When I travelled to Tibet in May (1994), I was hoping to be able to reach the remote province of Ngari in the far south-west. This sparsely settled, arid and treeless region of eroded mountains and wind-swept plains had fascinated me for many years.
Mt Kailash, known to Tibetans as Gang Rimpoche (Snow-jewel), is in southern Ngari. For followers of the Hindu, Buddhist and Bon religions, this sacred mountain is a supreme destination for pilgrimage. Also in Ngari, at Toling and Tsaparang are the spectacular ruins of the Tibetan Guge kingdom, established in the ninth century and abandoned in 1629.
Notices placed in Lhasa hotels and restaurants attracted six others wishing to travel to western Tibet. We engaged as tour operator a young English-speaking Tibetan who had lived in Dharamsala and who had set up business in Lhasa early this year. He arranged hire of a Landcruiser, the truck needed to carry petrol and supplies, drivers (both Tibetan), and the many necessary permits - military permits, approval by the tourism authority, Alien Travel Permits and, for Tsaparang, a (very expensive) permit from the cultural affairs department. Although he had not been to western Tibet before, he accompanied us as our guide. A condition of our permits was that we have a registered guide, and we were glad later that we had one person able to speak both Tibetan and English - especially when we would not have found the right turn-offs without the help of shepherds. The cost of transport, permits and guide amounted to about thirty-two Australian dollars a day for each person.
Our three-week journey of 3500 kilometres took us through Shigatse and Lhatse, along the so-called northern route to Ali (the only large town in western Tibet), south to Toling and Tsaparang, and then to Darchhen at the foot of Mt Kailash, returning to Lhasa by the little-used southern route.
West of Lhatse the roads were very rough, and often just unformed tracks made only by the vehicles that had used them; our speed often did not exceed 20 kilometres an hour. At altitudes between 4500 and 5000 metres, sound sleep was unusual. Days could be hot, but many nights were bitterly cold, and camping out soon taught us to prefer long hours of driving in order to reach a guest house. Relationships within a disparate group, of seven nationalities and as many temperaments, were not always smooth. There were few days when most of us did not dream of return to low altitude and civilization.
There were also few days when we did not feel something close to rapture at the overwhelming grandeur of the country. The rolling plains, great lakes and the mountains all seemed to have a wild vastness.
Small towns were about a day's drive apart. They were mostly ugly, dominated by hideous Chinese concrete buildings, with Tibetans on the fringes, often living in tents. At Ali we were threatened with enormous fines if we camped or stayed anywhere but in the very expensive Ali Hotel. Before long, annoyance was replaced with sadness at the realization that a building not more than ten years old and of pretentious design was almost beyond repair - bathrooms without water, wiring without electricity, everything cracked and falling apart. Of course such a building had to be protected by laws punishing those who stayed elsewhere. The incompetence and the clumsiness seemed a summary of China's presence in Tibet.
Away from the towns, and except for the convoys of army trucks that were almost the only traffic, Tibet seemed to be entirely itself. With few exceptions, the people live as nomads in dark brown yak-hair tents, wear traditional Tibetan clothes, and care for their flocks in ways that can hardly differ from the distant past. Almost anywhere we stopped, within a few minutes two or three people would appear, watching silently, but ready to smile if acknowledged. One of our group had brought many pictures of the Dalai Lama - greatly appreciated gifts, although (in this remote region) unexpected.
The side-trip to Toling was spectacular, the last fifty kilometres a track through a mighty gorge whose sides have eroded so that they often appear to be rows of statues or fortifications. This seemed to fit in with the hauntingly beautiful ruins of temples and innumerable chortens that surround Toling. Twenty kilometres further was Tsaparang - a small but steep mountain covered by the ruins of the Guge capital. Five temples among the ruins have been preserved down the centuries. Although almost all their statues were destroyed after the Chinese invasion, they contain extensive murals in remarkably good condition. These murals are among the oldest and most vital in Tibet, and an extraordinarily powerful witness to the civilization that once existed in a place which is now so remote and desolate.
At Mt Kailash, we accompanied Tibetans along the kora, the fifty-kilometre circumambulation path. Although all of the monasteries on or inside the kora were demolished or badly damaged after the Chinese invasion, all have been rebuilt and are occupied by small groups of monks. The same is true of the one monastery we visited beside the holy Lake Manasarovar.
As elsewhere in Tibet, in the towns of western Tibet the Chinese architecture, means of transport, clothing and behaviour are all glaringly different from those of the Tibetans. They show with supreme eloquence that Tibet is a land under foreign occupation, a fact only reinforced by the innumerable soldiers who infest the towns. But in contrast to some less remote places, in the wild expanses of western Tibet it is sometimes possible to imagine that the Chinese had stayed at home.
July 1994.
Tony Williams,
Bulleen, Australia,
17th December 1999.
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