The Weekly Wad: No Such Thing As A Free Tibet, Part I: Your Inner Nelson

Watching the screen with a fleeting glance, I could see the asphalt strip wavering from side to side. I looked at my tray table, then the window, then Riggs, then Jeff, then the screen, then the tray table and so on. I tightly gripped the armrests, as I usually do, and muttered under my breath a barrage of obscenities and pleas for the plane to land.

Our large group in Beijing had split. One half headed to Guangzho in eastern China and the rest, including your humble servant, opted to do a week-long trek through Tibet. About two months prior, when the idea was presented to us by our resident friend, Easle, I was hesitant. It was China I came to visit and Tibet is, political boundaries aside, a completely different country, culture, etc. But, it was Easle's excitement, his Chinese girlfriend Jazz's travel deal finagling and the encouragement of my travel companions that pushed me off the fence.

What pushed me out of the plane as soon as the damn thing landed, was the sharp swaying. I don't do well with turbulence and the last thing I needed on the flight into Lhasa was a monitor in the front row of coach showing a view underneath the plane while we landed. It wasn't the most graceful landing and for a few moments it seemed like the underbelly of the plane was going to scrape a little Himalaya on the way in.

Jazz had arranged an elaborate tour of Lhasa, the capital city and the region’s many monasteries. It was all to culminate with a trek — in a vehicle — to the Chinese side of Everest Base Camp after about six days or so. When we met Nelson, our guide, outside of Lhasa’s tiny terminal, he led us to a white van that would take us for the roughly one-hour ride to the city center. As soon as we had gotten in, he draped each of us with a traditional white prayer shawl. We posed for each other’s cameras and waited for the van to start up. It was about twenty minutes of the driver trying to turn the engine over and native attendants pushing the van from behind before Nelson made us get into another van.

The 800-lb. elephant our little group tried to avoid acknowledging was the impending AMS, or acute mountain sickness. AMS occurs when a dramatic increase in altitude results in lower air pressure, hence thinner oxygen. Our tour books had warned against it and everyone I had talked to who went to Tibet also expressed concern. It was nervous anticipation waiting for the affliction to, maybe, set in. AMS affects everyone differently and we had no idea who was going to get hit the hardest and who wasn’t. In the meantime, we just decided to drop it.

Nelson, a short and darkly tanned Tibetan, advised us to “think positive.” He was born in Tibet but raised in Dharamsala, across the border in India. He always spoke in short fragments of Indian-accented English that would trail off an octave lower making him sound uncannily like David Carradine. He threw terms around like "energy", "spiritual" and "clearing the mind" when discussing how to deal with AMS. My eyes accosted him with my usual skepticism to all things mystical, but I decided to try opening my mind by "clearing" it. Naturally, what always happens, happened. I had cleared my mind of everything else but thinking about AMS. Nelson's sage-on-the-mountain shtick was not helping and I began to wonder if the thin air made everyone in Tibet sound like him.

Most (read: smart) visitors to Tibet take the train from Beijing or central China through the mountain passes as they gradually (read: slowly) adjust to the altitude. We had decided to fly to Lhasa and skip all that annoying acclimation in favor of expediency. Our flight from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, to Lhasa was a mere two hours, but an astounding 10,000 feet upwards.

The van wound its way through the rusted mountains and across flat, arid plains, most times alongside what once looked like raging rivers but were now dried out riverbeds. Traditional Tibetan mud dwellings sat among rocky outcrops, most of them connected by strings of colorful prayer flags. The villages we came across were few and the landscape just looked so inhospitable. Yaks, a versatile staple in the Tibetan diet, clung to the edge of cliffs diligently sniffing out any moss or small plants they could find. Tiny goats that resembled schnauzers ran across the road in packs. I kept seeing Colorado in the open, blue sky and the limited palette of browns and ochres.

The very first view of Lhasa was obstructed by the imposing Potala Palace, an enormous monastery complex in the center, not only of the city, but of all Tibetan religious life. Looking as if it naturally grew out of the hill it sat on, Potala Palace was a dominating mass of stone entwined with a series of staircases constantly climbed by pilgrims.

Right across the road to the palace was the first sign we saw of Chinese hegemony. A flat, concrete square was anchored by an ugly, post-modern concrete monument to “the people.” Communists everywhere seemed to love their concrete and poured it with a giddy abandon over anything to mark their territory. Tibet was no different.

The real difference between Tibet and the China we had already seen, at least at first glance, was the people. Shorter and darker, they were of a more ruddy stock than the Han Chinese we encountered on the east coast. The further we got away from downtown, the city became dingier and the complexions more reminiscent of the harsh Tibetan interior; windswept, dusty and weathered. Their garb made use of many colors and their jackets were made of wool, leather and unique ornamentation.

The side streets and alleyways were dark, cramped and packed with street vendors. Thousands of natives were milling about. Hardworking pedicab drivers roamed the streets looking for fares. Yak carcasses hung out in the open as butchers indiscriminately hacked them to pieces. It must have resembled, to an extent, what Tibet looked like before the Chinese invasion of 1950.

We arrived at a hotel in central Lhasa that was decked out like a tribal Days Inn with animal skins and colorful murals everywhere. Still, the place was comfortable and clean with at least some hot water. It was early in the afternoon and Nelson told us that all we needed to do that first day was relax. Move slow. Take it easy. The following day we would explore Potala Palace and other area monasteries. With that he took his leave and we split off into three rooms and got settled.

During the drive, Riggs was unusually quiet while Easle, Jazz, Geg, Jeff and I bombarded Nelson with questions. When we got to the hotel, Riggs sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. His eyelids had drooped down and he looked completely spent. He complained of an increasingly nagging headache. Clearly AMS had begun to set in and I compassionately took a picture of his misery. He was the most physically fit of the bunch but he was hit really hard, right off the bat. Since it would be an easy win for me in the competition for unhealthiest, I began to fret. If AMS could take down a bull like Riggs, I thought, what the hell was it going do to me?

I quickly tried to summon my inner Nelson but all I kept visualizing were reruns of “Kung Fu.” Quickly, resignation set in. If the mountains were going to get me then there was nothing I could do about it. I had briefly suspected from the outset that the Tibetan portion of my visit to China would be costly anyway, just not in terms of money.