Day 316 - Why we are glad we aren’t American

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We like Americans, maybe not the middle-aged vacationers when roaming in herds, but on the whole we like them. But today we are glad that our passports are red and not blue because today we enter Tibet, and Americans are not allowed in. (This may have changed by now - information is hard to come by here.) For those who don’t know, Tibet is a province of China with some claims for independence. Sort of like a high-altitude Scotland. Based on hearsay, the latest edition of the Lonely Planet guide to China is routinely confiscated by officials because on the map Tibet is in a different colour and that is provocative. After our Rough Guide to China experience we’d still suggest risking LP though. Anyway, some Americans last week went up a Tibetan mountain, perhaps Everest Base Camp but we’re not sure, and unfurled a Tibetan flag and a ‘Free Tibet’ banner. They were then arrested and deported, which was lucky for them but unlucky for other Americans trying to get hold of the permit that is needed to enter Tibet - China decided they could do without a repeat and stopped issuing permits to Americans.

We had no such trouble and had a long drive that eventually took us into Tibet. On the approach to the border, Gemma hit a humour note with ‘It looks just like China over there’. The roads around here are nerve-wracking to say the least. Not in the nutcase bus driver way that we experienced a lot of in South America’s mountains, but just the width of the roads / tracks and the size of the drop. How the roads got here in the first place is a bit of a miracle, and we passed plenty of construction work to modernise it. The current state is dirt road, with lots of potholes and lots of rocks on the road from landslides. It is amazing to hear it called the ‘Yunnan Province to Tibet Highway’, and in fact it is the only road. Also, far below us was apparently, though we’re not 100% sure, the Mekong river of faraway Vietnam fame.

We reached Yanjing, a village not far into Tibet and our home for the night. Then we went for lunch with our guides, not exactly full of excitement at the prospect of some more rural Chinese food. The set-up was 10 Yuan (60p) for as many bowls of yak meat noodles as you can eat. Spices are almost obligatory. So we set about our work and it turned out to be pretty good. The bowls weren’t huge, and we haven’t really been eating very well since leaving China’s big cities so had built up some hunger, but even so it was some feat for Ed to put away 20 (yes, twenty) bowls of noodles and thrash the driver’s eating challenge.

In the afternoon we visited Tibet’s only Catholic church, which was very much as it sounds. Then we visited something called the ‘salt fields’. Many years ago, someone discovered a spring of salt water near to the freshwater Yangtze. So now there is a mini-industry that pumps the water up the hillside to storage pools and from those into these shallow pools for the water to evaporate and harvest the salt. Bearing in mind that it’s on a very steep mountainside, the shallow pools are supported on stilts on one end and with dozens of these things it makes for a unique sight.

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