The Hotel on the Roof of the World (14 page)

‘Tashi delai!'

Our glory was short lived. As we gazed out at the view a small Tibetan boy shouted down to us from the far end of the hanging valley.

‘Tashi delai!'
he called out again. He ran down towards us, followed by a herd of yaks which appeared from among the boulders on
our
mountain. It was hard to say who was more surprised: Mark, myself, the Tibetan boy or the yaks.

Where had he come from? Where was he going to? He talked to us incessantly, probably asking much the same questions as we had for him, but we understood little of what he said. In our limited Tibetan we told him we were English. He smiled, as if this explained everything, and with a wave he disappeared around the corner of the mountainside as quickly as he had appeared. The yaks followed, nodding their heads as they walked but keeping their eyes fixed on us, until they too were over the edge of the hanging valley and on their way down to the lower pastures. The sound of the yak bells carried on the wind long after they were out of sight. Piles of steaming yak dung were a constant reminder to us that we should not be so vain to have imagined that we had ‘discovered' the place. There was really nothing to discover about it. The hanging valley had been there since the time of the last Ice Age and the Tibetans had been grazing yaks on these high pastures long before Westerners even realised that Tibet existed.

As we reached the end of the hanging valley, where the pasture gave out into the boulder scree that formed the cone of the mountain peak, our breathing became longer and our conversation stopped altogether. It took one hour and twenty minutes to near the top of the mountain. I could have quit at any time. Every boulder left me gasping for breath and taking a thirty-second rest before I could face the next one. I came to terms with the fact that I would never be able to climb Everest. I thought of Greg and Dave and the teams that had been there this climbing season. Had they made it to the top? I had heard news of a fatality in a Japanese group and a mountaineer returning via Lhasa had seen the partially cremated body of a climber at Base Camp. I winced at the thought and looked across at Mark.

He was facing the same stage of breathlessness as me, and the best we could do was to nod to each other to show that we were still hanging on. We were so close that despite our exhaustion we couldn't possibly turn away and with the top just a few yards away a final burst of energy carried us up to the summit. It had taken seven and a half hours. We had reached 18,090 feet (5,480 m).

The view was stunning – the whole of the Lhasa valley spread out to the north and ripples of mountain ranges flowing away to the south. There was not a patch of green left from the summer and the fresh snows of the winter which settle briefly on the hills of the Lhasa valley had not yet arrived. Snow caps shone far in the distance from the mountains over 20,000 feet (6,000 m) but around us all was barren rock and sand. We were sitting higher than the summit of Mont Blanc but looking out over a dry and arid landscape.

We placed two white scarves on the lichen-covered cairn and opened our rucksacks for lunch. ‘What is a cairn doing here?' Mark asked between deep breaths.

It was another sign that we were far from the first to be standing on this rocky outcrop. Perhaps it had been the site of an important religious ceremony or some bored yak herder had gathered up some stones to pass the time. Whoever it had been, we were honoured to have shared the experience and the view with them, on their mountain.

A Himalayan Griffon drifted effortlessly past us, carried over on a thermal to the valley to the south. We unpacked our lunch, trying not to think of what the vulture had just been eating. There is something about high altitude which has the effect of dampening the appetite and we stared at our tablecloth spread with Chinese spam, flattened dry bread rolls and desiccated apples for some time before starting. Even the Swiss chocolate, donated by a generous Kuoni tour leader was not appreciated as much as at lower altitudes.

Thirst was continually on our minds. The deep breathing to pull in lungfuls of the thin air left us with parched mouths and it was a battle to drink enough to satisfy our needs. We had already emptied a thermos of coffee and two cans on the way up. For lunch we opened our third can of Jan Li Bao, the Chinese fizzy orange and honey drink which the label on the can claims is good for athletes.

The sun was strong on our faces but the wind was cold and after an hour at the top, we reluctantly bid farewell to the cairn and the flat slab of granite that had formed our lunch table.

The descent was much quicker than the climb up but no easier. We took the route through the hanging valley and over the edge to the grassy knoll which we should have taken on the way up. Once we were on the knoll, we discovered that it was not so much grassy, as we had expected, but was covered in dwarf rhododendrons. The bushes were pruned back to the frozen earth, as Tibetans harvest the rhododendrons as a crop. The dried stalks are sold in the Barkhor to pilgrims and city folk who have not had the time or inclination to climb up and get their own. It is used in the incense burners around the Barkhor and other holy places as a way of sending offerings to the deities.

It was dusk by the time we reached the valley floor, where we were joined by our yak-herding friend, who was singing loudly while he walked his yaks back to the village. He shouted to them between bursts of song and collected suitable stones for his yak-hair sling. If any yak slowed, or made the mistake of rising up the mountainside instead of following the stream to the bottom, he would spin his slingshot in the air and let loose the stone with such velocity and precision that it would crack on the ground behind the heels of the yak and send the animal galloping downhill to join the rest of the herd. He grinned at us whenever he sent off one of his slingshots, clearly very proud of his startling ability. Just a pity shooting the sling isn't an Olympic event, or the Tibetans would be in contention. He was in a good mood and sang with a full voice. It wasn't often he would have a good tale to tell around the yak-dung fire about two foreigners he found at the top of the mountain: ‘Strange people with sickly white skin, they didn't know where they were going and they couldn't even speak properly…'

As we reached the spot where we had started thirteen and a half hours earlier, we saw a trail of dust in the distance with a tiny Beijing jeep at the head. Dasang was on his way to collect us. But before he could reach us, the inevitable rent-a-crowd appeared from the village.

No matter where you are in Tibet, as soon as you stop for five minutes, a crowd of small Tibetan boys and girls arrives from nowhere. They sit in a tight group some 20 feet away, watch all that you do, whisper comments to each other and giggle. Word had spread fast that these two strangers who had passed through in the morning were by the side of the track and small children came running from all directions to join the crowd. The boys are generally the braver ones and some called out to us. Whenever we replied they all bowed their heads in shyness and the girls hid behind the boys. Never mind the Chinese television beaming down from the antenna at Chagpori, we were the evening's entertainment. We pointed to the top of the mountain and in sign language told them that we had just been there. They thought this was just the most stupid thing anyone could want to do and they rolled about on the grass in fits of laughter.

Dasang pulled up in his Beijing jeep and the crowd backed off slightly. He lifted out the back seats and from a bumpy holding area over the rear suspension pulled out dish after dish of Tibetan cuisine: rice in yak butter and sugar, flat bread, yak yogurt, yak meat with boiled potatoes and a thermos of yak butter tea. The hospitality of the Tibetans is legendary, usually unexpected and when it concerns yak butter tea, regrettably unwelcome.

Although some foreigners claim to like yak butter tea they cannot possibly be telling the truth. They say that it is an ‘acquired taste' but what deprivations you have to undergo to acquire the taste they do not say. To capture the taste of real yak butter tea, the only way is to follow the steps of preparation as it is made in Tibetan cuisine:

1. Boil water in a blackened pan over a yak dung fire. This does not impart any flavour into the water but impregnates your clothes with the smell of charred yak dung and creates the right ambience for a good cup.
   
2. Take a Chinese tea brick and break off half into the water. Stew for far too long.
   
3. Add several tablespoons of salt.
   
4. Add a dash of soda.
   
5. Pour this delightful mixture into a wooden tea churner. Go to the shelf and find the bowl of last year's rancid yak butter. Scoop out a handful and throw into the tea churn. Wipe hands on apron. Churn the liquid and rancid yak butter until the lumps have melted into the tea.
   
6. Pour the broth into a Chinese thermos flask and wait for unsuspecting foreigners to arrive.
   

While the majority of foreigners find the taste particularly nauseating, yak butter tea forms the staple diet of the Tibetans, together with
tsampa
(ground barley). It is an essential part of Tibetan cuisine and any Tibetan will tell you that it is not wise to start to the day without a good bowlful of yak butter tea. It has been claimed that Tibetans can drink up to fifty cups a day.

Such facts matter little when you are confronted with a freshly poured bowl and an eager host who is beaming a beautiful smile and beckoning you to take a drink. Of course once the yak butter tea is poured, it is considered extremely discourteous to leave the bowl untouched. This is where the problem arises; the Tibetans are such an incredibly friendly and hospitable people that offending them must be avoided at all costs. The host is continually hovering around, trying to fill up your bowl, smiling and telling you to drink.

Sipping it is no good, as you keep getting the taste and an automatic refill, so I tried the technique of downing it in one. This is a failure, as despite making your host beam from ear to ear, he then fills up the bowl to the brim again and you are left with the same problem that you started with – except that you already have a bellyful of the hideous mixture.

I discovered that the answer is to keep putting the bowl up to your lips while not actually drinking any. This at first confuses the host as he still keeps trying to fill the bowl after every sip. Then, at the end of the party, when getting up to leave, you hold your breath and down the bowl in one. In this way the host is only upset that he could not have been more hospitable, but this is better than leaving him feeling insulted. As an alternative you could always try to like yak butter tea – but that was an area where I had to admit defeat.

The rest of Dasang's feast was delicious. Yak meat is not as bad as it sounds, and while being rather chewy, is full of a flavour similar to good beef. Our appetites had returned and while we disappointed Dasang with our slow drinking of his yak butter tea, he was clearly pleased with our enjoyment of his food.

The children kept their distance, watching how we ate, and cheered when an elderly lady approached us from the village bearing a glass and a kettle of
chang
. Fermented from barley,
chang
is the main party drink of Tibet. Its alcohol content is very low and the first few glasses can be consumed without any noticeable effect, apart from feeling rather ill. The colour is cloudy green and the taste somewhere between cider, mead, a rough yogurt and Robinson's Barley Water. It was a wonderful return from the mountainside and our impromptu party went on until night drew in and a chill came over the ground. The children chased our Beijing jeep all the way to the village of Lu and waved until we had disappeared into the military camp.

Dasang and Mark dropped me off at the hotel and I crossed the lobby without being noticed by any guests. It was late and I was looking forward to a good night's sleep. As I pushed the door open to my room, a note on the floor put an end to my thoughts of eight hours of rest.

I set the alarm for 5 a.m.

FROM MISSIONARIES TO MAO TSE TUNG

‘Why don't your staff speak English?' was a question which was asked by menacing guests throughout the day. It became very tiresome and although it was extremely tempting to reply, ‘Why don't you speak Tibetan or next time stay at home, you complaining old bat?' this answer was not really acceptable in an international hotel. Instead a polite, ‘Oh, I am terribly sorry, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the service to our guests and thank you so much for bringing this matter to our attention' usually sufficed.

The last straw on the pile of ‘lack of English' complaints came from an investment banker who had been invited to Tibet to discuss important financial projects with the local government. We had special instructions to provide red-carpet treatment and the General Manager escorted him and his wife personally to the best suite in the hotel. The financier was concerned that his wife, who would be sightseeing while he was meeting with government ministers, may suffer from altitude sickness and he looked around the suite for the piped-in oxygen supply. He found the bottle beneath the bedside table and followed the explanations on how to release oxygen into the room, but no oxygen-enriched air bubbled through the water as the instructions had told him it would. He called the operator to ask for someone to check the oxygen. ‘Yes,' the operator responded, and he replaced the receiver on the telephone set. He waited patiently in his suite for an engineer to arrive. Fifteen minutes later no one had appeared, his wife was complaining of a headache and he paced the large suite, wondering why the service was so slow and trying to remain calm. He called the operator again to ask for the oxygen. ‘Yes, wait a moment, I check for you,' was the abrupt reply.

Another quarter of an hour passed, and still no one had arrived – his wife's headache was worsening and his own temper turned from a steady simmer to boiling point. He snatched up the orange telephone receiver, recoiling when the feedback screeched in his right ear, dialled 2222 for the operator and demanded to know why there was no oxygen. The operator gave him a terse reply, he had been wasting her time: ‘Yes, I checked for you, but there is no Mr Oxygen staying in the hotel. No guest of this name.'

There was no escape from the fact that the hotel needed an English teacher. The investment banker made his opinion clear to the General Manager who in turn shouted at anyone who might have been remotely responsible for the VIP's problem. Derek was called to the General Manager's office and reprimanded for the faulty engineering. Charlie was asked why his chambermaids had not found the fault and Harry was interrogated at length as to why he had not checked the equipment personally when assigning the room for the VIP. Only sending a receptionist to check a VIP room was not good enough. I heard the blast from outside the General Manager's office, where I had also been summoned: ‘How do you expect a Tibetan who has only lived in filth and squalor, surrounded by inefficiency and incompetence, to check if the room is correct for one of Europe's top bankers?'

Harry was also officially liable for the telephone operators, so was held doubly responsible for the complaint. By the time I was to see the General Manager he had forgotten what he wanted to see me for, and, exhausted from shouting and thumping the table, he waved me away again. Harry sent Dr Grubby up to the suite to check if the banker's wife needed anything for her headache and she declared that she had made an immediate recovery. Dr Grubby never had to see a patient twice.

The banker had pinpointed the weakness in the hotel's Blue Dot System of English – it didn't work. The Blue Dot System had been pioneered by the first foreign staff of Holiday Inn Lhasa and it had started as a great success. Each employee was awarded blue dots on his or her name badge to indicate the level of English spoken. Three dots denoted ‘good English', two dots ‘some English' and one dot ‘a little English'. The vast majority of the staff had no dot, signifying ‘no English whatsoever. Nothing. Don't even bother to ask me anything because I will just stare at you.'

The Blue Dot System was very popular with hotel guests as they had an idea of who would be able to reply to their questions and who it would be a waste of time approaching, but unfortunately the staff saw the Blue Dot System as a way of being forced by the management into the unthinkable –
working
. Much better to stand at the back of the reception desk and wave people away because you have no dots, rather than be in the front line and have to work occasionally. Even worse, when a guest did talk to you, it was always something difficult: ‘Where can I send a fax? Why is there no heating? Why isn't there a newspaper? Why are my photocopies black? Why are we locked in the hotel today? What do you think of Human Rights in Tibet?'

In the time of Communism, when everyone was equal, it was impossible for the management to give real financial or career incentives to the staff with dots. Career advances could only be made according to who you were or who you knew in the
Party
– it was unheard of to pay someone more for working harder. That would have been extremely unfair. Consequently, the staff scratched off the blue dots as soon as they were awarded and there was a real incentive not to learn English.

The complaint of the investment banker had come as a severe embarrassment to the local government and consequently had led to a serious loss of face. It was the right moment for us to push the hotel owners, who happened to be the local government, for permission to employ an English teacher. The usual red tape and refusal to add extra foreigners to the hotel staff was abandoned and authorisation was given immediately. It had been a victory for Party B, and the General Manager sent a telex to Hong Kong requesting that an English teacher be hired as soon as possible.

The answer came sooner than we had expected. A young couple had just asked at the head office if there was a teaching position available at the Holiday Inn Lhasa. According to the recruiters in Hong Kong, they were ‘very nice' and ‘very keen' and even more important, they would accept a ‘very low' salary. This should have sent alarm bells ringing but instead, the two new recruits to the expatriate staff were booked on CAAC flights via Chengdu through to Lhasa.

I listened to the alarm clock from the warmth of my bed, peeping from under the blankets to check that it really was 5 a.m. The note under my door from the General Manager had told me that the English teachers were arriving on Monday morning, and I would have to go to the airport with Dorje to pick them up.

I tried sleeping in the Landcruiser but with Dorje at the wheel there was little chance. I clung on to the door handle and the dashboard in an attempt to stay on the front seat. Dorje drove with dipped headlights but put them on full beam if he thought another truck or car might be coming our way. It was an interesting driving technique practised by all who drove on the Tibetan plateau: blinding oncoming drivers to announce their presence. I thought of explaining that in the West we tend to drive on full beam and dip our head lights when a car approaches, but after considering the sign language involved in the dark at 70 mph, I decided it was better just to keep myself wedged onto the front seat and let Dorje concentrate on the road ahead.

We passed an upturned Beijing jeep at one of the worst bends on the Kyi Chu road. White painted cubes of rock protruding 6 inches above the tarmac are set along the centre of the road around the bend in an attempt to force drivers to keep to the correct side. Clipping one of these stones sends vehicles spinning over into the path of oncoming traffic, bouncing on their roofs and occasionally rolling completely over into the river below. Dorje slowed as we passed the flattened jeep. Four Chinese soldiers' hats, stacked one on top of another next to a pool of blood, stood as the grim evidence of what had happened to the jeep's occupants. There was no one around, whatever had been left of the soldiers had been taken to the nearest military hospital. Dorje shook his head, and put his foot down to speed away from the scene. Carnage on the airport road was nothing unusual and by daybreak the debris of the night's accidents would litter the roadside.

The Lhasa airport was the usual chaos. Toyota Landcruisers, Beijing Jeeps and tour buses vied for poll position in anticipation of the race back to Lhasa. I left the car and strolled down to the runway where the tour guides gathered with their scraps of paper. They huddled together their eyes skywards trying to spot the first of the two 707s which were due in.

‘Hello, Mr Alec,' said a friendly voice. ‘My name is Renchen. How do you like Tibet?'

I had heard of Renchen from the few guests who had been fortunate enough to have him as a tour guide but I had not met him before. Some unfortunate guests paid their thousands of dollars only to be greeted by a newly arrived Chinese recruit. Their knowledge of English was often poor, their knowledge of Tibet even worse and their lack of respect for the culture diabolical.

‘Tibet is beautiful,' I told Renchen and he grinned back at me. The crowd stirred, a plane had been spotted and soon the mighty roar of the 707 engines came hurtling down the runway towards us.

I watched the passengers leaving the plane, gasping the fresh, thin air of the Gonggar valley. Families of Tibetans with their bundles, worried Chinese soldiers arriving for tours of duty, small groups of bewildered tourists, and then, there they were: two sets of dungarees and lumberjack shirts bouncing down the steps. The penny dropped. Sensible haircuts bobbed across the runway in the early-morning breeze.

‘Hi there. Thanks so much for coming to the airport. It's so wonderful of you!' Nancy introduced herself. ‘My, isn't Tibet wonderful! Gee, we just love it and we've only just arrived! We have twenty-four suitcases to collect, but this one I took on the plane with me.' Nancy giggled, clutching her precious bag. ‘It's our Mr Smiley stickers!'

I shivered. Undercover missionaries had penetrated the capital of Tibet. But it was not the first time that the Tibetans had been confronted with bible-bashing visitors and as history has shown, not even the deepest atheism of the Cultural Revolution could dampen the Tibetans' beliefs.

Some 300 years before Nancy and her husband Bob had bounced down the steps of the CAAC plane, two Jesuit missionaries, Albert D'Orville from Belgium and Johan Grueber from Austria, had walked into the Barkhor with the very same intentions. Travel was somewhat slower and tougher in the mid-1600s; it had taken them three years to walk to Lhasa from China. During the continuation of their journey overland to Rome, D'Orville succumbed to the rigours of seventeenth-century travel and went on to meet his maker in India. I often wonder if they were nauseatingly nice people but somehow I imagine D'Orville and Grueber to have been fire-breathing, God-fearing types, and not burdened down with bagfuls of Mr Smiley stickers.

In the eighteenth century Capuchin missionaries arrived on the scene and a rival mission was set up in Lhasa to compete with recently established Jesuits. The Tibetans in general were extremely tolerant of other religions and even today, although there are no Christian churches in Lhasa, a mosque to the east of the Barkhor beckons the Mohammedan traders and settlers from Xinjiang and Qinghai provinces. There has only been the occasional case of foreign missions being burnt down to the ground and the occupants slaughtered and this has generally been restricted to the outskirts of Tibet, where bandits and easily incited peasants roamed the land.

The missionaries in Lhasa were accepted by the Tibetans but the conversion en masse of the Tibetan people was taking longer than the early Jesuits had anticipated. In fact only seven were recorded. Competition between the Jesuits and Capuchins intensified and the Pope had to be called in to decide who should be given conversion rights for Tibet. The Capuchins won, although it made little difference as by 1745 the Chinese persuaded the Tibetans to evict all foreigners from Tibetan soil, under the pretext that if foreigners were allowed into Tibet, their precious Buddhist religion would be destroyed forever. Quite ironic considering what the friendly Chinese later tried to do to Tibetan Buddhism.

The Tibetans were constantly warned by the Chinese about the dangers of foreigners and in contrast to the present day, the Tibetans became fiercely xenophobic. Soldiers patrolled the remote passes and the approaches to Lhasa on the lookout for the foreign explorers, eccentrics, missionaries and madmen who attempted all manner of disguises to reach the Holy City.

The British in India found the closure of Tibet particularly infuriating, as by 1860 they had mapped the entire Indian sub-continent and were now expecting to carry on with their divine right to map-making beyond the Himalayas and into Tibet. A great blank area on the world map with the word ‘unexplored' emblazoned over it was a lure that no adventurous member of the Empire could resist. It was simply inconceivable that by the latter half of the nineteenth century the British did not have an accurate latitude and longitude bearing for Lhasa. Someone had to go there to take measurements. The Russians had been attempting from the north, an American from the east, the French from any direction they could. The British tried from the south but despite many ingenious attempts, no disguise was good enough to allow an Englishman to cross the Tibetan frontier and reach the forbidden city.