The Hotel on the Roof of the World (26 page)

OVERBOOKED

The first of the summer rains fell against the windowpane of Bonetti's office. He busied himself by the small electric stove, making three espresso coffees. We watched the drops of water forming paths through the winter dust on the window. We were not in a mood to talk – being fired was a depressing start to the day. It was Bonetti who broke the silence.

‘He liked it. I can tell.' Bonetti held his hands out with his palms uppermost and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Trust me,' he said. We didn't trust him.

‘We've just been fired for your stupid idea and you ask us to trust you!' Harry was upset.

Chef came into the office sniggering. ‘Harry, next time you have some firevorks left over, you can stuff zem up Bonetti's arsh!'

The day passed quietly, with no more news from Barba. We carried on working; the occupancy had grown to over 50 per cent and we could not just sit around waiting for an official letter.

The next morning Barba called Bonetti over to his breakfast table. He was giving him the gory details of his night with the Baroness. I was spared this part but was summoned to hear the conclusion, ‘… and then fireworks! Alec, this will be your punishment. From now on we shall start a new programme for ladies travelling alone on the Roof of the World. Those under thirty, let's say they are your market, you will have to look after them. The more mature ones, my market, I shall look after. You shall invite them to my suite, where they will have a private dinner served by Bonetti in a tuxedo, a musical serenade and finally a firework display arranged by Harry! What do you say? Send off a press release immediately!'

The ‘Ladies Travelling Alone on the Roof of the World' programme was a great success and Bonetti had been proved right. The special programme coincided with a loosening of the rules from Beijing. Each group travelling to Tibet still had to be accompanied by a guide and charged exorbitant fees, but the minimum number of travellers in a ‘group' was reduced to just one person.

Occupancy soared as the rules were relaxed and the summer season kicked off. It was what we had all been waiting for. Harry read out the figures in the Morning Meeting; ‘Last night sixty-four per cent. Today sixty-eight per cent. Tomorrow seventy-three per cent.'

All the sales work and the preparations were paying off. The local travel agents kept bringing in their reservations to Harry. Although the guests may have booked their trip to Tibet a year in advance, and the tour operator in the West booked many months in advance with the local agency, the Lhasa agents invariably walked up to the Front Desk with the reservation the day before the group's arrival. Sometimes the group even arrived before the reservation. It made forecasting very difficult and in the middle of August the inevitable happened.

Harry counted up the reservations which had come in during the day. ‘Wow, we are going to be ninety per cent tonight,' he told me in the afternoon.

At 7 p.m. he was still in his office. I called in to see him on my way to the Hard Yak Cafe. His face was red and his usual relaxed expression was replaced by a deep frown. He stared at the laptop into which he was loading the figures. ‘I have checked and double checked. There is nothing wrong with the programme,' he said. He picked up a pile of papers with Chinese writing, red chops and group codes and waved them at me. ‘I still have these to add. I am already over one hundred per cent!'

I counted through the papers with him. One hundred and eight per cent. One hundred and ten per cent.

‘I have checked everything!' he stammered.

We counted up the last papers. He stared at the spreadsheet on his computer and whispered in disbelief, ‘On Thursday we are going to be one hundred and twenty per cent.'

An emergency meeting was called for and the hotel was switched into overdrive. All time off was cancelled. Mr Han was sent purchasing in the local markets. Chef brought the kitchens up to full power, running them like a military machine. There were no more empty corridors, no empty seats in restaurants – we now had to cater for over 3,000 covers per day. Derek worked with his engineers through the night to make every available piece of machinery in order. There could be no breakdowns now, no rooms out of order. Party A called in extra staff, bringing the number up to 800 employees. Camp beds were laid out in the meeting rooms. The Presidential Villas were cleared out ready for use. The massage rooms were converted back to bedrooms. Dr Ga Ma was sent home and a blanket stretched over his couch. Despite the strong smell of his mouse-dropping medicine we managed to sell the room at full price as a ‘unique Tibetan experience'.

Still it was not enough. The local agents kept on piling up reservations on the reception counter. We could have refused them but the consequences for tourism in Tibet would have been severe. Tour operators would have dropped us from their brochures, unhappy guests would sue their travel agents and tell their friends about their Tibetan nightmare. In desperation, we asked the Tibet Tourism Bureau to take over the government guest house which was 100 metres down the road. The entire building was requisitioned and Derek's team spent a day trying to fix the broken plumbing, power, fixtures and fittings. Our Housekeeping Department tried in vain to shampoo the crushed eggshell out of the carpets and remove the brown stains from the bathroom tiles. We ran out of camp beds in the meeting rooms and used the government guest house for the guides and drivers who accompanied the groups. Each day was a battle – the main battlefield being the Holiday Inn lobby.

National guides refused to be separated from their groups. Guests who had paid hundreds of dollars for single supplements refused to share rooms. Guests who had booked with their travel agent a year previously refused to believe that the first we knew about them was when they walked through the front door. Crossing the lobby was becoming increasingly hazardous. A suit was an obvious target – it became impossible to get through without being bombarded with question after question from irate guests. Barba avoided them by stepping through the windows across the back corridors of the hotel. Somehow, Chef was never approached by the angry guests but instead attracted the stupid ones. They would see him dressed in his blue chequered trousers, chefs' jacket and hat and ask, ‘Do you work here?'

‘No. I am at a Chefs' convention,' he would reply and the guests wouldn't bother him again.

I was a glutton for punishment and headed through the lobby to reach the Hard Yak Cafe and my room. A guest handed me a torn rag which he pointed out had been a perfectly good sock when he had given it to the Housekeeping Department.

‘So the other one is OK then?' I asked him. ‘And you expect a
full
refund?'

The Bank of China ran out of small bank notes, so we had no change to give guests. The post office ran out of stamps and resorted to selling philatelic sets. These were very beautiful stamps, but they were in such small denominations that once you had stuck the required 18 stamps, each 5 cm by 4 cm, on the back of a postcard, there was no room to write the address, let alone a message.

In the middle of the chaos, I had a call from the town of Shigatse. There was no direct line and the call had been passed via the Beijing operator. It was an English tour operator and through the crackles I could just make out her distraught voice.

‘Is that Mr Alec? I was told to contact you. One of our group has died. Peacefully. In her sleep. Heart attack. There is no telex here. No fax. No phone to the outside world. The group has gone on to Kathmandu. None of the drivers will touch the body. Can you pass a message on to my travel agency in England?'

I placed the call to London and passed on the sad news. As Lhasa was the only point of communication, I became the messenger between the tour guide stuck in Shigatse, the British Embassy in Beijing and the travel agency and insurance company in London.

I broke the news to Barba.

‘One of our guests has died.'

‘Oh no. Where?'

‘In Shigatse.'

‘Thank God for that! Alec, there is nothing worse than a stiff in the hotel.'

The insurance company called with the news that the relatives wanted a cremation and would come out to Tibet to witness it. I asked Tashi for the number of the Shigatse Hotel so that I could place the call with our hotel operator, who in turn would call the Beijing operator, who would relay the call to Shigatse.

‘I don't know the Shigatse Hotel telephone number, Mr Alec.'

‘Well just call up the operator and ask her to look up the number.'

He picked the receiver up, dialled 2222 for our operator and asked her. She didn't know either. One of our staff had a bright idea; ‘Mr Alec, you could call the Shigatse Hotel and ask them for their number – they must know.'

It was a painful process but we eventually managed to find the number and place the call. The connection was weak and I had to shout, ‘The relatives want to come out to see the body. They want a cremation.'

There was silence down the other end of the phone. Then I heard the faint voice back. ‘Listen, there is no fridge here. You can smell the body from the lobby – there is no time for family visits.'

I placed a call back to the insurance company. The call came through as I was crossing the lobby. I fought away a guest who was complaining about the toilet paper being too stiff. He wanted his money back and was going to write to Holiday Inn head office.

‘If you will excuse me, I shall have to attend to your stiff toilet paper in a while,' I said politely to him.

The receptionist passed me the receiver across the counter. It was another bad connection and I had to shout, ‘You can smell the body in the lobby. We strongly recommend cremation on the spot!'

I looked around me. The crowd in the Holiday Inn lobby had gone silent. The man with the stiff toilet paper was running away down the corridor. ‘Not here. Not here.' I called out to the stunned guests. ‘But if you go to Shigatse tonight, don't ask for room 238.'

‘No,' the voice came back down the line, ‘the family insists that the deceased's son comes out to attend the proceedings.'

The local travel agency involved had managed to find a truck driver willing to transport the body back to Lhasa. It had taken several cartons of cigarettes and promises of Johnnie Walker Black Label. The tour leader had sat in the passenger seat of the truck as the driver raced through the night back to Lhasa.

They arrived early in the morning and went straight to the hospital. The doctors refused to take the body – there was no point – and in despair the driver came to the hotel and demanded that the body be stored in the hotel's walk-in refrigerator.

Chef would have had a heart attack – going in to take out the spam for breakfast and finding Mrs Simkins laid out on the floor. We declined their request. We had enough trouble from live guests.

There are no morgues in Tibet as bodies are not stored as they are in the West. Under the Tibetan system of sky burials, where the corpses are taken out at dawn and fed to friendly vultures, morgues are a waste of time. After much persuasion, the hospital admitted that they had a freezer but they would only keep the body for a few days. There was not long to wait, as the Chinese had cut through the normal red tape and allowed a permit to be issued immediately to the son, who was already on his way to Lhasa. He would be arriving the following morning and the local travel agency had arranged a cremation for the same day.

I had a stiff drink with the tour leader. It had been a harrowing experience for her – stuck in Shigatse with a body and then a ten-hour Tibetan truck drive through the night with Mrs Simkins bouncing around in the back. But the worst was yet to come. What kind of cremation did the relatives expect? A few kind words from the vicar in a little village church? Organ music, a coffin on the conveyor belt and the parting of velvet drapes?

The son arrived, somewhat dazed – knocked out from altitude and emotions. The tour leader and I accompanied him in the hotel Landcruiser, and we pulled out of the courtyard at the head of a long cavalcade of cars towards the hills near Drepung monastery. We stopped for a while by the side of the road and when a lorry overtook us we started off again.

The tour leader suddenly started to strike up stupid conversations with the son. ‘Look, a tree!' she said pointing out of the window. ‘What glorious weather today. Look! A cloud in the sky over there!' I knew we had to make polite conversation to keep his mind busy but this was ridiculous. Then I saw what she had seen – the lorry in front of us was loaded with a loose pile of firewood and on top of the wood was something wrapped in a white sheet, bouncing up and down as we sped over the bumps. Mrs Simkins!

‘Look!' I said to the son, ‘There is a yak over there and if you look behind us you can see some more trees.'

We turned off the main road and along a narrow dust track up the foothills to the east of Drepung. The track became progressively steeper and at the sharpest gradient, by a vertical drop into a quarry, the lorry in front of us spluttered to a halt. The wood for the funeral pyre and Mrs Simkins shot back towards us and the body balanced on the lorry's tailboard above our windscreen. Fortunately they could start the engine again and the body swung back onto the lorry-side of the tailboard. We carried up another few metres and arrived at the base of the small mound which was to be the cremation site.