The Hotel on the Roof of the World (17 page)

Each Tibetan who catches your eye around the Barkhor will immediately smile and beam a reply to your
tashi delai
s, the universal Tibetan phrase for, ‘Hello. How are you? Good to meet you.' Some stick their tongues out in greeting. They find foreigners amusing – our funny clothes, big noses, ugly blue eyes, pale skin and the funniest thing of all – body hair.

As I asked in sign language at a stand around the Barkhor for a pair of long underpants I felt a tug at my sleeve. I looked down to find a young monk, eight or nine years old, pulling at the hair on the back of my hand, grinning all over and saying
po
to his friend. This caused fits of giggles and the two of them ran off dodging in and out of the moving human line of pilgrims which circled the Jokhang Temple. They peeped at me from behind the
chubas
of the crowd still laughing and pointing.
Po
, I discovered, means ‘monkey'.

After several
may-oh
s and
putchidao
s at the Chinese stands I eventually found a pair of Chinese heavy-duty winter underpants. Our staff, including Jig Me, wore tracksuits beneath their suits, but these always stuck out at the bottom of the trousers and looked rather stupid. I cycled back with my new acquisition.

All had seemed peaceful at the Barkhor. The Chinese were relaxing. There had even been a recent sports rally where everyone had been waving ‘PROGRESS & UNITY' banners. The Chinese told themselves that those nasty splittists had been crushed and everyone was happy in the New Tibet. But this was just the lull before the storm.

The storm broke on International Human Rights Day when a group of nuns and monks followed the circuit of the Barkhor around the Jokhang Temple, waving the Tibetan flag and chanting ‘Free Tibet!' The Chinese have different ideas on handling demonstrations to Westerners. There are no peaceful pleas for calm, not even water cannons or rubber bullets – the answer comes immediately with AK47s. The Tibetan monks and nuns, guilty of nothing more than expressing their thoughts, were gunned down in the square by nervous Chinese soldiers. The Tibetans answered in the now traditional way and the Barkhor police station was set on fire again.

There was pandemonium at the hotel. Party A banned us from going outside, foreign tourists were deported and there were restrictions placed on new arrivals. Chinese soldiers were kept on patrol around the Barkhor and as calm returned to the streets the control on tourism slowly eased.

Among the few foreigners allowed in was a Mr Ernesto Barba, the new General Manager. He seemed pleasant enough. A suave Italian looking ten years younger than his sixty years of age. Long dark hair swept back over strong handsome features. His clothing was from the leading couturiers of Italy and his manners, on first impressions, were impeccable. He had the worrying habit of taking you by the arm and of tugging at your earlobes when you came up with a good idea, but this we put down to the warmth of his southern Italian origins. Chef was not so sure. Being typically Germanic, he liked discipline and private body space and took great exception to having his earlobes interfered with. Fortunately he did not have many ideas which Barba liked, so did not have to undergo too much stress.

After a brief hand-over period the former General Manager bid us farewell and left for the warmer climes of Southeast Asia. He was thin and pale; exhausted from the strains of running the hardest hardship posting of Holiday Inn. He gave us a wry smile and wished us luck. Perhaps he knew something we didn't about Barba, ‘the crazy Italian'.

I was not too concerned at the time. One of Barba's first acts was to promote me to Executive Assistant Manager in charge of Sales and Marketing, and to boost the Sales Department by bringing in a Belgian girl, Conny, as Sales Manager. Few expatriate women had worked in Lhasa and Conny's arrival was a welcome change to our male-dominated team. She was bright, beautiful and most important of all, she immediately fell in love with Tibet. Some expats succumb to the altitude in the first few days. Others who have come with the wrong expectations leave without even unpacking their suitcases. But Conny's reaction to her first visit to the Barkhor was the same mixture of wonder and excitement that I felt every time I was there, and I knew that she would survive.

The first days with Barba passed without incident although we were soon to discover that he was no ordinary man. He had come to Lhasa as part of his studies of oriental religion. He hated Holiday Inn. ‘Alec, when I signed the contract, I held my nose!' he chuckled to me in his office.

But the smile soon left his face. He sat behind his desk with a crossword book and sheets of paper onto which he was pasting blackened photocopies of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

‘Alec, what are we going to do here? Is it really this cold? What is this
Party A
,
Party B
nonsense? Who is Jig Me?'

As with all new recruits, he was having trouble coming to terms with the system. I left him with his Chinese glue pot and headed back to my office.

‘Mr Alec! Mr Alec!'

Tashi shouted across the empty lobby. ‘Here, I have a note for you.' I took the crumpled piece of paper from him and read, ‘SOS. The People's No.1 Hospital. Greg.'

Greg! He should have been out of Tibet weeks ago. I knew from the other mountaineers who had passed through Lhasa that the two Canadians had not made it to the top but I had assumed that they had carried on with their plans and had left Tibet via Kathmandu. Was this some sort of hoax?

I asked Tashi to find Dorje and tell him that we had to go quickly to the hospital. Dorje was delighted with the news and appeared almost immediately at the wheel of his Landcruiser, revving up the engine in the hotel forecourt. We sped through the streets, the accelerator pedal pressed to the floor. Cyclists were forced off their bikes, pedestrians into skips and several of the Lhasa dogs came very close to their next incarnations. We screeched to a halt at the hospital gates, dropped some yuan in the shoe-boxes of the chanting monks and set about finding Greg.

We peered into room after room of sickly Chinese and Tibetans until we came to Greg's cell. It was sparse, with a concrete floor and the usual decoration of green paint half way up the walls, with the top of the walls and the ceiling a cobweb shade of white. A table stood between two beds, with three pots of bottled tangerines and various medical paraphernalia. Oxygen cylinders and a drip feed stood in the corner. On one of the two beds the cheerful CMA guide sat bolt upright and on the other lay Greg. He was hardly recognisable. He had lost a lot of weight, grown a scratchy beard and although his skin was scorched red from his time on Everest, his lips had turned blue. He was attached to several bottles and had oxygen tubes taped to his nose. He smiled when he saw us and gave a sigh of relief.

Despite the physical pains of his illness, he seemed to be in far more trouble with the psychological trauma inflicted on him by the guide. Between gasps of oxygen he complained of being fed only on a diet of bottled tangerine slices and being stuck in the hospital with no idea of when he would ever get out. He was desperate for some other form of nourishment and I promised to bring him some soup from the hotel. Between gasps of oxygen he told me his story.

He had climbed with Dave to within 800 yards of the summit but the weather closed in on them. They too had waited for a ‘window' but it never came and reluctantly they had returned through their advanced camps back down to Base Camp. Dave had carried on to Kathmandu and as Greg hadn't been feeling too good, he had decided to return to Lhasa with the CMA guide. This was his mistake. He expected to be staying at the Holiday Inn but the guide had told him the hotel was fully booked (if only!) and had taken him to one of the Chinese hotels where he had fallen seriously ill. After a week in bed his condition deteriorated further and after shaking the rats out of his clothes, the guide brought him to the People's Number One Hospital. He had the very unfortunate combination of pulmonary edema and haemorrhoids.

The doctor had told him that if his breathing became any worse he would slit his throat and insert a tube direct to the oxygen bottle. This had done nothing to calm Greg's nerves. His breathing was certainly irregular. The only real cure for his altitude sickness was to get him out of Tibet, to a lower altitude and more familiar methods of health care. The weekly flight from Kathmandu had stopped for the winter, so we persuaded the guide to purchase a ticket for Chengdu as soon as it was medically safe for Greg to travel.

Between the gasps he also expressed his grave concern about the guide's motives in consistently wishing to ‘lend a hand' applying the haemorrhoid cream. For macho mountaineers, this thought was even worse than the life-threatening pulmonary edema.

Chef prepared special thermos flasks of soup and Greg slowly regained his strength, enough for him to be able to take the plane to Chengdu, accompanied by a doctor from the People's Number One Hospital and the friendly CMA guide.

I was sitting in the hotel bar after the mountaineers had gone, frightening a group of elderly American ladies with the vision of Greg in the hospital and details of what can happen to you at high altitude, when I suddenly felt myself turning white. The ladies were facing me, listening attentively, gulping down their over-priced bottles of Evian water and it happened. There, behind them, clinging onto the water pipe against the wall, stood an enormous rat. I tried to remain calm. I have no problem with rodents but the thought of being stuck in a tiny bar with a herd of stampeding tourists, whose eyes were already wide with fear over the horror of high-altitude sickness, filled me with dread.

‘And so Greg recovered fully.'

I brought an abrupt end to the story. ‘Goodness me, is that the time? We really must all be leaving the bar straight away or we will be late for dinner. Bring your drinks and follow me. Keep looking this way. That's right, this way ladies, keep looking this way.'

Then Laba, the barmaid, broke my cover.
‘Zizi!'
she screamed, pointing behind the ladies who I had managed to bring halfway to the door.

‘Look, Mr Alec.
Big
zizi
!'

‘Yes. Thank you, Laba.'

The ladies turned around and there was a moment of stunned silence. The rat looked at them. They stared at the rat. I looked at the ladies. Laba giggled at me. To my great relief the silence was broken, not by hysteria but by one of the group asking very calmly, ‘Does
zizi
mean rat in Tibetan?'

After all, these were ladies from a Smithsonian Institute tour. I had underestimated them. They wanted to know what species it was and two of them debated whether it was as big as the one they had seen in their room in the floating hotel in Vietnam.

This particular
zizi
, which Laba had been so kind to point out, was one of the first rats of the winter to make it into the hotel. They followed in droves. At night they ran along the air-conditioning ducts above the bedrooms, and every evening as I brushed my teeth, I heard the patter of tiny feet on the ceiling tiles above my bathroom. In reverence to Manuel's ‘Siberian Hamster', the expats referred to the rats as ‘Himalayan Hamsters'. Any guest reporting having seen or heard a mouse or rat was informed that they were very fortunate to have witnessed a rare Himalayan Hamster. This excuse was very thin and hardly ever worked. The Smithsonian Institute guests were not taken in by it and it certainly was not worth using when George Schaller was around.

The rats were a seasonal problem. All summer long they had been breeding and stuffing their little faces in the barley fields of the Lhasa valley. Now that the crop had been harvested and the temperature was dropping, they headed to the hotel kitchens for warmth and food.

There was nothing new about the winter rodent invasion. As a child, the Dalai Lama had befriended the mice living in his room in the Potala Palace. He snuggled under his blankets and happily watched them as they ate the offerings and climbed over his bedclothes. This is understandable, considering that the Dalai Lama is the incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, but generally the hotel guests were not so welcoming to these little four-footed visitors. One of the long-staying guests was lent a mouse trap which produced a record-breaking eight mice.

Tu Dian reluctantly set the remainder of the traps in the kitchens and in the bar, but the rodent numbers continued to increase. Public sightings were becoming embarrassingly common. Meals were hurried at the management table in case a rodent was spotted. If it was, the trick was to leave the table as quickly as possible, without telling the others why you were going. This meant that the last expat at the table would have the explaining to do when the guests stormed up and asked why rats were roaming around the restaurant. As the numbers increased, meal times became intolerably short as we scrambled to leave our seats. Action had to be taken.

After a lengthy debate in the Morning Meeting, where Barba received his halitosis baptism from Mr Pong, it was agreed that war would be declared on the rats. Heather translated the ultimatum into English: ‘We shall summon rat-catchers from Chengdu and put medicine down for the rats.'