Video Night in Kathmandu (11 page)

More than anything, though, the travelers filled the mountain nights with stories, Homeric accounts of epic journeys, rife with monsters and marvels (and, in place of the Homeric formulae, catchphrases taken from the ubiquitous guidebooks of the Lonely Planet Company); accounts of life-and-death struggles with malaria pills or ground-breaking bouts of dysentery, of buses without floors and hotels without roofs. More conventional tourists may justify their travels by acquiring eye-catching knickknacks; the unpackaged tourists of the Overland Trail collect anecdotes instead, stories designed to induce pity and terror. Memento mori are their only curricula vitae. “When I was in Monrovia,” a Frenchwoman began with practiced nonchalance, “the uncle of my driver was eaten, including his eyes and testicles.” It was in Zambia, said a Briton of highly indeterminate means, that I first smelled a lion’s breath. I knew the golfing champion of Zambia, piped up another; he died of Coca-Cola
addiction. And I in turn inflicted on the assembled company interminable accounts of sleeping in the jungles of Suriname and being molested in the temples of Upper Egypt.

It often seemed, in fact, that the principal aim of every Overland journey was nothing, really, but an exhaustive knowledge of suffering (and not, alas, in the Buddhist sense); hard-core Travelers felt “close to the natives” only when they were actually close to death. And so the litanies continued. “It took us thirty hours to get here by truck from Golmud.” “Oh, that’s nothing. It took me thirty-six hours, and the driver only stopped once for food, and we all got food poisoning and for the rest of the trip everyone was vomiting on the bumpy road.” “No sweat, man: it took me seventeen days by road from Chengdu—and that was by post office truck.”

The horror show to end them all, though, was said to be the bus trip to Nepal; almost none of the foreigners in Lhasa could conceal his excitement about an ordeal that was said to be the last word in discomfort. Three months later, in a temple in Kathmandu, I happened to bump into an Australian whom I had last seen preparing for the ride. How had the trip been? “Oh, n’bad. Took five dies. We niver stopped for food. Hid to find for oursilves, y’know? One night we stopped at this plice to sty, but thy didn’t want us. But thit’s where the droyver stopped, so we slipt outsold. Bloody freezing.” And the scenery? “Yeah. Couldn’t see much, y’know?” (As for his five weeks trekking, his account was even more heroically laconic. “Yeah, it was ixcellent! Freezing cold, couldn’t move for four dies. Wint up to Iverest Bise Cemp, met some Poles. Thy hedn’t seen anyone in forty-five dies, pretty plized to see us. The next die was the worst storm of the winter. Thy lost a man. We thought we’d die.” He grinned. “Yeah, it was ixcellent overall.”)

TIBET ALSO, HOWEVER
, awakened a different, and more unusual, kind of tale. A few months after I returned to New York, I arranged one night to have dinner with a Canadian I had last seen in the Banak Shol. “I ended up taking the bus to Nepal,” he began, as we gathered in pinstripes in a midtown restaurant, “and it was really, really rough—especially after the bus broke down. We had to scrabble for potatoes in the fields, and at night we had to sleep out in the open. To get a ride, we had to lie down
on the road in front of oncoming trucks. Yet somehow, you know, it was really worth it.” Now a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, he began to speak more softly. “And one day, in Gyantse, I met a monk by the side of the road. He couldn’t speak English. And I, of course, don’t know any Tibetan. But just the way he looked, something in the way he stood there …” His eyes grew distant as the memory. “People gathered round him, and they began giving him gifts. They just couldn’t help it. And me, I ended up doing the same. In fact, I spent the whole day just following him around. I couldn’t do anything else.” He stopped for a moment, shaking his head. “You know, it was really unreal. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Tibet, in fact, cast a curious spell over just about everyone who came here: even those who arrived as proud models of dispassion left as evangelists of the local cause. One reason for this, no doubt, was that after the bland monumentality and mechanical bustle of the rest of China, Tibet was, in every sense, a breath of fresh air; an antithesis to the communal vacancy of the mainland, and an antidote to it. The cities of China were drab and dusty and dour; Lhasa, by contrast, was a festival, a revelation, an explosion of brilliant flower boxes and golden symbols and gaily painted awnings. The dull-eyed Chinese were generally withdrawn, even sullen toward foreigners; the Tibetans, by contrast, were incorrigibly merry, with quick animation in their faces, ready at any moment to break into ruddy smiles that felt like benedictions. China, it was, ironically, that felt closed and remote; Tibet was jolly and rainbowed and welcoming.

Politically, of course, the contrast seemed even more abject: seven million Tibetans, reputed to be among the most pious and peace-loving people in the world, had found themselves assaulted by the forces of a billion Chinese ideologues who seemed to derive a perverse delight from violating the monuments of their faith. Lamaseries had been bombed to smithereens, sacred texts had been used as toilet paper. Children had been made to shoot their parents. Monks had been forced to copulate in public.

But beyond even the horrifying details of the genocide, there lay the deepest difference of all: China these days seemed to lack any semblance of a living culture or an abiding devotion to anything more than pragmatism; yet Tibet, in the face of terrible
opposition, sustained a spirit more moving and uplifting than any I had ever seen.

All across Lhasa, this faith burned with a fervor that left me shaking. From daybreak until late at night, old men and old women gathered in crowds outside the central Jokhang Monastery, joining their hands above their heads and flinging themselves down to the dust again and again and again in a ritual three-part prostration. Along the desolate plateaus, pilgrims from the farthest corners of the country could be seen tramping for days or weeks or months on end in order to visit Lhasa, crawling through the gutters to perform their ritual circumambulations of the holy places. Around the monasteries, wizened old men labored patiently up rocky mountain slopes, leading grandchildren or great-grandchildren by the hand as they brought the monks all the money they could spare. And in the lamaseries themselves, now broken and open to the wind (only a couple of hundred monks remained in the Drepung, where once 10,000 had inhabited the largest monastery in the world), the holy men went unceasingly about their prayers. If ever they chanced to see a foreign visitor, they asked for one thing, and one thing only: a photograph of their leader, exiled from Tibet more than a quarter century before. “Dalai Lama” was all they said. “Dalai Lama.”

Instead of being dimmed by the Chinese massacres, in fact, the calm intensity of Tibetan faith seemed only to have been strengthened by them. And Tibetan Buddhism was the first religion I had ever seen more impressive in its practice than its preaching. Back home, I had always harbored suspicions about the protestations of Tibetan or Tibetan-minded friends. Nor had I ever been able to follow the abstruse cerebrations of their doctrine. Yet the Tibetans I met—gentle yet tough, devout but fun-loving, masters of magic and machinery—thoroughly disarmed me. And the devotion I saw everywhere in their country moved me beyond words. Whenever I was alone in the Tibetan sunlight and silence, I felt that these were days of heaven and I would never know such purity again.

Almost everyone who had ever stumbled into this zone of mysterious magnetism seemed similarly stirred. When he arrived in Lhasa in 1811, disguised as a Chinese physician, the cranky British madman Thomas Manning disliked much of what
he saw, nonetheless, he found himself confessing that in Tibet “everything excites the idea of something unreal.” Upon first setting eyes on Shangri-La, the token cynic in
Lost Horizon
had let only one word escape, and that was “magic.” Even the most jaded or strung-out of the foreigners at the Banak Shol surprised themselves, and me, by speaking of monks whose presence had left them silent.

TIBET, WE ALL
agreed, was an inspiration to visit. And yet, if we had been honest about it, it would probably have been better had we never visited it at all. For the airy elevation of its spell tempted us all to overlook the one inescapable fact of our presence here: that the Chinese, by most accounts, had decided to open up the “autonomous region” not out of charity, nor out of genuine penitence, but for purely strategic reasons, both military and economic. They knew very well that Westerners could not resist paying any amount of money to penetrate the world’s last secret, and they were hardly blind to the power of public relations. Thus, by opening up Tibet, Beijing was apparently hoping to give proof to the world of its enlightened tolerance; and by flocking to Tibet, we were in effect giving legitimacy to this show of good intentions. In our determination to be one step ahead of everyone else, we were like the vanguard of some invading army that, by racing ahead, is the first to trip the mines.

Many of the Overlanders at the Banak Shol made pointed gestures of sympathy for the local cause. They boycotted local transportation. They refused to patronize Chinese shops. They bought local maps in Tibetan, rather than Chinese, though neither script was intelligible to them. They even, by the end of 1987, began to urge the Tibetans on in anti-Chinese demonstrations. Yet still the fact remained: all of us were here only at Chinese sufferance, and our presence aided no one but the Chinese. Our money ended up in Chinese coffers; our visas were propaganda victories for Beijing.

In the process of making China richer, moreover, we were very likely making Tibet spiritually poorer; many observers believed that the Chinese, having failed to demolish Tibet by force, were now planning to destroy the place by exposing it to an onslaught of Western visitors. In 1984, China had tentatively allowed 1,500 foreigners into Tibet; by 1988, it was said, they
would bring in more than 100,000 tourists. By now, therefore, even homesick Tibetans in exile were wary of returning to their motherland. Just before I arrived, the Dalai Lama himself had canceled his projected return to his people, in the fear that it would ultimately bring more harm than good.

Forty years ago, Robert Byron had written: “There can be few persons of sensibility whose heart is not with the Tibetans in their effort to remain the last outpost of any racial individualism on the face of the earth.” His words were even truer now. But the Chinese invaders had begun to compromise that purity, and the newest invaders were threatening to finish it off for good. The “bitter lesson” of Tibet’s sad history, the Dalai Lama once wrote, is that “the world has grown too small for any people to live in harmless isolation.”

OCCASIONALLY, OF COURSE
, it was possible to see that foreigners could bring a little solace to the exiled land. One day in Ganden Monastery, an old monk shuffled up to an Australian girl with the familiar plea, “Dalai Lama? Dalai Lama?” To my amazement, she reached into her bag, pulled out a color photo and gave it to him. Instantly, the monk’s eyes filled with tears. He held the photo to his heart. He sat down and muttered to himself a prayer. Eyes tightly shut, he placed the picture on his heart, his head, his face. Then, drawing out a white scarf, he wrapped the photo inside it and set it down beside him with infinite care. For many moments, eyes still closed, he simply sat there, too grateful, or too rapt, to speak.

Yet as I looked on, the spell was abruptly broken. Please could she have, the girl demanded, two prayer scrolls in exchange. The monk, still moved, was happy to oblige. And at that moment, as so often in Tibet, what made me fear most deeply for the place was nothing but the openness of its people. After years of isolation, the Tibetans, for all their entrepreneurial skills, seemed achingly ready to welcome the world on any terms at all. As I sat on a local bus one day, wrinkled yak-herds in filthy cloaks bundled up and clapped their arms around my shoulders. At famous Sera Monastery, aging monks taught me how to say their chants, while novices asked, through smiles, if they could take my picture. And as I waited for the bus that would take me out of Lhasa, three jovial matrons bustled up to me and draped a
traditional white scarf around my neck, then proffered a glass of Tibetan barley beer to send me on my way with happy memories of their land.

Such unqualified trust, however, was unlikely to be reciprocated. By now, even the most sympathetic pilgrims of the Overland Trail had grown so used to cutting corners that they could scarcely distinguish any longer between experience and expedience. They wanted to “live free” in every sense of the term. Besides, full-time travelers considered themselves accountable to no one but themselves.

One night, as we sat on the terrace of the Banak Shol in the starlight, an American photographer asked everyone to wish him luck as he descended for “the big battle.” Almost an hour later, he emerged again, all smiles: he had succeeded, he declared triumphantly, in forcing the owners to accept his payment for his three-week stay, not in the Foreign Exchange Certificates that tourists were supposed to use, but in the “people’s money” that was, in fact, worth 40 percent less. He had thus managed, he announced with pride, to save himself almost $20. The proprietors, a group of Tibetan girls who spoke little English but had hunted down blankets on request and given single travelers double rooms at no extra cost and offered their guests whatever bicycles they could spare, had threatened to call the police; but in the end, they knew, they were virtually powerless against a foreigner. “Man, I don’t like all this chiseling kind of shit,” declared the conqueror. “But, shit, if they’d hassled me, I’d just have shown them my American Express card.”

At that, others in the audience were moved to recount their own victories in making money for nothing by selling desperate locals their Foreign Exchange Certificates. “I got a hundred sixty renminbi for a hundred FEC,” said one. “Me too. One guy refused to give me more than a hundred fifty. We had to wait for half an hour. But in the end he gave in.” “Jeez, man. I got only a hundred forty-eight.” Through it all, an Indian boy remained pretty silent. Twice in the past week he had had things stolen from his bed; everyone knew that the thief had been a fellow traveler.