The road from Lhasa to Kathmandu traverses as remarkable a landscape, both
physical and cultural, as any on earth. Its eastern end was completed in
1955 by the invading Han Chinese, after centuries of Tibetan dependence on
human porters and yaks, and its western end only by 1966. Since then,
despite ironfisted restrictions on access, this passage has become another
Golden Road to Samarkand for foreign travelers, "for lust of knowing what
should not be known." For 950 km (590 miles), this route could convey many
more modestly intrepid travelers along one of the world's great safaris, if
only the Chinese administration would afford tourism the same priority as
the road's present economic, logistic, and military functions.

Such was the conclusion of a geographical expedition which followed this
route in August, 1990, under the auspices of the International Geographical
Union's Regional Conference on Asian Pacific Countries in Beijing. There
were ten of us - from Scotland, Germany, Korea (happily Buddhist),
Australia, and the United States - led by four diversely talented guides
from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a quite crucial Tibetan bus
driver. We stopped over night in Gyangze and Xigaze (the largest Tibetan
towns after Lhasa), and in New Tingri and Zhangmu (the border control
points). What follows are one participant-observer's opinions, pro and con,
of the feasibility (and dubious desirability) of encouraging tourism along
this marchland between China and Nepal.

Encouragements, sensate

The attractions of the route are manifold, from views of Mount Everest (80
km distant, but presenting that unmistakable North Face, before which at
least thirty photo portraits were taken by our party) to strenuous climbing
down avalanches and a gratifying absence of desultory package tourists. At
how many airports can the pilot announce, the moment the last passenger is
seated, "we will take off immediately," and then do so? Forbidden Tibet is
forbidding yet. Dwarfing all else is that extraordinary landscape of huge
proportions and overwhelmingly long vistas, with textbook examples of
mountain-building and glaciation, all blindingly sharp in the thin air and
bare rock surfaces. Our bus wound precariously up one fearfully steep
slope, then down another, half the party afraid to look out the window in
case their eye movements tipped the bus over the precipice, the other half
leaning wildly out of the same windows, snapping dozens of ultimately
disappointing photos. There was also the satisfaction of touching the
history of inner Asia, of tracing Sir Francis Young husband's treaty
expedition of 1904, or passing that succession of mud-built fortified
border villages where incursions had been repelled over the centuries. Most
gratifying of all, there was contact with Tibetan culture and landscape,
and the opportunity to mingle with Tibetans. We were not the first to be
swayed by those siren songs, nor the only visitors dumbfounded by yaks and
barley-beer, by prayer flags and sacred rock cairns on every mountain pass,
by gutted lamaseries and nomads' tents.

Part of Tibet's attraction to visitors from the western democracies is the
enduring opposition of Lamaistic Buddhism to the often brutally atheistic
communism of desecrating invaders, and the self-satisfaction of showing
solidarity with the theocratically and culturally oppressed. The same
attraction is manifest in the sheer oddity of Tibetan culture itself
national costumes like circus attire, and calligraphy like Arabic
misplaced. For the geographer, the striking cues are the buildings, fields,
and settlements of the cultural landscape. Here yellow fields of rape sway
beside green fields of barley and buckwheat. There the ubiquitous monsoonal
mud is molded and piled to dry as building blocks, or stacked like packing
cases to form supporting columns for electric transmission lines along the
treeless valleys.

We stopped to inspect a farmstead outside Gyantze and the village of Qiuxu
(also called Chusul or Zeng) near Lhasa. Both were brazen, uninvited
intrusions into the private worlds of shyly retiring people, yet richly
rewarding experiences for us, as they would be for other travelers. The
farm patriarch required a bribe, but led us into his carpeted bed-sitting
room for a candid disquisition on agricultural practices and policy. He was
not a communist, he said, but displayed a poster of Mao Zedong, alongside a
calendar for 1986. His house was the traditional truncated pyramid, with
battered outer walls, starkly white-plastered, and broad black window
frames. It rose two levels above the enclosing mudcemented stone walls of
the barnyard. On the parapeted roof deck, his daughter hand-loomed thick
woollen cloth. in the smoke-filled, fly-flitting, earth-floored kitchen,
his infant's crib stood by the dung-fueled stove, sharing a low mud
platform with utensils, leather bottles, and strewn straw.

That farmhouse is not yet an approved bed-and-breakfast hostelry for
discriminating travelers, but would fit stylistically into the equally
traditional Tibetan mud-walled village of Quxu. Straddling a barely
trickling anabranch of the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra), the village has
all I the organic, contextual, vernacular authenticity that delights
western planners but escapes their emulation. Its barnyards are bogs, its
central lane its drain. Its door lintels are bedecked with prayer flags
("wind horses" strung from thin tree branches) and inscribed with the
sun-and-moon or swastika insignia of fortune-craving true believers. its
walled alleys and courts are alive with horned cattle, saddled donkeys,
black calves, slinking dogs, and bemused or apprehensive Tibetans. Our
Chinese guides kept out of sight, leaving the mapping (and salivating dogs)
to fearless, ignorant foreigners. Authentic villages like Quxu still need
the field anthropologist, not the disruption that tourism brings.

Discouragements, logistic

Such sights and experiences as these will always attract determined
travelers from every corner of the earth, but less resolute souls will be
deterred by the impediments. Seasonally, segments of the route are too
windy, cold, snowy, or inundated with monsoonal rain for pleasurable
travel. Unpredictable delays, which unsettle clock-conditioned Westerners,
arise when the bus is bogged down for hours, or overheats its brake linings
and axles in sloshing across braided streams and jolting along corrugated
roads, emptying overhead storage racks onto the heads of passengers. one
prescient traveler with orthopaedic problems brought her own inflatable
cushion.

Along the last breathtaking descent into Nepal, where the road follows a
raging torrent into its chasm, dropping 1,350 meters in elevation over only
33 km, avalanches habitually halt the bus, transferring its passengers and
their luggage to barefoot Nepalese porters who sometimes disappear into the
forests, taking the luggage (and a thousand mementos) with them. Our last
Tibetan night was spent in the border control village of Zhangmu (also
known as Dram, Khasa, and Zham), which was then isolated by avalanches both
above and below. No motor traffic could enter or leave. Our party took two
hours to scramble dizzily on foot down the final three slippery kilometers
to the Friendship Bridge, 737 meters (2,418 feet) below, where Nepal meets
China and we met our waiting bus. For one incapacitated traveler, our
Chinese guides purchased poles and tarpaulin for constructing a litter, and
hired bearers.

Incapacity discourages tourism in other ways. High altitude sickness
thunders through the head for the first day or two in Tibet, leaving the
heart pounding and the lungs gasping for oxygen while trying to sleep,
disorienting the mind, and plaguing the nose. Emphysema and nicotine
addiction beget biliousness. Dusty, slightly bloody snot accumulates, and
nose-bleeds occur. our bus carried two emergency oxygen flasks, which
occasionally leaked into the cabin and gave us the giggles. How
light-headed we felt, staggering around the high passes above 5,000 meters
(17,000 feet). Not every potential tourist will accept such contingencies.
Fitness does count. When medical attention was mandatory, the hotel
physician charged a Chinese guide two yuan (42 cents), but charged a German
geographer fifty yuan ($10.62) for the same consultation and another twenty
yuan ($4.25) for pills.

Those accustomed to the delicacies of West European or North American
tourism may balk at the deficiencies of Tibetan food, lodging, and hygiene.
In one hotel or another, our party endured toilets that refused to flush,
hand basins that would not empty, bath drains that flooded the floor,
shower fixtures that defied logical operation, overnight water shut-offs,
gas leaking into bedrooms, electrical wiring designed for self-immolation,
monkeys peering through windows, and regular power failures for which our
reward was a candlelit dinner with troubadours. Hot water became a dim
memory. At New Tingri, where we shared barracks with the army, bed linen
had not been changed, but bore bodily stains, exudations, and hair.
Adaptable colleagues simply turned the sheets, but were asked by others how
often they imagined that had been done already. We were well primed for the
spittoons at Zhangmu.

Guide books routinely advise travelers to carry their own food through
Tibet. The availability and acceptability of local food are simply too
uncertain. Gourmets and low cholesterol partisans that we were, much that
was offered proved inedible, and our picnic lunches frequently ended up in
the eager hands of rural Tibetans, who welcomed the tin cans and chopsticks
as much as the nourishment. Our Chinese guides regarded them as beggars who
disgraced the nation, and tried to shoo them away. We lived on chicken
legs, bread rolls, canned fruit, canned drink and plastic packets of
pungently emetic plastic vegetables. We did without napkins and utensils,
relying on one Swiss army knife (surreptitiously carried by a foreigner) to
open all those cans, and a shared supply of moist cleaning tissue. One or
two carried personal travel food (mostly noodles, biscuits, and tea),
retiring to their rooms at mealtimes, as often as not for the latest dose
of antidiarrheals. One traveler suffered from celiac disease, her
intolerance of glutin ruling out most wheat breads and leaving her, on
occasion, helplessly hungry.

Quite a different discouragement for tourists is the paucity of souvenirs
for sale. Kodak and Fuji profited handsomely from our excursion, but not
the command economy of Tibet. The market stalls of Gyangze- and Xigaze did
barter in jewelry, clothing, textiles, and assorted handcrafted artifacts,
but only dubiously accepted the FECs (Foreign Exchange Certificates) with
which foreign visitors are saddled. Even the communal rug factory in
Xigaze, dedicated to lining the monastic coffers of His (Late) Holinesss
the Panchen Lama, and where weavers sing as they work like the Seventeen
Dwarfs, caught dismayed visitors without the resources to acquire a
bargain-nonhunter's oriental carpet. Prior advertising would have obviated
this problem, and gilded the holy coffers more amply. Savvy travelers
bought turquoise, braided ceremonial hats, and antique wooden
prayer-printing blocks, the latter intended for re-sale to European
museums. One Chinese crypto-capitalist quietly bought handicrafts for
re-sale in Kathmandu. From street hawkers and receivers of stolen goods,
others bought ornate silver prayer wheels and bells. Even the government's
Friendship Store, nationally dedicated to absorbing loose foreign currency,
impeded commerce. Attempts to buy a "uighur" hat were discouraged by the
sales assistant, who berated the product, discounted its suitability for
the customer, and scorned its non-Tibetan origin. Where else do stores
refuse to sell their inventory?

Currency exchange is time-consuming and petrifyingly bureaucratic. Cash
points are so rare that commerce is crippled. To exchange the last of our
FECs into one of the freely traded currencies before leaving China, as the
law requires, we slithered up the monsoon-drenched hill to the only bank in
Zhangmu by 10:00 a.m., its posted opening time. The building was locked and
empty. At 10:10 a.m., our posse fetched the manager from his bed, and by
10:35 a.m. the bank opened its doors for business. Eight tellers and clerks
benignly awaited us behind the partition. They completed the first
transaction of the day at 10:50 a.m., and the third by 11:00 a.m., using
overhead wires to speed enfolded messages and documents across the banking
chamber. Panic mounted that we might miss today's bus to Kathmandu.

Discouragements, political

Perhaps most discouraging for tourism is the visual and emotional impress
of Chinese totalitarianism on the Tibetan landscape. New Chinese
settlements are sited in brutal, confrontational juxtaposition with old
Tibetan settlements. The former are prefabricated from imported sheet iron
and other mass-produced materials, drearily adhering to the most basic
"socialist functionalism." They serve as construction centers or military
command posts, intimidating and unrelated to the historical landscape. By
contrast, the Tibetan settlements are shaped from mud blocks and coursed
stone rubble in traditionally irregular forms, adorned with religious
symbolism. They serve as farm centers. just west of Lhasa, nondescript army
barracks stand athwart the lower edge of the vast but depopulated Drepung
Monastery, like a junkyard spoiling the view of a castle. Unfortunately,
tourists see the foreground first. On the lakeshore of Yamdrok Tso (Yamtso
Yumco), another Han settlement not only elbows aside an older Tibetan
village but encroaches on its already meager terraced fields.

Between Lhasa and Zhangmu, the infrequent motor fuel supply points are
effectively controlled by the Chinese army of occupation. Our bus carried
its own reserve supply, a plastic pod resembling a 45 gallon garbage bin
which seeped into luggage stacked around it. We refueled from bowsers
secured inside the walls of army barracks. Photographs were forbidden at
the Yarlung Tsangpo bridge, with armed guards at either end, and at one
politically sensitive Chinese settlement. Typical tourists resent such
restrictions, and would deplore what our expedition underwent at border
control barriers - the bag searches (when x-rayed shoes were mistaken for
rifle butts), the confiscated camcorder, the detentions for lack of exit
certificates (occasioned, in fact, by Chinese bureaucratic negligence at
ports of entry), and the passport "accidentally" stolen by a "careless"
Australian.

Little love is lost between Han Chinese and the dispirited, sullen, angry,
rebellious, and uncooperative Tibetans. There are no roadside billboards,
but huge ideographic messages assembled with white stones appear overnight
on prominent hillsides, suggesting that "Chinese Go Home" or some equally
terse Han response. indifferent to the plight of a Tibetan driver Chinese
trucks sailed past our bogged-down bus for two hours. At Drepung Monastery,
abounding with political agitators of both persuasions, distant lamas
shouted, for our benefit in English, "Chinese bitch!" and "Chinese no good
! " At the top-rated Xigaze Hotel, Communist Party officials from Beijing
lounged about the lobby with their entourage of uniformed security officers
and camp followers, ostentatiously proprietorial. It is hypocritical cant
for such dignitaries to publish tourist brochures advertising the
"religious-cultural integrity" of Tibet when the Dalai Lama is in exile,
and naked children of nomads pelt our bus with stones because we have no
pictures of His Holiness to distribute. Only morally ambivalent geographers
can grieve over such a predicament while simultaneously accepting the
Chinese justification for occupying the Himalayan marchlands near India.

Encouragements, planned

Despite these discouragements, most of which contain the seeds of their own
correction, determined travelers will always want to follow this wonderful
road so close to the heavens. Others will need to overcome their aversion
to contact with Third World poverty (their chagrin at begging children and
brutish lives), and many will question the propriety of dragging a
remarkable culture down a developmental highway, probably to its own
destruction by tourists. These are policy issues which Han and Tibetan
leaders must settle, perhaps by contemplating the fates of American Indians
and Australian Aborigines, who are torn between abandonment to their
traditional ways (on some anthropological preserve) and assimilation into
the multicultural, materialistic global village. A marketing survey might
be instructive, before another culture fades into extinction, as would a
sensitive appraisal of what roles the National Theatre and Potala Palace
could play in fixing Lhasa as a growth pole at one end of the safari. How
much friendlier the landscape would look if Han and Tibetan settlements
were not juxtaposed.

Overland transportation and its infrastructure will obviously need
improvement. The existing succession of numbered road maintenance depots,
with their yak-hauled snow plows and resident road gangs, is a useful
beginning, but not all that seasoned tourists will desire. For the relief
of unmentionable bodily functions, our bus stopped periodically where two
adjacent clefts in a hillside or cliff afforded privacy. Such locations
need to be mapped and signposted, unless the Travel Bureau promptly builds
roadhouses selling fuel and refreshment, conceivably in conjunction with
the maintenance depots. Until avalanches are forbidden, the descent from
Zhangmu to Nepal might be accomplished more majestically by chair lift or
aerial cable car. Chinese and Tibetans need also collaborate in operating
tours. Our Tibetan driver, though spurned by Bad Samaritans, was our
translator, facilitator, and guarantor. Through him, and not our Chinese
guides, we penetrated Tibetan culture. He carried a feather duster for
cabin cleanliness, self-sufficiently changed a wheel, hosed down the bus
each morning, and took care to get a good night's sleep. He drove
confidently where others would not have driven for all the yak butter
candles in Tibet.

Like the rest of China, Tibet keeps Beijing time. During our expedition,
the sun rose inconveniently at 9:00 a.m. and set at 9:00 p.m. At pitch
black 7:00 a.m., we would place our bags in the hotel corridor for loading.
One night, our Korean colleagues rose at 2:40 a.m., showered, lugged their
bags into the corridor, and went to the untended restaurant for breakfast.
In that black and eerie stillness they realized that their time-keeper had
misread the hands of his watch, interpreting 2:40 as 7:10. Tibet certainly
deserves a brighter dawn, and the same time zone as Kathmandu.

For all its shortcomings, that road still beckons. it demonstrates that
place has a transcendent power over people, and that one may love a
country, and even travel there, without loving its food, its plumbing, or
the system that controls it.

Further Readings

F. Spencer Chapman, 1938. "Lhasa in 1937," Geographical Journal, Vol. 91,
No. 6, June, pp. 497-507.

Alexandra David-Neel, 1986. A My Journey to Lhasa. Boston: Beacon Books.
First published in 1927 by Harper & Brothers. A journey made in 1923, when
the author (aged 55) was the first European woman to enter the forbidden
city of Lhasa.

Carole Elchert, ed., 1990. White Lotus An Introduction to Tibetan Culture.
Ithaca, New York: Snow Lion Publications. Report of the 1988 Cultural Arts
Expedition, funded by the Ohio Arts Council and the Ohio Humanities
Council.

Tomoya lozawa, 1980. Trekking in the Himalayas. Tokyo: Yama-Kei Publishers.
Translated from the Japanese by Michiko U. Kornhauser and David H.
Kornhauser. Detailed field maps of Himalayan settlements. nal Rural
Architecture: A Culture Geography of the Common House. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press.

Stanfords International Maps, 1989. South-Central Tibet, Kathmandu-Lhasa
Route A Map, London: Edward Stanford Ltd. 1:1 million scale, 2nd edition.
The best current touring map of the area.

Francis Younghusband, 1985. India and Tibet Hong Kong: Oxford University
Press. Introduction by Alastair Lamb. First published in 1910 by John
Murray, London. The military expedition of 1904, from the horse's mouth.

MAP: Expedition route from Lhasa to Katmandu. (B. Ryan)

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PHOTO: Yak-drawn snow-plow, at a road maintenance depot beside the Jia Tsua
La pass, 32 km west of Lhase. (B. Ryan)

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PHOTO: Traditional Tibetan farmhouse at Tingri, inside a walled compound,
with dung patties and firewood stacked around the parapets. (B. Ryan)

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PHOTO: Mud-block column supporting electric and telegraphic transmission
wire, just east of Gyantzie. (B. Ryan)

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By Bruce Ryan
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