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Lhasa
The Potala Palace seen from the Jokang Friend of ours - yes, it's you Paddy and T - believe in what they call the 'travel gods': a shadowy group of inanimate yet important deities whose job it is to safeguard your passage as you're hoofing it around the globe with a pack on your back. However, judging by the problems that have bedevilled us during the most recent leg of our trip, it would appear that we have done something to get their backs up. We've missed buses, spent a week in the company of the world's worst tour guide, endured The World's Worst Toilets and to cap it all, we're currently stuck in the Chinese equivalent of Milton Keynes courtesy of a mysteriously cancelled sleeper train. For whatever reason, the travel gods are definitely not smiling on us.
Urumqi, near China's north-west border, is a fairly inconsequential sort of place that typifies modern China: loads of big shiny buildings and cars, with only the odd pagoda and park to brighten things up. But it's not all bad: the people are jolly nice, even though we can't understand them (and vice versa: we have been given a day's worth of free internet by the proprietors of
Yaks
Source of power, food, tea and tacky souvenirs a local bar, largely because it's much easier than trying to explain to us how much it will cost.) And anyway, we've done enough great stuff in the last couple of weeks that an unexpected day here seems like a price worth paying.
Last time we spoke, we had just finished the Annapurna Circuit trek in Nepal and were preparing to head north into Tibet. In between, we managed to squeeze in a couple of nights at Nepal's wonderful Chitwan National Park, a muggy wildlife reserve in the south of the country. We spied a couple of the resident single-horned rhinos, tramped through the jungle in search of elusive tigers and spent a very enjoyable Monday morning bathing in the river with a frisky elephant, which isn't a sentence I will get to write very often once we're home.
But above all Chitwan was a nice break, because the journey into Tibet promised to be anything but. At this point I have to choose my words carefully because - and I'm not making this up - anything you post online about Tibet that's deemed off-the-hymn-sheet by the authorities runs the risk of being taken down. (So if some
Lhasa
Where the streets are lined with prostratutes (NB: this is Adele's joke, not mine - Rob) of what follows sounds a touch sanitised that's because, er, it is.)
Let's just say that independent travel from Nepal into Tibet is not permitted. Instead, you have to book a tour through a travel agent. In practice, this means that an agency bundles you into a 4x4 with a couple of other travellers, a guide and a driver, and you set out together to complete the 800-kilometre drive through Tibet to its capital, the 'forbidden city' of Lhasa. I won't bore you with the amount of buggerizing around we actually had to do to make this happen, but one way or another we ended up shoehorned into a Toyota Land Cruiser one Saturday morning, bound for the border at last.
Fortunately, we found ourselves alongside excellent travelling companions (a middle-aged Australian marine biologist called Thea and a jolly gay German called Jurgen) and it quickly transpired that Tibet - or the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, to give it its complete and current title - was worth every bit of the pain it took to get there. Battle-weary travellers will tell you that Tibet is not worth visiting now that more ethnic Tibetans live outside its borders
Rob
Always had a way with the ladies than within them; happily, it transpires that this is complete cock. Whatever has happened here over the last 50-odd years, this is still an unmissable destination.
After spending a night in the grotty frontier town of Zhangmu, we headed out on a road that snaked around the edge of a mountain until we were cruising at an altitude of over 5000 metres. Right from the start, the landscape beggared belief: vast arid plains with snow-capped peaks jutting over the horizon, even at this height, and absolutely nobody in sight in any direction. We drove over mountain passes strewn with prayer flags, passed herdsmen with huge teams of yak (the default choice above when it comes to beasts of burden above 3000m) and occasionally the odd village of rudimentary whitewashed houses and cheery gangs of dirty children.
But the thing that surprised us most was the light: it has an overly bright, unreal quality that's different to anywhere we'd been previously. This is exacerbated by the fact that Tibet has to set its clocks to 'Beijing time' even though Beijing is thousands of miles away; as a result, it's never the time that you imagine from the position of
Lhasa
Jokhang Square the sun, which feels a lot weirder than it sounds. It's equally clear that the people here are as poor as anything, and that their situation mirrors that of at least three-quarters of their fellow countrymen who join them in scratching a living from the fragile layer of topsoil. This is a harsh, harsh place, right up there with Bolivia (of which it reminded us a great deal) in terms of toughness.
But it's mesmerisingly beautiful too. Our first destination in Tibet was the one we were most looking forward to, Everest Base Camp. We'd spent a lot of time around mountains in the preceding month and were worried that Qomolongma might not live up to the hype, but we needn't have worried: it's simply stunning. There's a bum-breaking two-hour drive along unmade roads to confront first, but just when your patience as running it, it suddenly rears up in a majestic and gloriously cliched way right in front of you. Not only does it seem bloody massive, as you'd expect of a near-9000 metre mountain, but fabulously beautiful too - particularly at sunrise and sunset, when the sun lights the peak up like a Christmas tree. (This looks
The Great Escape
It's taken a year but Adele final makes her getaway with the old 'get out and take a picture' ruse so other-worldly that you'd swear this was done for the benefit of tourists.) We took a load of amazing pictures, but unfortunately if you want to see them you'll have to suffer us coming round your house and boring you to death with them; we took so many that we had to copy them from our camera onto a DVD, and not one of the 20 internet cafes we've been in since has had a DVD player. Not what you'd expect from a country that's a world leader in IT, but there you go.
We hiked up towards the foot of the mountain and Base Camp proper, where there are huge tent cities erected by the scores of climbers attempting to summit the peak, and spent the night nearby in a tent of our own. As a result, we had the opportunity to gaze up on an Everest picked out by the moon on a gorgeous, starry night - something that I will remember forever. (In time, I hope to forget the fact that I was building a makeshift karzy at the time.)
Back on the road, we spent the next couple of days roaring onwards the heart
Lhasa train
Chinese Army makes its way through Tibet of Tibet, stopping at the towns of Shigatse and Gyantse to visit their huge, immaculately preserved Buddhist monasteries. These buildings themselves are quite a shock to the system, with their lurid artwork, butter sculptures and mandalas (giant devotional wheels made from coloured sound), but the people you meet there are nothing short of incredible. There are legions of claret-robed monks who alternate between blank-faced devotion and guileless horseplay, and hordes of locals who 'circumnambulate' their way around the temples, prayer wheels in hand, offering what little money they have to the statues and topping up the lamps with yak-butter oil (as a result, it's pretty smelly and slippery underfoot). The more zealous among them circumnambulate by prostrating themselves every few metres, an act of devotion that seems inconceivable to anybody brought up in the west, but that attracts no passing comment here whatsoever.
The days spent soaking up this lot were pretty wonderful, but it wasn't all plain sailing. For one thing, the toilets in this part of the world have to be seen to be believed; not for nothing did I build my own at Everest. But mostly, our problems stemmed from the gimps who were chaperoning us.
Lhasa train
This time it's yaks that dot the landscape Our driver appeared to be suffering from Tourette's; mid-journey, apropos of nothing, he'd suddenly start exclaiming loudly in Tibetan, or sneeze or burst into prayer - usually if there was some danger of you actually falling asleep - after which he'd choose from his collection of, oooh, two CDs and crank the volume up. The guide, meanwhile, was nothing more than a lazy, mendacious tosspot, and that's talking him up. Between them they contrived to be just about the worst possible advertisement for Tibetan manhood you could imagine. Before our visit was over we'd meet plenty of Tibetan people who were the complete opposite, but not before this pair of goons had left us with a thoroughly nasty taste in our mouths.
We were delighted to be shot of them on arrival in Lhasa. Despite the fact that it is rapidly being turned into a gigantic Chinese metropolis (like many of the ethnic towns in the further-flung reaches of western China) it is still a bewitching place. What's left of the old town, primarily the palaces, temples and Barkhor market area, are wonderful, but they're eclipsed by the pilgrims who travel hundreds of miles to circumnambulate in the Tibetan
Yak butter tea
Yak being the operative word capital. It doesn't matter to them that major highways bisect the kora (pilgrimage route) these days; it's going to take more than six lanes of traffic to stop them flinging themselves to the ground in the time-honoured fashion. As a result, there are amazing scenes of drivers in massive 4x4s picking their way around the prostrated bodies of elderly pilgrims, who often end their hours of supplication weeping with devotion at the Jokhang, the holiest of Lhasa's buildings. A visit here at prayer times is not for the faint-hearted.
Ultimately we spent five nights in Lhasa, drinking in the atmosphere, chowing down on the local food - a curious melange of barley-based dumplings and yak-butter tea that we are unlikely to replicate at dinner parties - and watching the monks debate like football hooligans in the Sera monastery. We were gutted to leave, the one consolation being that we did so on the highest train line in the world: the Lhasa-Golmud express, an just-completed engineering mega-project to connect Tibet to the rump of China so audacious that the Swiss company originally contracted by the government told them that it couldn't be done.
As far as we could tell,
Gargoyles
Rob's not the only one to have sampled the local brew they were wrong. Aside from the fact that oxygen is pumped into each carriage in a bid to maintain air pressure, and the bloody-hell-did-you-see-that scenery, this was pretty much like any other train journey in China: swift, quiet, comfortable and full of people smoking, spitting or staring at us open-mouthed as if they'd never seen Caucasians before. Which is not impossible, given the relative location of our destination. Golmud, stuck out on its own in south-western China, is a sprawling provincial capital that's notable for having no sights of interest whatsover. Typically, we ended up stuck here for two nights, because you need a special pass from the Public Security Bureau before they'll let you catch the bus out and into China proper. But it was fair enough: turns out our onward journey took us too near to the Lop-Nur nuclear test facility for comfort.
I think I'd rather not have known this, but in reality all it meant was that we were heading deep into the desert. Right into it, in fact. Our next two stop-offs, Dunhuang and Turpan, were both incongrously green oasis towns that loomed out of China's very own wild west, a vast no-man's-land of
Outdoor pool
on the way to Dunhuang sandy basins and scrubland. En route to Dunhuang - a sweaty, deeply tedious bus journey that makes you long for the National Express - we passed through epic sand dunes over several hundred metres in height, but the real drawcard here is the Mogao grottoes, a mile-long stretch of caves packed full of Buddhist cave art, from intricate wall paintings to 60-foot-high Buddhas, that emerged hundreds of years ago, when this region was an important staging post for trade caravans on the Silk Road that linked China and the rest of the world.
Turpan, by contrast, is famed as the hottest place in all of China, and it was luckily that we were able to spend the 14-hour journey here in the air-conditioned splendour of a train-carriage rather than a bus smelling of backside. It regularly hits 47 degrees and above in these parts at the height of summer, but we got away with a blast of the high-30s during our visit to the ancient desert ruins of Jiaohe. Once again, the people are the real stars: in this case, the locals are Uighurs (wee-gurs), cheerful central Asian ethnic minority types who'll whip you up fantastic barbecued food with
Desert oasis
That is if you like high street shopping and all things state-stamped Chinese in the middle of Central Asia homemade noodles for about 10p. As a result, it feels much more like a Soviet province than part of China, although you need to whisper that sort of thing pretty quietly. We met up with a really cool Pakistani girl called Azeema and collectively filled our boots.
And so to Urumqi. We intended to use this place as a jumping-off point to hike around Tian Chi, or 'Heaven Lake' - a beauty spot about three hours up the road that deserves its big-talk billing - spending the night in one of the many yurts owned by Kazak nomads who occupy the shores during spring. Great in theory, but in practice we missed the bloody bus up there and ended up having to race around the lake in a day as part of a flag-wielding Chinese tour group. Then we got back to Urumqi to discover the aforementioned train cancellation and that we could have stayed there after all. Now you can see why we think those blinking travel gods have got some explaining to do.
If we ever get out of this place, we're going to a town called Kashgar -on the Chinese north-western border and at the
Market force
Azeema takes a Turpan raisin trader to the cleaners. While some Chinese bloke stares on. No change there then crossroads of the old Silk Road trading routes - that's still famed for having the world's largest Sunday market. After that, it's down the Karakoram Highway back to India for the final leg of our trip. There's one month to go and depression is setting in, but there's plenty still to experience. And just think: you won't have to read too many more of these.
Take care,
Adele and Rob x
Catchphrase of the week
'AH GO BA' CHINA!'
The punchline of the worst advert ever made. It's for a London-based firm called Jade Travel, screened on China's only English language channel, the risible CCTV9, and features Sun Jihai - second-choice right-back for Manchester City - and a random fat bloke called Tom. Don't take our word for it, go to
and taste the magic for yourself.
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azeema
non-member comment
good memories
so glad i did that trip.. these pics are priceless...