The Hotel on the Roof of the World (23 page)

Just what kind of bathroom facilities he expected there to be in Tibet remains a mystery to me. As time goes by, the distance between the Tibetans from inside Tibet and those on the outside widens.

With the closure of Tibet to tourists, the flights from Kathmandu to Lhasa were not operating, so I took the overland route in. The first day leaves the squalor of the Kathmandu valley, up through the green and fertile foothills of the Himalaya to the border crossing at Zhangmu. The town itself lies on a steep mountainside but before reaching it you have to pass the notorious Nepalese customs. They scrutinise every document, every piece of baggage, to see if there is something they can confiscate. The previous year they had taken a video player off one of our expats as they said there was no paperwork allowing it out of China. They know that you are at their mercy and so you wait, being as polite as possible and wishing them
‘Namaste'
, the Nepali equivalent of
tashi delai
.

Once away from these nasty little officials and across the bridge you are in a no-man's land between Nepal and Tibet. There is a road here up the steep mountainside but most of the year it lies in the bottom of the valley, washed down by the summer monsoons. A group of porters offered very reasonable prices to carry my suitcases up the hill. Business had not exactly been booming since the imposition of Martial Law in Lhasa and the closure of Tibet to tourists. It was a tough hike and I was glad of their services. As I struggled up, porters passed me with refrigerators strapped to their foreheads – this is the major trade route between China and Nepal.

The town of Zhangmu is perched precariously on the hillside, and every so often large chunks of it fall off into the stream, several hundred metres below. The Chinese guards scrutinised my paperwork, visas and permit and passed me over to Dorje, who was waiting patiently for me with a Holiday Inn Landcruiser. As it was late, we stayed the night at the Zhangmu Hotel, which, unfortunately, had not yet dropped off into the valley. The rooms were filthy, and all the rubbish from the hotel was strewn down the hill to the stream below.

I undressed in the bathroom and nervously stepped into the shower. I stood in a small puddle of cold water and looked at the tangle of pipes, tubes, taps and electricity cables on the wall. I read a notice with the instructions for the water heater: ‘Pull Lever A to Position B'. As I pulled Lever A, blue sparks shot out of the device and I leapt from the shower. I got dressed again. I could wait until Tingri, the next stop, for a bath.

We left the bamboos and lush vegetation of Zhangmu behind and followed the dirt track up, up and up. Even with Dorje at the wheel, progress up the tortuous track was slow. The trees became shorter and spindlier until they finally disappeared as we rose above the tree-line. The greenery fizzled out and we climbed ever upwards through a crack in the Himalaya and onto the Tibetan plateau. It was a sensational experience. To our left, across a brown plain, was the massive Shishapangma, to our right the mountain range which leads to Everest. We stopped at the 17,000 feet (5,200 m) Thang La (
‘la'
means ‘pass' in Tibetan) and Dorje called out the cry of all Tibetans as they reach the summit of passes;
‘La! So so so so!'

I would have called it out too but I was having trouble with breathing, let alone shouting out of the window at the top of my voice. My heartbeat was racing and my head pounding. Despite the beauty of the mountain scenery I was very pleased when Dorje pointed out that we were approaching Tingri and the brand new Xegar Hotel. My pleasure was short-lived. There was no water, no electricity and in fact nothing but a great deal of filth in this unimaginatively designed lump of Chinese concrete. Everything, right down to the frilly pink nylon bed-covers, had been imported from eastern China. So too had the ‘management'. Breathing was impossible in the festering toilets and no one in their right mind used them. Instead, the car park was used as a much less smelly option.

I persuaded Dorje that this was not a place fit for human habitation, and we left on a side road down to Everest Base Camp. There were no mountaineers about as it was too early for them, and in any case they had been banned from entering Tibet along with all the tourists. We struggled over the Pang La and the mighty range of the Himalaya stood before us. Dorje was not so keen on the road. He liked speed and was unhappy about the rough ride ahead, over boulder screes and icy stream beds where the track had disappeared. We drove over glacial debris towards Rongbuk monastery, thought to be the inspiration behind the mythical Shangri-La of James Hilton's novel.

Rongbuk lies just a few kilometres from Base Camp and the surprised monks made us very welcome. They lit the stove in the guest room and stoked it, not with yak dung, but with wood. There was not a tree for miles around and the fuel was a rare luxury, for which we paid a suitably high price. As night drew on, we settled down into thick sleeping bags which Mark from Save the Children had sent down in the Landcruiser with Dorje, in case we should need them. They had been bought from army surplus stores in Pakistan and had ‘High Altitude Use' stamped on the label.

An icy wind blew through the cracks of the monastery walls and wild dogs howled in the starlight outside. Rongbuk is said to be the highest monastery in the world at 16,350 feet (4,980 m) and it felt to me as if we were in outer space. My head pounded and my breathing grew erratic. After every few normal breaths I took an involuntary gasp. I shivered to the bone, fully dressed inside the thick sleeping bag. The temperature had dropped to –20 °C. The fire was still crackling in the stove but I calculated that it must be using up the little oxygen available in the room. I opened the door to allow in a fresh supply of oxygen.

I could hear a movement outside, above the noise of the wind. I peered out into the dark and caught sight of the starlight glinting in the eyes of a pack of dogs, as they pounced up the monastery steps towards me. I slammed the door shut just in time. I could feel the claws sinking into the wooden door as they growled and barked outside, snapping at the door handle. I was caught between my worst fears: freezing to death, dying of lack of oxygen or being mauled to death by a pack of savage dogs. This was certainly not my idea of Shangri-La. I spent the worst night of my life between gasping for oxygen out of the door, keeping the dogs at bay with a burning stick and stoking the fire to keep the warmth in the room. Dorje slept soundly throughout.

By morning the dogs had vanished and the view from the steps made up for all the trauma of the previous night. Ahead of the monastery, at the end of the Rongbuk valley, lay the massive wall of the north face of Everest, rising up nearly 4,000 m higher than where I was standing. I looked in awe. A plume of snow was blowing off the peak, held high in the air like the spray of a breaking wave with an offshore wind. There was nothing around us. Just the little monastery, ice, rock, absolute desolation and this massive grey wall.

Dorje took me further down the trail to the start of the glacial moraine and the location of Everest Base Camp. It was far cleaner than I had expected. A team of Americans calling themselves ‘Mountain Madness' had been to Base Camp the previous season with the noble aim to clean it of the tons of rubbish left over the years by environmentally unfriendly mountaineering groups. They had done an excellent job – all I could find was a small piece of a disposable razor.

The wind howled around me as I walked across to an area where slabs of stone had been set upright. The rocks bore inscriptions to those who have never returned. Wherever I looked, my eyes were taken up to the great mountain. Bleak and unforgiving. The taker of lives. You had to be crazy even to think about it.

Dorje beckoned me. It was time to move on. We waved to the monks at Rongbuk as we passed them on our way back. For the first time I noticed the ruins of many other small buildings. The Red Guards had even carried their dynamite this far.

Unfortunately, the Red Guards had finished their dynamiting by the time the Shigatse Hotel was built. It was one step higher than the Xegar Hotel but that is about all that can be said in its favour. I could see why an American tour leader had returned to Lhasa describing the Shigatse Hotel as ‘vomititious'.

After stopping off at Gyantse to see the amazing Kumbum, built in the shape of a Mandala, we moved on to Lhasa, via Lake Yamdrok and the Kamba La. Yamdrok is known as the ‘turquoise lake' and is a sacred place for Tibetans. It is also an important wintering spot for migrating waterfowl. On just the tiny portion of the lake which can be seen from the road, a thousand Red-crested Pochard and hundreds of Pintail and Bar-headed Geese stop-over in winter.

Younghusband, who had led the British troops into Tibet in 1904, described Lake Yamdrok as, ‘One of the most beautiful lakes I have ever seen… in colour it varied from every shade of violet and turquoise blue and green.'

The description is still true today. The depth and range of colours are remarkable. In the winter the lake is predominantly turquoise as the water absorbs light from the high-altitude sky. In summer, the colour changes with the passing of clouds, from moody black to purple and deep sea greens. The view of the lake has remained unchanged from the time when the Capuchin missionaries walked along its shores, the Tartars swept through, the Indian pundits counted their paces, the British expedition carried their trade treaty to sign and the Red Guards marched past with their rucksacks of dynamite.

Unchanged that is until now. For today a great and terrible scheme is afoot by the Chinese. The beauty of Lake Yamdrok is being shattered by the construction of a Chinese concrete monstrosity by the lake-side and the excavation of a mighty tunnel out of the lake to the Tsangpo river (down on the other side of the Kamba La). This is an appalling solution to the electricity needs of expanding Tibet. A hydro-electric plant that will drain the Turquoise Lake. Communism and the Environment were never good friends. Unfortunately, the new capitalist China is even worse. We bounced down the hairpin bends on the Lhasa side of the Kamba La and descended into the Tsangpo valley. We were in sight of home and Dorje increased speed, knowing that he would soon be back with his family. Covered in dust from the four-day journey and without sight of a bathroom since standing in the cold puddle of the Zhangmu Hotel, I breathed a sigh of relief when Dorje swung the Landcruiser into the forecourt of the Holiday Inn Lhasa. It was the very height of luxury.

But all was not well at the hotel. To start off with, we had no guests. Secondly, my mountain bike, my pride and joy, which I had left chained to the security guards' hut, had been stolen. Thirdly, the dreaded visit from the Holiday Inn Worldwide Inspector was about to take place. And fourthly, we were all under house arrest.

HIGH SEASON APPROACHES

We spent our time preparing for the inspector's visit which all seemed rather futile. We dressed up two staff as doormen and trained them to look as though they had been standing by the door all day, for when he arrived. Everything received a coat of new paint. This is a very convenient way of cleaning, especially in the kitchens where all sorts of apparitions were disguised with a fresh coat of white emulsion. Holiday Inn inspectors are used to this trick and take it for granted, as the Queen does, that everywhere they go there is the smell of fresh paint.

We even hired a special carpet to cover the cold marble floor of the lobby. It was a stunning Tibetan carpet – a pale blue background with flower designs around the border and the eight auspicious Tibetan symbols in a line down the centre. But it was more than just a beautiful carpet – it was the Dalai Lama's carpet. We had borrowed it from the Norbulingka, the Summer Palace of the Dalai Lamas, where it had decorated the floor of the fourteenth Dalai Lama's private cinema. I had some reservations about walking on it. I was not worthy. Alright, the Dalai Lama wasn't home, he was in exile in India, but does that mean we can just borrow his carpets when we want to? I was doubtful and was very pleased when His Holiness's carpet was returned to the Norbulingka.

We were all very pleased when the inspector was returned to where he had come from. He was a small unassuming man without a sense of humour. He wasn't impressed with the Dalai Lama's carpet, as he did not know who the Dalai Lama was. Despite our Herculean efforts, he wasn't impressed with the hotel either. He was careful to praise the management and staff but pointed out that certain criteria simply did not meet the regulations laid down by Holiday Inn.

‘The car-port is not wide enough for two cars to open their doors side-by-side.'

‘What do you mean,
car-port
, nobody can drive here?' Barba asked, restraining his anger.

The inspector continued; ‘The telephone cords – the length of wire from the receiver to the set – are not the stipulated length.'

‘So what?'

‘There is no special menu for children.'

‘We don't have any children here.'

‘There are no ice machines in the corridors.'

‘You want ice in this weather?'

Barba was on the edge of a massive attack and we calmed him down by suggesting that perhaps Holiday Inn would close the hotel. He went off grinning and rubbing his hands together as the inspector finished the report.

In America, Holiday Inns are allowed a waiver if, for any insurmountable reason, they cannot comply with all the expectations laid down in the Holiday Inn Operations Manual. The most they are allowed is one waiver. Holiday Inn Lhasa was granted twenty-seven and still permitted to carry on trading. Several conditions were specified for improvement. The most important one concerned the thickness of the doors. Apparently, none of the 500 doors in the hotel were the correct thickness in millimetres, according to the inspector's bible, the Operations Manual. This alteration alone would cost in excess of $200,000 – a difficult demand on the owners considering the hotel had no guests.

Barba waved his hands. ‘Who cares about Holiday Inn's stupid doors? I am going to make this a hotel to be proud of. What do we need here that would really make a difference?'

We all tried for the right answer:

‘A change from yak meat?'

‘A laundry service that works?'

‘Heating?'

‘Guests?'

Barba shook his head. ‘No, no, no. Gentleman, and Conny, what we need is an outdoor swimming pool!'

As Barba worked day and night to persuade Party A to part with vast sums of money to invest in a swimming pool, Conny and I spent our time trying to convince tour operators not to cancel their Tibet programmes.

The Chinese soon relaxed their grip and allowed us to venture out of the hotel again but Tibet remained closed to tourists. There were several checkpoints between the hotel and the Jokhang and soldiers stood to attention in little sentry boxes at every street running off from the Barkhor. Soldiers wearing headphones and with radio sets strapped to their backs stood by the sentry boxes, ready to call for backup in case a dangerous unarmed monk or nun came past. Sorties of nine soldiers at a time, laden down with AK47s, led by an officer carrying a revolver, marched around the Barkhor every so often – usually in the wrong direction.

Once every couple of days a great cavalcade of motorbikes with side-cars would pass along the roads, with soldiers carrying mounted weapons hanging out of the side. An armoured personnel carrier stood on guard by the empty rickshaw stand at the front of the Barkhor square. It was an obvious and rather crude way of saying, ‘Don't mess with us because we've got lots of very big guns.'

To remind everyone of the military strength and ‘unity with the Motherland', several large billboards displayed comradely paintings of Brother and Sister Tibetans carrying Chinese arms. Smaller pictures on the billboards proudly showed nuclear fallout clouds. No one could speak out against it.

Despite the modernisation within China and the new economic prosperity, freedom of speech is still a luxury not afforded by the Chinese or Tibetans. Neither the student in Tianamen Square nor the Tibetan in the Barkhor is permitted to say what he or she likes. Socialism rules with an iron fist and a new wave of inmates filled Trapchi prison, guilty only of thinking aloud; ‘Free Tibet.'

Watching army patrols and knowing that, as a foreigner, I was being watched by them, was not my idea of fun. I avoided the Barkhor on my trips out of the hotel and instead went on day hikes into the hills and marshes around the Lhasa valley.

After having been nursed back to health by Conny, I planned to take her for a romantic picnic to a spot looking over the marshes by Drepung monastery. We walked up through the tree-lined fields beneath Drepung and along the base of the foothills to a quiet corner sheltered by a large granite boulder. We spread out a tablecloth and unpacked our picnic of luxuries unknown in Lhasa. Generous tour leaders who knew of our limited diet would bring us life-saving supplies: chocolate from Switzerland, Buffalo cheese from Kathmandu, bottles of French wine with corks. It was the perfect setting. Tame snipe and bar-tailed godwits were feeding in the meadow in front of us. Beyond the field, vast tracts of reeds swayed in the gentle breeze. The golden roofs of the Potala Palace shimmered in the distance. If there was going to a be time for romance, it was to be now.

Just as I leant closer to Conny, two Chinese soldiers appeared from around the boulder. I leapt to my feet. The soldiers jumped back, just as startled to find us as we were to see them. To my great relief they were not carrying AK47s, but curiously they were each clutching a blonde Barbie doll. After the initial shock of finding us there, they smiled and waved to us as they walked off down the pathway, hand in hand with their Barbie dolls dangling by their side.

I thought we were alone again when a group of Tibetans suddenly came running down the hill waving frantically at us. Either these were exceptionally friendly Tibetans or something was wrong. They crouched down behind boulders and motioned for us to do the same. An almighty explosion tore through the peaceful Sunday morning. The birds in the meadow took flight, their shrill alarm calls filling the air. A shower of granite splinters rained down around us. How was I to know that the romantic picnic spot was beneath one of the main quarries of Lhasa? We packed up and left.

We walked through to the eastern end of the marshes, just behind the Potala, where we came across the ruins of an old Tibetan house. Even in ruins, the house was majestic. The walls still stretched three storeys high, with black trapezoid frames around the outside of the empty windows. The roof and most of the interior walls had caved in and now filled what was once the ground floor. Some timbers still remained – their blue and red paint faded after decades of exposure to the elements. The plaster on the inside of the walls had kept some of their original red, blue, green and gold colours.

A second house, much smaller but in a perfect state of repair, stood 10 metres away with the Chinese flag flying over it. Tatters of Chinese newspapers which had been plastered over the walls of the second-floor ruins blew in the wind. I stood on tip-toe on the rubble to see the date on one of the pages. ‘9.7.1972'.

As I read the date out to Conny a group of small children arrived. They had come from the other side of a new drainage ditch, 15 metres wide and three metres deep which the Chinese had sliced through the former courtyard of the house. They were the usual group of inquisitive and friendly little children that track you down wherever you are. They smiled at us and played on the rubble, picking up stones with the remains of colourful frescos and hurling them into the drainage ditch. It was a sad sight. Between the
tashi delai
s, I thought I heard one say ‘Lhalu'.

Could this be true? Was this the house where Younghusband had stayed in 1904? Where the best chang in Lhasa had been brewed? One of the five wonders of Lhasa? Where the serf parties had burnt the slave debts in the courtyard?

Yes.
‘Di Lhalu rey,'
the little boys replied to my question. ‘This is Lhalu.' They should have used the past tense for there was not much of any use now.

Conny and I returned to the hotel. It had not been the best of days – my hopeful romantic picnic had been spoiled by Tibetan dynamiters, the marshes were being threatened by a ‘progress' drainage ditch and we had found one of the historical treasures of Lhasa in ruins.

It had also been a bad day for Nancy and Bob. They were fired. Party A made an official complaint about their methods and they were asked to leave. Nancy's supply of Mr Smiley stickers had been used up and it was time to move on. As a farewell gift they left us with the results of the latest multiple choice English test, which had been used to recruit our crack team of Receptionists and Cashiers. The top candidates had filled in the blanks with the following underlined words:

‘I can't find your folio. Would you please wait a moment while I
miscellaneous?
'

‘
Bill
means the price is very high.'

‘Can I use my
complaining
to pay for this?'

‘
Expensive
is another word for angry.'

‘You should always smile when talking to guests, never
window panel
.'

‘Goodbye. Have a
department concerned
.'

Fortunately, our new top English-speaking team was in place just in time. No sooner had the test results come through than the Chinese announced the news that they would allow tourists to return to Tibet. There was just one hitch. Tourists could only come in groups of fifteen persons or more and had to be accompanied by a guide at all times on a pre-arranged tour package. This suited the Chinese government perfectly. They do not care about economics, only about politics. In this way they could say that Tibet was open but at the same time fix the rules so that no one would come. This is why boycotts of China do not work. They have no effect whatsoever on the government – they only hurt the people. This is an important point that many Westerners do not understand. The government is only concerned with national security and being seen to be politically correct. But with a boycott, the rickshaw driver and the Khampa ladies at the Barkhor, the Tibetan staff at the hotels, the Tibetan guides, the Tibetan drivers, the Tibetan suppliers of drinks and food, the Tibetan herdsman selling yak meat – they and their families all suffer.

With the rules from Beijing and an understandable but misguided wish to boycott China and Tibet, the odds were stacked up against us again. It looked as though we would be stuck with an empty hotel for some time. The only people allowed to organise package tours to Tibet were the Lhasa travel agents and we knew what a disaster these companies were. We asked for a meeting with Ape Renchen, head of the Tibet Tourist Bureau and Mao Ru Bai, the Vice Governor of Tibet, to argue that the hotel should also be allowed to operate tour groups. Very surprisingly, they agreed. We were the only hotel in China permitted to become a tour operator. Our prices would have to meet with official approval and we would be issued with certain guidelines for carrying out the tours but otherwise we would be free to operate programmes as we saw fit.

At last there was light at the end of the tunnel and we set to work immediately on planning tours throughout Tibet. It was an exciting challenge. The costs were calculated for transport, accommodation, meals, entrance fees and guide services. The hotel had a large fleet of Landcruisers and Japanese Hino buses so most of this money would be coming straight into the profit centres of the hotel. On top of these costs a modest 10 per cent profit margin was included. What could go wrong?

Everything. We had not anticipated the mind-numbing bureaucracy from Beijing and exactly what it means to have state-controlled prices. We were told in no uncertain terms that this was completely the wrong way to make a tour costing and we were thoroughly reprimanded for our sheer ignorance and incompetence in our way of ‘fabricating' the charges. No prices could be calculated logically but all had to be made according to the documents from Beijing. We were proudly given a set of these documents complete with the large red greasy rubber stamps on the most important pages and we were shown how to make a real tour cost. Using inexplicable calculation methods, the authorities in Beijing had obtained a predetermined price for what they considered to be essential items of a tour package: ‘the comprehensive fee, service fee, handling fee, receiving fee, organising fee, promotion fee, visa fee' and my favourite, ‘the unforeseen circumstances fee'.