi , Dalai Lama photo,” we heard from a swarm of barefoot urchins, who tugged on our shirttails with hands covered with layers of filth and excrescence. “Kuchi kuchi Dalai Lama photo,” we heard, as we squished through mud furrowed by wagon wheels. “Kuchi kuchi” as men whose clothes blended with the mud stared at us. “Kuchi kuchi” beginning to annoy me as I watched a woman pick nits from another woman’s head. I felt like an astronaut in the midst of a Tibetan western.

An audible rumbling preceded the sight of Patrick dropping his spotless red Karrimor pack in the mud and running into an alley to drop his pants. Cheers heralded Patrick’s return. Blushing and bowlegged and clutching his stomach, Patrick said, “I’m bloody melting. Doc, what do you have for the shits?” I suggested that Patrick stick to a diet of boiled rice, yogurt, and black tea, and abstain from beer for a few days. “What kind of medicine is that?” Patrick replied, resuming a brisk pace. “I’ll just have to bloody well melt, then.”

That evening John climbed up a rock shoulder to the base of the fort. Climbing, he reasoned, would be safer than encountering the dogs on the streets at night. Patrick and I tried to follow. “I’m going back for a torch,” Patrick said below me.

“You’ll be killed by the dogs,” I said.

“The hell with the dogs,” Patrick said. “I’m going—” A sudden visceral growl behind Patrick made both of us scream, and I heard John laughing above us. “You’re a real comic,” Patrick said. “I almost soiled myself,”

“Hurry up,” John said. “There’s a pack of mongrels behind you.”

“Like hell there is,” Patrick said, flicking his lighter, only to illuminate six pairs of eyes staring back at him. Patrick yelled and scampered up the slab until he reached the base of the fort, where he could sit on the tourist path. Patrick eyed John suspiciously and inspected the fifteen-foot-high stone wall rising above them. Without any jokes about rotten mortar or landing if he fell, John made three swift moves up the wall and disappeared over the top.

“Come back!” Patrick yelled. No answer came from the other side of the wall. I was scared too, not for John, but for myself. John had already done the crux; I had to follow. “You’re both crazy,” Patrick yelled, as I tried to grab a handhold and pulled a loose piece of slate from the wall.

“Rock,” I yelled down. Luckily, none of my other handholds broke off. I made it over the top and saw John up ahead, climbing a moonlit ribbon of quartz to the shadowy fortress. When I caught up with him, I was glad to see that he was out of breath, too. “We’re crazy,” I said.

“Better for it,” John said.

As is always the case, climbing down triggered more adrenaline than our climb up. When we made it back to Patrick, he was ecstatic to see us alive, and later bought us several rounds of beers to celebrate our safe return at the Tibetan hotel.

We returned the next afternoon to explore the devastated fort’s stooped hallways and courtyards, discovering that many of its carved wooden beams and frescoes were still in excellent condition. The top of the hill offered a depressing view of the Palkhor Monastery. An outer wall and three reconstructed buildings were all that remained. The famous “temple of a thousand images” had been blown into smithereens.

On the way down the hill, a small window let us enter a locked room of the fort containing five well-preserved Tantric mandalas. We studied these ancient symbols of the universe for hours. Each had two central figures depicted in graphic sexual union, ensheathed in layers of eternal flames.

At 6:00 the next morning we returned to the Palkhor. Three generations of monks chanted sutras in the central court, which was festooned with numerous tankas. I felt myself immersing in the experience. The rumbling of the baritones resonated deep inside my skull. The rise and fall of the young tenors lapped like waves on the shores of my subconscious. I felt weightless among the multicolored silk banners, and gradually began to feel my mind’s eye rise above the floor. This phenomenon had happened to me many times as a child lying in bed. It had always seemed frightening at first, seeing the room get smaller and fearing to venture out too far in case I could not return.

Suddenly I was transported back to my first trip to India in 1979. Determined to come to terms with my strict Catholic upbringing, I had gone alone into the mountains with the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, and the I Ching. As fortune would have it, I came upon an elderly, bearded man on a pilgrimage to Amarnath Cave. The man wore only sandals and a sheet. He carried a three pronged staff of Shiva and blessed pilgrims who put coins into his hand. I accompanied him across a fleeting glacier, long enough to see him drop the coins for others to find. We could not communicate with words, but we picked wild flowers before approaching the cave. Reading the religious texts and meeting this pilgrim helped me see that the world’s great religions all share core doctrines of love, and fascinations with ritual.

A group of tourists walked counterclockwise around the inside of the monastery. They talked loudly and took pictures of the fearful deities on the wall, the vulture hanging upside down from the roof, the monks slurping their butter tea and blowing their noses in their sleeves. The monks did not seem to mind when the tourists pointed at them. But when a German man came in and began doing prostrations next to the initiates, I felt self-conscious and left.

In the infinite wisdom of the China Travel Service, our getting off the bus at Gyantse meant that we could not get back on the same bus at a later date. Patrick asked Chinese truck drivers for a ride to Shigatse when they stopped at one of the town’s matchbox restaurants. After two hours of rejections, and no luck trying to hitchhike, John sat down to read Gu Hua’s A Small Town Called Hibiscus. Finally, a Tibetan driver skidded to a halt next to us. “Shigatse?” John asked. The driver nodded and said, “Gomo ju” (ten yuan, two U.S. dollars). We paid the driver ten yuan each, and the dozen other Tibetans in the back of the open truck helped pull us and our packs aboard. Turquoise nuggets and oversized red coral beads dangled from the men’s earlobes.

“I’m not paying in advance,” a British man who’d appeared beside us said, and looked to me for support. “What if he doesn’t take us to Shigatse? What if his truck breaks down?” The driver started the engine. When the Brit saw that the truck was leaving without him, he threw a ten yuan note into the cab and climbed in the back with us and the grinning Tibetans. Patrick opened a bottle of Chinese brandy and yelled in pure satori, and all of the Tibetans cheered when he passed the bottle.

Knowing that there were no military checkpoints between Gyantse and Shigatse gave us the same surge of freedom I associated with hoping a freight train. The landscape and the altitude and the brandy were intoxicating. Great curtains of light swept across the harvested fields. The Tibetans sang. The obnoxious Brit turned out to be a medical student, and he shared his flat bread with us. With a second bottle of brandy came more singing and political discussions about who was more of an imperialist, Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher.

In 1447, the Fifth Dalai Lama is credited with having built Shigatse’s Tashilhunpo Monastery, the historical seat of the Panchen Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s second highest lama under the Dalai Lama. The last Panchen Lama spent ten years in Chinese prisons during the Cultural Revolution before he was forced to reside in Beijing. Foreigners often accused the Panchen Lama of being a puppet of the Chinese. Although the Chinese wrote and announced his public declarations, which counseled Tibetans to denounce the Dalai Lama and accept the Motherland, the Panchen Lama also managed to give many pro-independence statements. His most recent and most vociferous appeal for Tibetan independence came two weeks before he died in January of 1989 on a visit to the Tashilhunpo Monastery. The Chinese press said that the Panchen Lama had died of a heart attack. To verify this the government sent a plane-load of cardiologists from Beijing to Shigatse. It struck me as excessive to send so many cardiologists to examine the Panchen Lama after his death.

Tucked into the monastery’s complex of narrow alleys and prayer halls were marvelous gilded roofs, monks engaged in debate, a printing press, and enormous copper cauldrons of butter tea stirred with six-foot ladles. One might even glimpse monks blowing on conch shells or long brass trumpets. From all outward appearances, the Chinese had lavished money on the Tashilhunpo’s reconstruction. The crescent moon and sun, ancient symbols of universal consciousness, still topped each stupa (shrine). Banners of colored silk and fantastic tankas adorned the main halls. Tibetan pilgrims offered tsampa, money, and strands of hair beneath a picture of the Dalai Lama, and spooned yak butter from greasy skins into the monastery’s butter lamps.

But the golden corners of the roofs turned up in the Chinese style, instead of the traditional rectangular Tibetan lines. The printed books were censored. The bulk of the monks’ duties lay in the fields, and tourists were ushered in and out of the monastery with rude efficiency.

Patrick organized a farewell party in his own honor at the Tibetan hotel in Shigatse. He had extended his sightseeing as far as he could if he was still to make it back to Yunnan for the start of his second year teaching “the Queen’s English” to Chinese university students. The party made for a fitting end and beginning. On the first cloudless night we had seen in three weeks of rain, we played Chinese checkers and drank warm beer and brandy. This made Patrick long to continue with us into the mountains. “You bloody wankers better write,” Patrick said. “I’ve never had as much fun as hitchhiking in the back of that truck.”

“Come to Sakya Monastery with us,” John said. “Sakya is the seat of the Red Hats. The monks there were allowed to marry and drink alcohol. We’ll become monks!”

John and Patrick argued for the last time. They started somewhere in the thirteenth century with Kublai Khan’s Mongolian empire. Patrick said the Han Chinese were listed as the lowest racial hierarchy, following Mongols, Turks, and Manchus. John said that Kublai Khan had adopted Tibetan Buddhism as Mongolia’s state religion, and that therefore the Tibetans conquered the Mongolians, not the other way around.

“I don’t know about religion,” Patrick said, “but I have a lot of respect for the Chinese after living in Yunnan. The Chinese are a wonderful people.”

I would miss Patrick’s unfailing respect for everything Chinese. He provided a worthwhile counterbalance to our pro-Tibetan sentiments. In the West we are raised to believe that the solution to two opposing views usually lies somewhere in the middle. However, in the case of Tibet, we were beginning to believe the truth was closer to the Tibetan view. John and Patrick continued playing checkers under the stars while I began to nod off. Before I fell asleep, I heard Patrick argue that China’s development of Tibet would eventually benefit the Tibetans: “It’s the trickle-down theory. You should know about that with Ronald Reagan as your president.”

According to travelers we met who had been trying to hitchhike out of Shigatse for a week, a pilgrim truck was to leave for Sakya from the Tibetan truck stop across from the Tashilhunpo’s main gate at 6:30 the next morning. We walked quickly down the wide, dark boulevard through the sprawl of three-story cinderblock buildings that housed Shigatse’s predominantly Chinese population. Mongrels charging us from the shadows made it difficult to appreciate the outline of a dilapidated fort on the ridge against the backdrop of predawn stars. Their barking continued as we sat down next to a metal gate where pilgrims were sleeping. The Tibetans gathered up their bedrolls moments before a truck with no lights came barreling out of the gate. We ran with the pilgrims and helped women throw their bedrolls and children into the back of the truck. They in turn pulled us up.

Traveling with Buddhist pilgrims at last! Each time the truck hit a bump we were thrown into the air and landed hard on burlap sacks of barley. There were twenty-eight pilgrims, including seven women and five babies. It took me a long time to notice that there was a young British couple among them, wearing sheepskin coats turned inside out. They almost looked Tibetan with their dark tans and the turquoise nuggets that hung from their ear lobes. They did not say a word to us, but they shared their large plastic bags of tsampa and pretended to sing Tibetan folk songs with the pilgrims. Everything became an excuse to laugh: the idea of these Westerners trying to sing Tibetan folk songs, and landing on top of someone else with each new bump. How strange John’s and my pleated wool pants and down parkas looked next to the sheepskins. I noticed that the same shades of orange and dun that colored the horizon were settling on us. We were being baptized by Tibetan dirt.

“Fuck you,” the British woman said, when one of the pilgrims pinched her.

Vertical red and white stripes distinguished Sakya Monastery’s blue fortress walls from the contiguous sprawl of Quonset huts. We headed for the houses across the river, where Tibetan work crews secured stone walls with wire mesh to prevent the river from claiming any more of the homes being built for newly arrived Chinese settlers. Painted blue and striped like the monastery, the new houses had sticks piled on their rooftops for fuel. They stood in stark contrast to the barracks-like housing for the workers.

Across a flimsy bridge that spanned the torrent, a Tibetan boy wearing Western clothes and a Mao hat followed us into an alley. We jumped puddles of urine from unattended cows, saw a dog lying stiff-legged with rigor mortis, and passed yak-dung patties molded like large peanut butter cookies on the adobe walls. Other children, wearing rags, paid no attention to us; they were too busy carrying the largest rocks they could muster to divert runoff around their homes.

The recent monsoon had done little damage to the Tibetan neighborhood compared to the adjacent monastery, which had been razed by Chinese artillery. Demolished houses and fragmented walls blended with other ruins that predated Sakya Monastery by several centuries. A single stupa remained among the rubble.

The boy produced a note pad from his back pocket that contained sentences written in Tibetan, Mandarin, and English. He pronounced each word carefully, and badly: “My name is Tenzin. How are you? I am well We exchanged the Tibetan for English names of things we could point to, like so (teeth), ka (mouth), mik (eyes). Tenzin led us to his house, where his mother welcomed us into a smoky room. Tenzin had a younger brother and sister, two and four years old, who sat in our laps and pulled at the hair on our arms while Tenzin passed us reed baskets of tsampa, churra (a small, bittersweet curd), dried peas, and cubes of dried yak cheese. “Pö-cha, yapo-du! ” (“Butter tea is good!”) we said, as the mother churned the golden liquid and insisted that we fill our pockets with peas and barley and help ourselves to handfuls of “churra, yapo-du!” We delighted the mother with our appetites, and by drinking many cups of pö-cha.

At my inquiring if the churra were from a ya (yak) or a dzo (yak-cow cross), the mother ordered Tenzin out of the room. He returned leading a small cow on a rope. The mother shrieked with laughter. Next, she had Tenzin fetch a bag of vintage tsampa, which we mixed with butter tea into balls. When we were sated, Tenzin played a four-string guitar, danced, and sang folk songs. Tenzin’s lilting tenor accompanied a familiar cement feeling in my stomach. Too many “churra, yapo-du,” “pö-cha, yapo-du,” and “ya-ma, yapo-du, tu je che” (“yak butter is good, thank you”). I became acutely aware of the blackened fingers with which Tenzin’s mother had expertly kneaded the yak butter into tsampa balls for us to eat.

The next afternoon, six Japanese tourist buses stopped at Sakya Monastery for two hours. Since none of the buses were full, I assumed that one would be willing take us a half-day drive to Tingri, from where we would hike to Everest. Each driver leaned on his horn while anxious stragglers pushed through the swarm of kuchi kuchi kids. I waded into the tugging chorus and asked a German woman if we could pay for two seats to Tingri. “We can do whatever we want,” the woman said. “We chartered this bus ourselves. But we are having a problem with the driver.” As if on cue, people at the front of the bus screamed at the Chinese driver in French and Italian. The driver stared out the windshield. The woman looked at us apologetically. “I am sorry. There is nothing I can do.”

Sakya was an afternoon stop on their way from Lhasa to the Nepalese border. Once foreigners chartered their own bus, they became possessive. I walked to the driver’s window and constructed a formal greeting from sentence fragments I had learned from Patrick: “Hello. I am a Western doctor. We are going to Everest! Thank you.”

“Mei you” (Chinese for “don’t have”), the driver said, still leaning on the horn. If we had learned anything on this trip, it was never take the first mei you for granted. But the bus left us behind, even though there were enough empty seats to take us. I cursed the buses for abandoning us to another night among the bedbugs at the Tibetan hotel. We were stranded in Sakya, where the only Chinese restaurant in town specialized in greasy stir-fry soup. I was ready to leave behind its dirt alleys and puddles and urchins.

I almost missed Sakya’s charm completely. The next day, when no tourist buses arrived to refuse us, we hiked up the nearest mountain. Each new rise looked like the summit, and it took us longer to get there than we expected. Finally, we rested on a small outcrop of red shale that clung to the steep scree. Sakya’s town and monastery looked miniature next to the river.

A CRACK resounded through the hills. Another CRACK and sheep scattered across a steep ravine. We saw two moving forms that turned out to be children. If they fell they would die. CRACK and we watched the children move with amazing quickness across a slope. Wide-brim felt hats and beige cloaks gave them an appearance of supernatural grace. CRACK resounded through the mountains, and finally I noticed the slings the children were using to throw rocks with deadly accuracy.

We worried at first that the boys were caught in an avalanche. Then, realizing that all the noise was an acoustical illusion created by the echoing sound of the slings, we relaxed. When the boys showed us how to use their slings, it no longer mattered if we left Sakya that night or next week. The children showed us how you put stones the size of walnuts in the widened section of the black and white sling, and then swung it over your head like a giant propeller. Once it started whirring, you released one end and the rock shot out in the intended direction with a thunderous CRACK. Our stones flew out erratically and made the boys take cover. The boys themselves were experts; they could hit a sheep on the run from fifty yards. When they tired of teaching us how to throw rocks, they ran after the sheep they were tending.

We ran down the scree in giant, moon-walking bounds. At lunch, we added canned mackerel and ramen noodles to our stir-fry soup, and talked about the legal aspects of mountaineering in off-limits areas with a heterogeneous group of Europeans we came upon, who had liked Sakya so much that they had stayed an extra day. They offered to give us a ride.

A mud shower sprayed us as we walked to the bus the next morning. Three Tibetans peered down on us from above the half wall on a third-story roof. Seeing them prompted me to pick up a Tootsie-Roll-sized donkey turd and throw it back at them as hard as I could. The turd almost hit one of the men’s heads, and we were engaged in battle. The men threw mud at us. John and I whipped turds back at them.

“Kuchi kuchi. Dalai Lama photo,” I said to a girl clutching a Dalai Lama postcard in her hands. The girl screamed. I tugged on the post card and repeated my request. Uneasy laughter spread among the younger children, who had toilet-training splits in the back of their pants. “Kuchi kuchi,” I said grabbing the smallest boy’s belly with my enormous white hand. The children shrieked with laughter. When we had arrived at Sakya I had cursed these urchins. Now they were my kuchi kuchi kids.

At Xegar, six French trekkers waiting by the side of the road pushed onto our bus and demanded that we take them to Tingri. They had just hiked from Everest and had to return to Tingri for their equipment. The group’s arrogant tone incurred the collective wrath of the chartered passengers. The trekkers argued until the passengers let them stay—if together they paid 108 yuan to travel the next twenty-six kilometers.

“Cons! For that price we could go to Lhasa.”

“Then go to Lhasa!”

“This is preposterous.”

The driver settled the argument by charging each trekker five yuan, a fair price. We were moving again. A tall, unshaven man with water dripping off his stringy, unwashed hair sat down next to me. “Two weeks we are trekking to Everest and the whole time rain,” the man said. “We come 12,000 miles for a glimpse of this mountain. We wait in Base Camp three extra days, and still only monsoon. Not seeing Everest is the biggest disappointment of my life!” I tell the man we are headed toward Everest and he says, “You will never see Everest.”

Wisps of smoke traced magical lines from the prayer flags on Tingri’s rooftops to the heavy clouds that sealed the valley. As we walked to the Tibetan hotel, a flock of urchins pressed fistfuls of tsampa into our hands, ran metal hoops in circles around us, and splashed each other in the hotel’s flooded central courtyard. The magic faded when we realized that there would be no effective boundary between the monsoon and our room. The straw mats were the dirtiest I had yet seen in Tibet, and smelled of mildew, A sordid history unfolded as I examined the soiled sheet: the first corner had been used as a dish towel for spaghetti sauce; the second to wipe blackened soot from a pot; cigarette burns marked the third corner; crusted snot clung to the fourth.

“Don’t touch that mattress!” shouted another Frenchman, with a half-smoked Gauloise protruding from his scraggly beard. “Les puces de lits. Bedbugs. They attacked me last night.” Seeing the Frenchman scratching made me scratch. “This is a god-forsaken place. I am going to Everest. Today I wait all day for a stupid yak man. We made an agreement yesterday. I paid him and he never came back. They are thieves, these yak men.”

We went in search of a yak man and found five of them drinking chang in the hotel’s smoky restaurant. An ancient woman poured the turbid liquid from a black kettle into our cracked porcelain cups. Tsarang, the tallest and most inebriated of the yak men, wore black pants cut off at mid-thigh. He offered a toast, “Dalai Lama, yapo-du,” and downed the contents of his cup, which the woman promptly refilled. We followed suit. The homemade beer looked like dishwater but was pleasantly bubbly, and it breached the language barrier. We were going to Everest, or “Chomolungma.” They were yak men. Each wanted to take us.

As the self-appointed spokesman for the group, Tsarang traced the arc of the sun on the table with his finger three times—three days for the trip to Chomolungma. The other yak men nodded their heads in agreement. Tsarang held up fifteen fingers (fifteen yuan, three U.S. dollars) for himself for each of the three days, and ten fingers each for the two yaks, if burly fingers marching across the table were meant to represent yaks.

“They are cheating you,” yelled the Gauloise-smoking Frenchman, who had joined us at the restaurant.

The yak men did not understand the Frenchman’s English, but they understood his derogatory tone. John protested that three days was too long; the guidebook said that you could hike from Tingri to Everest in two days. John traced two arcs to Chomolungma. Tsarang shook his head no. I sided with Tsarang. An extra day would help us acclimatize slowly to the change in altitude from 10,000 to 17,000 feet. John stubbornly raised his cup to Chomolungma in two days. Tsarang added a third arc and the yak men laughed.

“He’s cheating us,” John said when Tsarang ordered another kettle of chang.

I reminded John that Tsarang needed an extra day to get his yaks back, and that we did not have a tent or a stove. The yak men laughed when they understood from my tracing of a tent and a stove that we had neither. Tsarang waved them in free. John calculated 105 yuan to be a fair total price for the three days, if it also included kerosene. “And three more for the Dalai Lama,” I said, holding up three fingers, invoking 108, Tibetan Buddhism’s symbolic number for enlightenment. “Chomolungma, yapo-du,” we toasted, and Tsarang refilled our cups.

“You are fools,” the Frenchman said.

“Dalai Lama, yapo-du,” I said.

“Dalai Lama, yapo-du,” the yak men said and touched their cups to their foreheads before downing the chang. Tsarang stood up abruptly, mumbled something unintelligible, and left. “He will never come back,” the Frenchman told us. Tsarang returned in two hours with a horse cart for our packs. On the way out of town we bought a case of Chinese bai jiu (beer) and a whole quarter of one of Tibet’s scrawny sheep. I also plucked a wide-brimmed, beige felt hat off a Tibetan man selling cheap, colorful clothing in front of our hotel. He wanted forty-five yuan but took twenty-five.

“It’s filthy,” John said, inspecting the sweat-stained brim for infestation.

“Broken in,” I corrected.

“Be careful he does not steal everything,” the Frenchman yelled after us. I left Tingri thinking that if I were a yak man, I would have stolen the Frenchman’s choice food items.

The rain clouds broke and left us standing in a green valley with Cho Oyu lifting the horizon. Cho Oyu was the largest mountain we had ever seen. We could not imagine “knocking the bastard off,” as Sir Edmund Hillary said of Everest. Although we had climbed 20,000 foot peaks in Peru, they were mere foothills compared to Cho Oyu’s 27,000 feet, and Everest at over 29,000 feet. We were mere inebriated specks in the vast Himalayas.

Tsarang drank only chang during our three-day trek. We tried to get him to drink water, but he handed us back beer instead, which we accepted as part of an unwritten social contract. Despite frequent stream crossings and numerous chang stops to toast “Dalai Lama, yapodu!” we crossed the valley in only two hours. Tsarang had the largest house in the village we found there, with hay stacked on its roof as is the custom throughout western Tibet.

There I tried to milk a dzo in a corral, to the encouragement of Tsarang’s teenage brother, but after milkless minutes the dzo kicked me into the dung with its hind foot. Undaunted, I went inside for another yak by-product overdose. Tsarang’s grandmother looked at us through thick cataracts and asked how much we were paying Tsarang. We mimed the original transaction that led up to 108 fingers. This sent the grandmother into hysterics. Everything we did made her laugh: eating whole boiled potatoes, tossing tsampa onto our cheeks instead of into our mouths, dancing with Tsarang while he sang and played a four-string guitar. After a refreshing stop, we were soon back under way again.

“Chuh!” Tsarang yelled at Khampa and Sera, our yaks, who stood motionless and snorted steam from their nostrils in the frigid morning air. “Chuh!” Tsarang yelled again, and threw a softball-sized rock with frightening speed that thumped against Khampa’s flank. At each river crossing Khampa tried to buck the case of beer. Sera had the reddish coat and white markings of an Irish Hereford. She had enormous brown eyes and preferred to graze, until a swift kick to the hind quarters made her bolt to the next patch of grass. Such was our skittery introduction to chasing the unruly beasts.

Dokale was not a town like the map said, but nothing more than two black, yak-hair nomad tents. Unlike these nomad tents, which opened at the top to let the smoke out and fresh air in, Tsarang’s ripped, canvas tent let snow in and kept the smoke from escaping. Soon everything we owned smelled like dried rabbit dung, which Tsarang fired red-hot with a bellows under a boiling pot. The smoke, and the sight of John and Tsarang devouring greasy boiled lamb and butter tea, nauseated me. I tried to eat tsampa to thwart an impending intestinal eruption. It was too late.

“What are you doing?” I yelled when John poured the water from the boiled lamb into a water bottle. “Didn’t they teach you nutrition in medical school? All the nutrients are in the water. We’ll need all the energy we can get.”

Seeing the greasy water and bits of lamb in the wide mouth of the water bottle sent me running out of the tent to the nearest hillock. A fine snow covered my tracks by the time I returned, and every other occasion I was forced to sprint from the tent in order to avoid defiling myself. Snow covered our blankets, until daylight illuminated a fairy land with thick gray clouds and yaks on the hills. That morning it took Tsarang two hours to find Khampa and Sera, who had wandered off in the night. How Tsarang ever found them amazed me. On a distant hill all yaks look alike, and there were hundreds of them. Yaks also do not come when they are called.

Being afflicted with diarrhea in the mountains was infinitely better than having diarrhea in a populated area. The mountains did not care if you dropped your pants while struggling toward a high pass or descending through a valley that narrowed into a gorge. By afternoon the diarrhea, nausea, and a headache made me fall behind Tsarang and the yaks. John stayed close by to humor me through my frequent rest stops.

“Seriously,” John said, opening a can of unnaturally pink, greasy meat. “Have some Spam.”

“We’ve been robbed!” John said when he discovered that our case of Chinese beer was actually nonalcoholic cider. Tsarang had hurried back down the mountain at the onset of a torrential rain, but we had decided to take refuge at what remained of Rombok Monastery. “I paid seventy-five yuan,” John lamented. “Twice as much as this cider is worth.” I had the worst headache of my life and cared more about avoiding the rain pouring through the slate roof.

A teenage monk in dirty robes entered the room and handed us a thermos of butter tea for which he wanted five yuan, an exorbitant price. Hoping to get rid of him, I paid the money. He proceeded to pull from his robes a freeze-dried shrimp dinner, a can of Cadbury chocolate powder, and an assortment of electrolyte drinks. He insisted that we buy something.

John offered a bottle of cider to the pseudo-lama for the chocolate powder. The monk shook his head no and pointed to the word bai jiu written in Chinese on the case. Of course. The monk did not drink alcohol. John took a sip and demonstrated that we had indeed brought a case of nonalcoholic bai jiu. The monk traded the chocolate for three bottles of cider. Just as John was feeling good about his bargain, the monk demanded ten yuan from each of us for the room.

The rain continued through the evening. We drank cider and moved our sleeping bags to avoid each new leak that sprang in the roof. A reconnaissance of the monastery revealed a solitary, hourglass stupa amid the remnants of buildings that had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Sleep was out of the question. John and I stayed awake discussing the ill-fated Everest expedition of Mallory and Irving.

“The climbers in the Mallory expedition used to make fun of the monks at Rombok Monastery,” John said. “The monks believed that each rock, plant, and animal on the mountain had its own spirit, and that to disturb anything was to invite death. The British climbers ridiculed the monks for being superstitious and unkempt. The expedition was held up for two months by inclement weather. Finally, the climbers sought the blessing of the old abbot who presided over Rombok. In an ornate ceremony, the abbot pled their case before the ruling spirits. Apparently, the ceremony was not a success; the abbot warned Mallory and Irving that inauspicious portents boded ill for their expedition. But the weather cleared the next day, and the mountaineers were determined to press on. Mallory and Irving climbed to their death.”