Journal of a Sabbatical

China Trip 2000

take me home country road

Quote of the Day: "Life is old there older than the trees" -- John Denver

Bonus Quote of the Day: "Don't bathe." -- George

Today's Reading: The Story of the Stone (a.k.a. Dream of the Red Chamber) by Cao Xuequin

On October 2 we left Chengdu for Lhasa.

Mona woke us up really early. I think I sleepwalked to the airport. I know I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and fell asleep again sitting on the edge of the bed. How come I can't sleep sitting up on airplanes?

So we're there at the airport. Mona is confused about the flight time and takes us to the wrong check-in desk. She tells us we have plenty of time, which we don't. Savvy travelers that we are by now, we ask: what about the airport tax? Even the tiniest airport in the most remote part of China requires you to pay an airport tax. These little airport tax chits keep turning up between pages of my book, stuffed in my notebooks, crumpled in my pockets, all over the place. Mona tells us we don't have to to pay the airport tax despite a sign in English as well as Chinese telling us where to pay the airport tax. OK, she's local maybe she knows.

So we get to the gate where we hand over out tickets and passports. The attendant there asks: what about the airport tax? We go pay the airport tax, get those little tax chits, and hand them to the attendant. The attendant asks: what about the permits?

The permits! The all-important little pieces of bureaucratic paper that allow us foreigners to enter Tibet. The pieces of paper our friend of a friend wanted 2000 yuan for but CTS told us come with the tour. Those permits. Ah, Mona does have the permits. What was she waiting for? Does she have any idea what the permits are for? She shows them to the attendant who stamps them with some kind of official seal and keeps them. She keeps our passports too. Wait a second, she can't keep our passports. We hold up the line, consisting mainly of Chinese people who don't need permits to go to Lhasa. Finally the attendant realizes we need our passports. She hands back the passports. She gives Mona back the permits. Gee, we don't get to keep the permits? They would have made a nice souvenir but so be it.

The flight is crowded with tourists who want an interesting way to spent the holiday week and pilgrims from Hong Kong on a religious pilgrimage with their lama. The lama has a cellphone. They all have cell phones. Everybody but us. We don't have cell phones. Oh well, can't use 'em on the plane anyway.

At the Gongkar airport we met our guide, George, and our driver Jamba (Future Buddha). It's a long ride from the airport to Lhasa City, about 95 km but the scenery is breathtaking. Actually the altitude is what's literally breathtaking, but I'll get to that. The road winds through a flat valley along the Tsangpo River, headwaters of the Brahmaputra. The mountains rise up straight out of the valley - no foothills, nothing gradual, just straight up.

The grass is a kind of golden color.

A few black-headed gulls scud along the surface of the river.

Prayer flags flutter from bridges.

We stop along the road to view a really big Buddha carved into the side of a mountain and then painted. It's festooned with those white ceremonial scarfs that pilgrims offer and strings and strings of prayer flags. We must be in Tibet.

George sings Take Me Home Country Road as the Land Cruiser progresses toward Lhasa. It seems incongruous but also somehow appropriate.

If we had our first view of the Potala on the drive to the hotel I don't remember it. Suffering from altitude and lack of sleep I feel about a thousand years old and want nothing more than to lay my body down on a nice comfortable bed. When we get to the hotel George instructs us "rest and don't bathe". Rest I can understand, we need to get used to the altitude. But don't bathe? Altitude makes you dizzy and they don't want us falling and getting injured in the shower.

Our rooms are on the third floor. The effort of climbing the stairs is exhausting. I guess I shouldn't have been so casual about the altitude. If I had any notion of doing anything but resting, it's gone now.

Carol tries to tune in some news of the big wide world on her radio. The tinny sound of "I'm on top of the world looking down on creation..." wafts across the room and I start laughing. It's hard to laugh at altitude.

Take me home, country road, to the top of the world...