THE RACE TO RESIGN

Barba had no intention of cancelling Miss Tibet. He was doing what he was best at – bluffing. He called another meeting with Jig Me and the group of Communist cronies and this time tried another strategy. ‘There will be no press, just a group of housewives and teachers from Hong Kong.’

With this new, toned-down approach, he won the support of Mr Hu from the Tibet Cultural Bureau and so started the preparations in earnest. A great extravaganza was planned, with a picnic at 14,000 feet, a barbecue with roast yak on Jarmalingka Island, a surprise buffet on the roof of an isolated monastery, and then the grand finale – the Miss Tibet Gala evening, with music from a Filipino band, especially flown in for the occasion.

With two days to go before the arrival of the guests, Mr Hu asked for a meeting with Mr Barba. He wanted to show Barba his gala performance. Jig Me acted as mediator.

‘No, no, Jig Me,’ said Barba, ‘you must be translating wrong. You mean that he wants to see my gala performance.’

‘No, he has prepared the gala performance. You cannot do one.’

It was quite a surprise. Two sets of preparations had been going on, each oblivious to the other’s work. Barba’s blood surpassed boiling point. I have never seen anyone capable of summoning up greater anger.

Everything about him oozed rage; his facial contortions, the little beads of sweat that appeared on his forehead, the maroon colour which spread across his face, his stammering voice and the vast array of imaginative swear words accompanied by Italian sign language. He stood up from the table and shouted, ‘You mean that this little Communist has prepared a show. Am I, described by Playboy magazine as “the Felini of the hotel industry”, not able to produce a show good enough?!’

It had been a great insult to Barba’s gigantic ego. But Mr Hu realised that he too was being severely insulted and hurled abuse back in Chinese. Jig Me visibly aged ten years and Barba stormed out of the meeting.

Later in the afternoon, a compromise was reached. Barba would view Mr Hu’s show in the evening to give it an appraisal. He laughed all the way through it.

‘Call this a show? Chinese girls, prancing around to disco music twenty years out of date!’

Mr Hu thought Barba was enjoying the performance and made him an offer – he could have the show for $15,000. The atmosphere became electric and Barba shot to his feet. He was just saved from assaulting Mr Hu by Jig Me’s very simple solution. Mr Hu could have his show on one night and Mr Barba could have his on another. With careful scheduling, Mr Hu’s evening show was put on at a time when the hotel was practically empty and Barba’s was kept as originally planned for the last night of the Miss Tibet tour.

The group of ‘housewives’ and ‘teachers’ had no difficulty reaching Lhasa and on the day of their arrival, occupancy hit the magic 20 per cent. It was the first time in the history of Holiday Inn Lhasa that a day in December had reached this prized figure. Derek was triumphantly given the order to switch the heating on. Barba had achieved his goal although he was a little disappointed that he had not yet been fired.

Conny and I took the group to the Barkhor on their first afternoon. Some of the ‘housewives’ carried suspiciously large home video cameras, and many of the ‘teachers’ took notepads with them wherever they went and looked everywhere for Tibetans who could speak English and tell them about human rights.

We were starting to gain too much attention for a normal tour group and we bundled the ‘tourists’ through the crowd of ‘You how much?’ Khampa girls and back onto the tour bus. You never knew whom to trust at the Barkhor. Any one of the harmless-looking Tibetans or Chinese could be an informer. No matter how much Barba was savouring the risk of being fired, I was enjoying working in Lhasa and had no intention of being deported for organising his group of illegal journalists.

Back at the hotel, the guests complained of the cold. The long-awaited heating was completely ineffectual in the massive marble-lined lobby. The staff had the annoying habit of leaving doors open at either end of the hotel, turning the corridors into wind tunnels. We tried all sorts of methods to keep them closed but nothing worked. The heating, however, did have an effect in the rooms, and when I opened the door to room 3205 I was hit by the heat of a sauna and a rather curious smell. I looked around my room but couldn’t find anything out of place, so I decided the smell must be coming in from outside.

The tour was going superbly. What they saw, where they ate, what they did, had all been carefully planned to bring them on to a new and more thrilling high each day. The momentum gathered at breakneck pace and they returned to the hotel on the final afternoon of the tour in eager anticipation of the grand finale – the Miss Tibet election itself.

Three hours before the election was due to start, the small man in the blue Chairman Mao suit who had been at the initial meeting reappeared at the hotel. He announced that the Filipino band was forbidden to play rock ’n’ roll, that the lead singer of the band was not to look too sexy and that the election had to be cancelled. There could be no Miss Tibet. We would be allowed to continue with the show, but the Tibet Cultural Bureau would provide the pre-selected contestants and the title from now on would be the ‘FASHION PARADE EVALUATION’. Conny was ordered to take down all the posters and signs which read ‘Miss Tibet’ and change everything to the ‘FASHION PARADE EVALUATION’.

That evening, as I changed into a dinner jacket for the gala evening, the smell in my room became unbearable. It was not just in my room but in all the rooms. There was a tinge of it on the air in the corridors and it worsened as you approached the coffee shop.

It suddenly hit me. I recognised the smell. This was the same odour that had spread through my garage back in Jersey when I had baited a mouse trap and then forgotten to look at it for a few weeks. The difference now was that this smell was not just from the body of a tiny dead mouse – this was the rat population of the hotel which had been poisoned in the air-conditioning ducts. The rat-catchers from Chengdu had long since gone, having only picked up the bodies which were out in the open. No one had thought of the air-conditioning ducts, where the corpses had initially been preserved in the dry, chilled atmosphere. But now the bodies were being blasted with hot air and were rapidly defrosting and decomposing. The stench throughout the hotel was excruciating.

The heating was immediately switched off. The windows in the Everest Room were opened wide and Derek ran around the hotel instructing his Engineering Department staff to block off all the vents. A bend in the air-conditioning ducts above the coffee shop produced the bodies of thirteen rats. No one knows how many lay out of reach in the five storeys of the hotel.

Once the temperature had been lowered the smell started to decline. I put on several layers of T-shirts and my thick woollen long johns under my evening suit and went to the Everest Room, to see if there was anything I could do to help with the final preparations.

The Everest Room was usually home to the notorious group buffet but tonight Barba had transformed the area into a Hollywood set. He had ordered a Tibetan tent village to be constructed in the hotel grounds outside the Everest Room, so that yaks grazed on the lawn by the windows. Charlie, who was responsible for the grounds of the hotel as well as the housekeeping inside, kept prodding the yaks away from the flower tubs, but to no avail.

Inside, gigantic thangkas – Buddhist paintings on scrolls – hung from each wall and a vast stage had been knocked together by Derek’s engineers (which would serve as the catwalk and set for the Filipino band). An arch spanning the width of the stage had been created by the hotel’s Art Department and emblazoned with Barba’s favourite phrase: ‘The Best is Yet to Come.’

All references to ‘Miss Tibet’ had been painted out at the last minute and there was still a smell of fresh paint. No one complained as it made a change to the smell of defrosting rats which hung in the corridors.

The panel of judges and VIPs took their seats at the head table. For each of the ten foreign judges that Barba had asked for, the authorities had insisted there be two locals – so the table stretched from one end of the room to the other. Us mere mortals sat at the round tables.

Conny took the stage as hostess for the evening. She was stunning, dressed in a beautiful black velvet ball gown, which definitely had not been made by Communist tailors. Her big brown eyes sparkled with excitement and she kept up a beaming smile despite the mayhem behind the scenes. Barba had donned his impresario outfit and lurked in the background, wearing a pale lilac shirt and a blue silk neckerchief beneath his dinner jacket. From behind the ‘The Best is Yet to Come’ banner, he shouted commands and directed the players of the evening.

Conny was ordered to commence. She welcomed the VIPs and the first act of the night – a Tibetan yak dance. This becomes rather tiresome after you have seen it a few times, but the first occasion is always very impressive. To the fast beat of a drum and the sound of crashing cymbals, a yak herder enters the restaurant with two pantomime yaks in tow. He cracks his whip on the floor and skips from side to side. The yaks also jump continually to the rhythm of the drumbeat while, still skipping, the yak herder pulls out two white silk scarfs, khatas, and places them on the floor, one in front of each yak. The drum beat quickens and the yak herder skips even faster and shouts at the yaks. Between dancing from side to side, the yaks try to scoop up the silk scarves on their horns. Several attempts are made and the yak herder has to shout louder and crack his whip even harder until finally we are all put out of our misery when the yaks each hook the scarves onto their horns. This brings cheers and rounds of applause and a great sense of relief that it is finally over for the poor men inside the yak costumes.

As the yak herder led his animals away, Barba shouted his commands to the next act. The Filipino band came on stage and the waitresses appeared from the kitchen bearing plates with the first course, while dancing the Chinese Thirty-Six Steps. It was an amazing sight. Thirty waitresses following a carefully choreographed dance routine, while carrying bowls of vegetable soup.

Discos were big business in Lhasa. New ones were opening in town virtually every day and the hotel was home to one of the hottest nightclubs of Lhasa. Every night over 600 Chinese and Tibetans crammed in to the Holiday Inn Lhasa disco to hear the latest from Boney M and Abba. During the Cultural Revolution dancing had been suppressed in China as being something inherently bourgeois. After the fall of Mao, dance halls opened up across the country and the population, both young and old, took immediately to this newly allowed form of pleasure. Couples waltzed the night away to the sounds of old Chinese folk songs, moving Communist propaganda ballads which they had all learnt when they were in the Red Guard, and they waltzed too to the new disco imports from the West.

The discos became the places for girls to meet boys.

Waltzing close with a partner in the dark of a nightclub, particularly when inhibitions are subdued by alcohol, has always been a good way to find romance. But as in all nightclubs, the atmosphere can become tense when charged with alcohol, love and lust. Khampas were not allowed into the Holiday Inn Lhasa disco carrying their daggers and Chinese soldiers were not permitted to enter with revolvers. Despite the efforts of the hotel Security Department, fights were fairly common. I was once called down by Dr Grubby who was refusing to treat a patient in the clinic. It turned out to be a blood-stained Chinese soldier who was sitting on the couch, waving his handgun at anyone who came near. On another evening a bullet hole was left in the glass door as a memento from an unhappy customer. Fortunately, there were not too many of these.

Despite the occasional dangers, dancing was a popular pastime in Lhasa. It was not used exclusively for romance. Girls danced with girls and boys waltzed with boys. The disco was particularly popular with the young Chinese soldiers and they would often dance together in their uniforms, arm in arm to the slow numbers.

After the Chinese waltz, the next favourite dance was synchronised disco. The most complicated of these was The Thirty-Six Steps. One person would start and soon the entire dance floor would be a solid mass moving in perfect coordination. Bend the knees three times, kick with the left leg twice, walk forward three paces, right foot first, kick forwards with the left leg, turn, kick back with the left leg, side-step three paces to the right… and so it went on for thirty-six steps.

The waitresses at the Miss Tibet gala evening were doing it superbly. No one seemed to mind if the soup was little bit cold and half of it was in the saucer. Barba crammed the evening full of surprises. A Tibetan magician made bowls of noodles from paper, the entire Housekeeping Department dressed in their brown Mao-style uniforms came on stage and sang Communist propaganda songs. There was even a Miss Foreigner in Tibet competition. Barba had chosen his favourite foreigner, Mary-Anne Bishop, who had been in Tibet studying Black-necked Cranes. A horse-drawn carriage came in, pulling a pair of enormous weighing scales. Poor Mary-Anne had to sit on the scales and receive as her prize her own weight in yak cheese. As the horse departed, it stopped in front of the head table, lifted up its tail and dropped a huge pile of steaming dung on the dance floor. Everyone roared with laughter. Everyone that is, except for Charlie, who had to scoop it up.

Finally, the great Miss Tibet election itself. The girls, all preselected by the Tibet Cultural Bureau, paraded along the stage wearing costumes from different parts of Tibet. Who knows what the judges were doing, or even if their votes were counted.

The ‘housewives’ and ‘teachers’ ran to the front of the stage with their ‘home videos’ and souvenir snap cameras and after some confusion, Conny announced the winner as a Miss Droma, wearing a costume from Gyantse. Gesang, the head of hotel security, rode into the Everest Room on his motorbike with sidecar and Miss Droma was driven away to the sound of the Filipino band. Never mind that Miss Droma was a married 26-year-old mother and pregnant with her second baby. No one would know.

The exhaust fumes from the motorbike filled the room and several guests became nauseous. The hall emptied. The evening had been a great success and Barba’s ego swelled to Everest dimensions.

The next morning the hotel also emptied and we were left alone again. The day after a big party always has a strange feeling to it. The corridors which had echoed to the laughter of happy guests in their dinner jackets now stood empty, the only sound being the whistling of the wind. All the excitement was over. None of us had been fired. The hotel was freezing again. Charlie tried in vain to stop a large icicle from returning to the urinal opposite the coffee shop, but within a few minutes of breaking it off it would be back again.

Barba was exhausted, and left for Christmas vacation. So too did the rest of the expats. I was left alone with the ‘English teachers’ Nancy and Bob, which was rather a depressing thought, and with Conny, whom I had the task of training in the Sales Department. This was a far more enjoyable prospect.

Thankfully, I had not seen much of Nancy and Bob since their arrival in Lhasa. Tashi would come back from the English lessons and tell me more than I wanted to know about them. They seemed to treat the lessons more like Sunday School junior class than adult education. Tashi asked me if it was normal that the staff should be made to play the games of small children. They had been told to tie balloons to their feet and then jump around in the courtyard (or ‘playground’ as Nancy and Bob looked at it) and try to pop their colleagues’ balloons. Nancy shrieked with laughter at every pop and gave away her precious Mr Smiley stickers to the winners.

It was a strange concept to me. The Tibetans had a wonderful religion of their own which had seen them through untold hardships and deprivations and yet Nancy and Bob were intent on converting them to Nancy’s particular off-beat brand of Christianity.

Not surprisingly, their methods were having little impact on the local population. Tibetan Buddhism had withstood the extremes of the Cultural Revolution – it could certainly withstand Mr Smiley stickers. With the Chinese, who were caught between the atheist principles of Communism and the overpowering spiritualism present everywhere in Tibet, Nancy and Bob had a better chance. They focused their attentions on a Chinese boy who had left his job as a receptionist as he was bullied by the bell boys. They renamed him ‘Jacob’ and concentrated all their efforts on him. Thankful that they were easing off the Tibetans and had left the expats unmolested, I put aside my personal thoughts on their business in Tibet and acted as Christianly as possible by promising to invite them to the hotel Christmas dinner.

I was determined to save something special for Christmas. Since Chef had left on vacation, the variety of food, which had never been good at the best of times, reached its lowest ever levels. There was virtually nothing to buy in the local market, the stores were bare and Mr Han, the local Purchasing Manager would not be going on a purchasing trip until the spring.

Cabbage and spam became the only supplements to yak meat. Fried spam, diced spam with cabbage, boiled spam strips on a bed of cabbage, spam cut into imaginative shapes to pretend it isn’t spam with cabbage. The choice was becoming very depressing and my diet grew progressively unhealthy. To mark the occasion, I taped the chorus of the Spam song from Monty Python in the middle of a section of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Every so often, ‘Spam, Wonderful Spam’ would blurt out over the PA system and startled guests would look up from their food. A few seconds later they would go back to their plates of spam as Vivaldi’s ‘L’Inverno Allegro’ blasted through the squeaky in-house music system again. Had they been dreaming? Tibet had a profound effect on many visitors. They returned to the West with unanswered questions on spiritualism, the meaning of life, and whether they had really heard the Spam song while they were eating.

I sat in the coffee shop, decided against the special of the day, which was yet another enticing combination of spam and cabbage and instead ordered a large plate of chips. After twenty minutes a small plate arrived with ten miserable chips.

‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I ordered a large plate of chips.’

The waitress sighed visibly, returned to the kitchen, and came back into the restaurant with the same ten chips on a large plate. After all, that is what I asked for. They really must think we are stupid.

The coffee shop kitchens were kept warm by the stoves boiling cabbage, but the steam also caused some of the salt cellars to clog up. I asked Zhang Li to put a few grains of rice in the salt pots to dry them out again. She looked at me with a completely bewildered expression. I explained again. ‘Oh, yes Mr Alec,’ she said, the penny finally dropping.

One of the greatest problems with the staff was that they had no interest in thinking, or coming up with any new ideas. We would give our big speeches about ‘we are all Holiday Inn together, working as a team, all for Holiday Inn’ and they would just look at us blankly. They thought it was a very peculiar notion that they were expected to work hard just because they worked for Holiday Inn.

Conny and I tried to change this attitude in the Sales Department. We gave our staff a sheet of paper each and asked them to write on the left-hand side what they were doing at the time and on the right-hand side what they would like to be doing. We thought that secretaries might want to be more involved in PR or take on more responsibility with the local agents or go on sales trips abroad. A week later, not one of the staff had filled out any part of the form. I asked Tashi what was going on. I explained that we wanted to develop the staff, train and motivate. Tashi shrugged his shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter what we write Mr Alec. We have to do as you say.’

So this was the system. Good old Communism. It was no use thinking for yourself because you always have to do what you are told.

In the coffee shop the salt cellars had gone from bad to worse. No matter how many I tried, I couldn’t get a single grain of salt out of them. I opened one up. Zhang Li had put cooked rice inside. True, I had not told her that I wanted dry rice grains. So how was she to know?

Christmas approached and a steady trickle of guests came through the hotel. These were the expats from companies in China who had fallen for the direct mail shot (that had gone out in the envelopes with the stamps on the reverse). They loved Lhasa, but complained bitterly of the cold. There was no hope of the heating being switched on again and the temperature inside the hotel dropped to below zero. On the coldest day in the office the thermometer on my desk sank to –11 °C. I opened the door in the morning to find that a water pipe had burst in the ceiling above the sofa and our filing cabinets. Clusters of icicles hung from the ceiling tiles in great cascades of frozen stalactites. The filing cabinet was a block of ice and files left out overnight on the sofa had to be cracked open.

I wore my Chinese long johns, layer upon layer of T-shirts, my thickest suit and then a down jacket. I walked around like the Michelin Man and just kept my teeth from chattering. Charlie had leant us a small electric fan-heater which had no effect whatsoever on heating the office, but was quite good at keeping the feet warm. I had brought in two laptop computers from Hong Kong when I came back from the Miss Tibet promotions and these also needed warming with the fan-heaters to start them up in the morning. Any coffee which Conny and I had left in the cups would be solid ice if we forgot to clean the cups out. This was seriously cold. I could see why the other expats had all found a reason why they absolutely had to take their leave over the Christmas period.

Christmas Day itself felt special in Lhasa even though life outside the hotel continued as usual. Herds of yak were driven along the roads to the market, and the Barkhor, as vibrant as can be, was packed with pilgrims. Inside the hotel, I carried on with my plans to celebrate Christmas. I asked Tu Dian to decorate the coffee shop and we went through the Christmas dinner menu for the handful of guests who had chosen the Holiday Inn Lhasa as their Christmas home.

I also invited the local travel agents to the lunch and accompanied by Tashi, visited their offices to hand them the invitations personally. This was a mistake. I had not been inside their offices before and it would have been better if I had left it that way. We called first at the office of China Youth Travel Service (CYTS). Their previous manager had been banished in disgrace for allowing a journalist on a tour in Tibet. The new manager, a Mr Zhang, had been sent to Lhasa from Beijing and I wondered what he had done wrong to be sent here. More to the point, where had they sent the previous manager? What place did the Chinese consider to be worse than Tibet? Mr Zhang didn’t know the answer and quickly changed the subject. He said that he was always shown around travel agents’ offices when he went abroad, so he would show me around his.

Mr Zhang’s offices were on the second floor of a large rambling Tibetan house which he said had belonged to a noble family. They wouldn’t have recognised much now, apart from the beautiful stonework of the exterior. Large rectangular blocks of granite were hemmed in place by smaller slithers of granite and covered in the ubiquitous whitewash. Concrete stairs led up the outside in an obvious post-1959 addition and then it was hard to tell what was new and badly decorated and what was original but falling down. Mr Zhang proudly showed me the various offices: the guides’ office with the group code numbers chalked up on a large blackboard, the accounts office with piles of papers covering the desk and the floor and then his office, complete with frilly nylon settee covers and jam jars of tea.

From there everything went downhill: the scramble over piles of mountaineering gear at the office of TMA in the Himalaya Hotel, the dingy office of Lhasa Travel in the Sunlight Hotel to the filthy office of China International Travel Service (CITS) Xigaze branch in the Tibet Hotel. I thought this was as low as you could go until we walked a few doors down the corridor in the Tibet Hotel, to the office of the CITS Shannan branch.

We knocked on the door. There was no reply but we could hear noises from inside, so Tashi nudged the door open. The time was 12 noon. There were two beds in the office. One was unmade. The other had one of the office ‘workers’ in it, stretching and yawning loudly. The one who was standing up was not in much better shape. Hair standing on end in typical post-siesta style, one trouser leg of the crumpled, crimplene suit rolled up to the knee. He burped loudly in our direction and we were hit by the stench of yesterday’s garlic.

The entire office was an absolute pit. Piles of soiled clothing lay heaped in the middle of the floor. Piles of rubbish in the corners. A rotting black and green banana skin stretched tentacles of mould across the carpet. We had to wait for one of them to look for some important papers, which he thought might be in one of the piles, or in a drawer, or perhaps in a pocket somewhere. I picked up a new brochure of the CITS Shannan Branch. In English it described their services; ‘It is expensive but worthy of it, while it is inexpensive but beneficial to it.’ I thought about this for quite some time. No. It really doesn’t make any sense.

While waiting, Tashi asked me for some words in English. I pointed out objects in the room: video, photocopy, photocopier and finally – lost for pleasant words in that airless, odour-filled room – I introduced him to the meaning of the word ‘disgusting’ and we left.

Holiday Inn Lhasa, despite the first impression of some of our guests, was heaven on earth compared to the other hotels of Tibet. Back in the safety of the Holiday Inn, Tu Dian proudly called me to the restaurant to show me the decorations he had prepared for Christmas. He had dug up a stunted, half-dead conifer from the hotel grounds and covered it with fluffy cotton wool and the remains of last year’s Christmas baubles.

For some reason, Christmas baubles were highly prized by the staff and each year a significant proportion were stolen. Sometimes they even took the imitation snow. The tree stood by the doorway, where the security guards could keep an eye on it, and in the centre of the room, on a table with Charlie’s best red tablecloth, was Tu Dian’s pièce de résistance – a cage containing four large white rabbits.

Tu Dian was so pleased with it that I hadn’t the heart to tell him that rabbits were associated with Easter and not really a necessary addition to the dining room at Christmas time.

‘Well done, Tu Dian,’ I said, ‘Yagadoo.’

Believe it or not, yagadoo means ‘good’ in Tibetan. It is tempting to say ‘yagadagadoo’, but as the Flintstones have not made it to Tibet, this falls rather flat with them. Tu Dian was happy. Fifteen of us sat down for the Christmas dinner. A select crowd of the local travel agents, a group of Germans from Beijing who were wearing red hats with white bobbles, two Belgian engineers who had come out to install a PBX system at the Lhasa telephone exchange, Conny, myself and the dreaded Nancy and Bob. We sat there around the table, in sub-zero temperatures with tinny Christmas music blaring over the PA, staring at the white rabbits.

A Himalayan Hamster shot across the doorway of the coffee shop. Fortunately the food arrived before any of the guests noticed it and then all concentration was on eating. The meal was excellent. A Tibetan bean soup for starters. Imported cold cuts of meat as second course followed by roast Chengdu chicken and not a piece of cabbage, yak or spam in sight. Dessert was a very passable crème caramel. Conny showed the chefs how to make a delicious mulled wine and we even celebrated by using Chinese Dynasty wine as the main ingredient, which has the rare distinction of coming out of a bottle with a cork. Most Chinese wines are peculiar chemical brews held in the bottles by screw tops and if left over night in a glass, they tend to separate into a clear liquid and an evil-looking purple substance.

Just before dessert, the rabbits started becoming frisky. The cage rattled as the rabbits thumped away at making baby rabbits. Not all the guests found it amusing and reluctantly I asked Tu Dian to take them away.

The Tibetans loved Christmas because it signalled the start of the New Year party season. The parties would extend through Western New Year, into January or February for Chinese New Year and on until the most important of all – Tibetan New Year, which could be as late as March.

Between Christmas and New Year there was a party every night. The Foreign Affairs Office winter party, the CITS party dining on highly suspicious items in their refrigerator restaurant beneath the Potala Palace and worst of all – the ‘Advanced Workers’ party. This demonstrated all that Communism stands for: a group of various workers from units involved with tourism were presented with ‘Advanced Worker’ certificates in front of a bored, clapping crowd. We sat in our overcoats in the filled-in swimming pool of the Tibet Hotel, which had been turned into a nightclub, while the ‘Advanced Workers’ paraded around the dance floor. There was an engineer from our hotel, although what ‘advanced work’ he had done, nobody could tell me.

They held their banners high as we listened to the inevitable speeches. Everyone nodded and clapped when they thought they should. We were served warm beer, inedible cold meat and bowls of sunflower seeds. Grisly bits of yak meat accompanied slices of unidentified animal organs on chipped plates. I left mine untouched and spent my time trying to master the art of eating sunflower seeds. I assume that this sport is an import from China, but it has been widely accepted by Tibetans. You have to pick up a handful of sunflower seeds, pop them one at a time into your mouth and then, without the aid of your hands, crack the seed open between your teeth, spitting out the seed case on the floor while swallowing the seed kernel and talking simultaneously. If you are good at this you can build up the speed of emptying an AK47 in the Barkhor and the floor by your chair will be covered in a crunchy coating of empty sunflower seeds. I was never very good at it but it kept me amused while the speeches were going on.

New Year’s Eve was the excuse for yet another party. The Tibet Tourism Bureau had the bright idea to call it the ‘Visit Tibet Year’ party. It was a good idea, it was just a pity that they had not told anyone about this earlier. Nobody knew that the following year was going to be ‘Visit Tibet Year’, but such minor technicalities were unimportant to them. It was a similar case when CAAC started flights between Lhasa and Kathmandu. They had kept it secret until the first flight landed and were then surprised that the flight had been empty.

Promotion and even the basics of marketing were alien concepts to the Communists. This always baffled me as you would think that if they were so good at brain-washing a billion people into thinking that Mao was great and that the Little Red Book was essential to life, then they would know a thing or two about selling ideas, promotions and PR. This could however explain why the word they used for all the marketing activities we undertook was ‘propaganda’.

‘Making some more propaganda?’ Tashi would ask as I warmed up the computer to type in the latest edition of the Tibet Travel News.

I was unable to avoid the Mao Tai gambays of the ‘Visit Tibet Year’ party and was very pleased when it finished abruptly and everyone went home. I tried to play Scrabble with Conny that night but it was a pretty boring way of spending New Year’s Eve – finally we gave up and listened to the BBC World Service wish their listeners in Asia a very Happy New Year.

On our Western New Year’s Day, Jig Me again gave the expats a day off. I slept in and only just made it to the buffet before the coffee shop closed at 10 a.m. The tray of so-called ‘bacon’ looked even more unappetising than ever. I fished around in the grease with the stainless steel serving spoon but all I could find were small cubes of hairy pork fat. There was some curled up spam in another dish which looked equally unappealing. The bread rolls were positively dangerous. They would have been better suited to the construction industry than as a food item. I was not going to risk my teeth on them, as going to the dentist at the Barkhor was not high on my list of priorities. I found Tu Dian and told him that this was not acceptable. I had become very good at these speeches. He bowed his head, frowned and nodded. ‘Sorry, Mr Alec. Tomorrow OK.’

I looked at the tray of scrambled eggs. At least it was still yellow, but it had gone fairly solid. I hacked off a corner and returned to my table where Zhang Li had poured me a cup of five-hour-strong Shanghai coffee.

To give the impression that the coffee shop was heated, each table was supplied with a small pot of burning alcohol – the type used to keep pans warm when served on the table. They did not generate any significant amount of heat but it was fun to pick them up and roll the alcohol quickly around the rim as this produced a great cloud of flame which leapt up to the ceiling. This game soon lost its attraction and I spent the afternoon with Conny climbing one of the small hills by the pointy mountains at the west end of the Lhasa valley. It was a beautiful day but by the time we returned to the hotel I was feeling rather ill.

The scrambled egg was taking its revenge. I just made it back to my room before exploding. Liquid came from holes I never knew I had. I have had food poisoning many times in the past, from experimenting with unknown foodstuffs during my travels as a backpacker, but I had never been knocked out by anything like this. Shamefully, I told everyone that it must have been something I ate at the Barkhor – while only Tu Dian and I knew the real source. Tu Dian felt responsible for me and made special soups which Conny brought me but I could not keep them down. Jig Me wanted to send me to the People’s Number One Hospital but I insisted that I would have to be dead before I went in there. Conny called for Dr Grubby but he was sick too. The flights to Kathmandu had been cancelled for the winter and the flights to Chengdu had been out of action for the last two days. ‘Can you die from food poisoning?’ I kept asking myself. Would I get a sky burial?

I was out cold for four full days. I was eventually brought back to life by rehydration packets which Sue, the new manager from Save the Children, had brought from her previous assignment in Africa. Conny mixed them up and told me they were, ‘Delicious. Like lemonade.’

Both of these statements were untrue.

To make matters worse, I contracted a severe bout of flu. A nurse from the People’s Number One Hospital came up to the hotel to give me gigantic syringe-fuls of penicillin. They were the syringes of horror movies. Enormous things with long needles which she filled up in front of me. With a sadistic smile, she then waved for me to roll over and jammed the needle into my backside. Slowly, ever so slowly, she emptied it into me. Twice a day. Alternating buttocks. There were no pills available – this was too simple a solution – if it was going to cure you then it had to hurt. Between the injections Conny nursed me back to health and I could see that there was more to beautiful Belgians than their chocolate.

I was still white when Barba returned. He laughed when I told him what had happened.

‘You see Alec. I am a vegetarian. I do not even eat onions or mushrooms as they interfere with my meditation. This could never have happened to me.’

Barba had brought back a new member of staff – his Sicilian side-kick – Guiseppe Bonetti. It is hard to imagine a closer fit to the Italian stereotype. A Danny Devito look-alike with one sole objective in life – sex. Bonetti’s idea of nirvana was not to break away from the endless cycle of rebirths but to find himself in one endless orgy.

He was a perfect companion for Barba. Each morning they could discuss in detail their conquests of guests or staff of the previous night. So much for the cryptic warnings I had received in Hong Kong about trying on shirts. The lessons learnt from the episode in the Palace Hotel lift were now largely forgotten. Bonetti was officially in Lhasa as Food and Beverage Manager and he struggled valiantly with Tu Dian, his local deputy and Mr Han the Purchasing Manager, to improve the food quality.

Chef returned to Lhasa and found a way to improve the desserts on the buffet table. The cakes never had soft centres but were always frozen solid. Guests would chip at crème caramels with their spoons, thinking they were cracking the caramelised sugar of a crème brulée. But it was not sugar. It was ice. Chef found that if the desserts were stored overnight in the refrigerator instead of being left out overnight, the problem was solved.

Although the cuisine started to improve, the traditional fight between Executive Chefs and Food and Beverage Managers soon resumed.

‘How can you have a German chef?!’ screamed Bonetti.

‘How can I verk in ze kitchen ven I find Bonetti in here cooking his own pasta on my stoves?!’ shouted Chef.

Morale was sinking to rock bottom. There was a day when we had no guests in the hotel. No one. Not a sausage. Four hundred and sixty-eight rooms, eighteen suites, two Presidential Villas and not one guest. Empty.

The wind whistled along the corridors and a lone sweeper from Housekeeping Department polished the marble floor in the lobby. One of the expats had brought a video of The Shining up from Hong Kong. That night we huddled around the television in room 3205 and watched the horror story about the family of a mad axe-man, who bore a striking resemblance to Barba, living in an empty hotel. They were in the depths of winter, cut off from the outside world, as all manners of horrific incidents took place. Was that noise just the squeaking hinges of the fire doors blowing in the wind or had a tricycle gone down the corridor?

‘I put ze lights off in ze coffee shop,’ said Chef. ‘And now zey are on again.’

I still shudder at the memory of that night.

Barba was also becoming scary. His moods were less predictable and his rages greater than ever before. His wife had refused to come out to Lhasa with him and he took out his anger on whoever he saw fit. He abandoned the management table in the coffee shop and set up his own table in the winter sunshine out in the courtyard. He ordered one of Charlie’s finest tablecloths for his own table, while all the other tables remained bare. Bonetti was his personal chef and regardless of what the guests and other expats had to put up with, Barba was assured a freshly made Italian meal every day. He and Bonetti brought in their own supply of extra virgin olive oil, mozzarella and Parmesan cheese. Any guest asking to eat what the manager was dining on was given a short answer, normally consisting of two words. Any guest making the mistake of sitting at Barba’s table was sent running and waitress Zhang Li was given the task of keeping guests away. It was pitiful watching her trying to explain to a guest who had paid $200 to $300 a day for the privilege of being in Tibet, why he or she could not sit at the table.

‘You no sit here. Here Mr Barba. Mr Barba Manager.’

No one could join Barba at his table except by personal invitation. The two exceptions were Bonetti, who provided him with food and entertainment, and myself, who told him what was going on in the hotel. Barba adopted me as his protégé and each morning at his breakfast he taught me his ideology. Although this gave me a great insight into his marketing genius, it also meant that I had to sit and listen to his obscure beliefs.

One morning at the breakfast table, Barba sat in a pensive mood. ‘Alec, to manage someone,’ he scooped his freshly made doughnut in the bowl of yak yogurt and honey and looked me straight in the eye, ‘find out their weakness. Then manipulate them.’

As soon as he had passed on this secret to success, I suddenly saw everything in a new light. This was how he treated all of us. Never mind Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, or the trendy Management by Objectives. This was Barba’s ‘Management by Manipulation’. Now I understood why behind the picture of his wife by his bedside stood a picture of Adolf Hitler. I had seen and heard enough.

Chef had also come to the end of his tether. He had taken enough insults about German cuisine and went to Barba to hand in his notice. I followed the same day. It was a well-thought-out and carefully worded letter. Life with Barba had become intolerable.

Barba climbed on top of his desk and shouted, ‘How dare you resign?!’ He looked at Chef and at me.

‘Nobody is allowed to resign before me! I am the boss here. If anyone resigns it is me! HEATHER! Come in here and take down this telex to Hong Kong.’

Barba ran his hands through his hair and dictated the message from on top of his desk. ‘Quick, Heather, Quick! Write!’

Heather trembled. She had seen him angry but never this angry. And never standing on top of his desk.

‘To the Vice President, Holiday Inn Asia-Pacific etc., etc. You can use my contract as toilet paper. I am leaving this no-hope company now. Yours, E. Barba.’