The most important part of the month of Saga Dawa happens during the full moon. In the predawn hours of the night of the full moon, just about every Tibetan in Lhasa will get up in the darkness to walk a seven-mile loop around what used to encircle the entire city. Today the circuit that makes up the Lingkor is just a small circle inside the sprawl of Communist Chinese concrete buildings and army camps that compose the greater Lhasa area.
I had woken up a couple times during the night to the sound of rain, but by 5 A.M. the rain had stopped. I struggled out of bed to make my way out to the street. It was just two blocks down the road to the Lingkor circuit. From a block away I could see massive bonfires burning on the pavement. As I got closer and merged into the clockwise flow of pilgrims walking the kora, I realized the fires consisted of giant piles of incense burning in the street. In the glow of the firelight I could see the unending line of the poorest of the poor lining the edges of the street. I had gone to the bank the day before to get a few large stacks of small bills to give out to the needy. Each of these two Mao notes was worth about half of a US penny. My Tibetan friends told me that any action that one takes during this day will be magnified a thousand times over, both good actions and bad actions. Thousands of the poorest people from all around Lhasa come into the city to try to be the recipients of other people's kind actions. As my eyes became used to the darkness I could start to see the faces of all the people lining the sides of the street. Entire families sat together with outstretched hands. I dispersed hundreds of two Mao bills. I just walked down the street handing a bill to every person. They all sat shoulder to shoulder on the curb in a seemingly endless line. Tibet remains one of the few places in China where beggars still roam the streets. One of the key tenets of the Communist Revolution led by Mao was the idea of the “iron ricebowl.” This meant that everyone in China would have an “unbreakable ricebowl,” that no matter what happened you could always get a bowl of rice to eat. Unfortunately this policy had never been exercised in Tibet.
By the time I walked to the west side of the Potala, the sun had started to rise. Seeing the Potala silhouetted in front of this orange glowing disk and smelling the incense burning, I once again felt that I was a part of something ancient -walking the same path that so many people had walked before me, smelling the same smells, seeing the same images.
Just as I walked past the Potala I turned back for one last look. On the street corner in front of the Potala Palace, stood a large billboard. The bottom half contained a picture of five or six people dressed in full face gas masks and radiation suits. The top half of the billboard displayed five consecutive frames in an animation of a mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion. The entire thing reminded me of something from a scene out of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” The bizarre juxtaposition of images, nuclear holocaust right in front of the former home of the Dalai Lama, the recipient of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, left me transfixed.
During one of my many conversations with other foreigners in Lhasa, another traveler mentioned that two months before he had met two American guys in Kathmandu who had also tried to cycle to Mt. Kailash. Apparently these two cyclists had set out from Lhasa, on mountain bikes, for the same awesome mountain that I was headed for. Somewhere out in Western Tibet, before they actually reached Mt. Kailash, Chinese police stopped them and took them to an unknown facility. The Chinese officials then proceeded to take all the Americans’ clothing and other gear. The cyclists speculated that they must have wandered into a contaminated nuclear waste zone accidentally but they were never sure. From there the Chinese deported them to Nepal.
I knew that active nuclear testing still took place in Lop Nor, located in Qinghai Province to the north of Tibet. Many American friends often cringe when I tell them I traveled in the general area of nuclear testing, but none of them seems to realize that they do the exact same thing when driving through parts of Nevada. I had often heard stories about nuclear dump sites located in Western Tibet, so I thought that there may be some reason for concern after hearing this story. I asked a friend of mine who stays quite knowledgeable about these matters. After I explained the tale as I had heard it, my friend informed me that he did not think that there would be any nuclear contamination located on the “south road” to Mt. Kailash. He thought that if there was anything out in Western Tibet it would be located far from the only road that crossed that area. As the conversation ended, he mentioned that if I wanted to retrieve any soil samples, he would make sure that they were properly analyzed. This most certainly did not make for a reassuring note to end on.
On the Road Again
From Lhasa my route went south to Shigatse, the second largest city in Tibet. Two different roads connect the towns of Lhasa and Shigatse. One crosses two passes at more than 15,000 feet [4573 meters] high with a road surface of dirt and gravel. The other road had recently been paved. The choice was simple, I opted for the smooth flowing pavement, besides I had cycled the other road on my last trip. Cruising along on the pavement presented new adventures in speed for me. In just a few hours I could cover the same mileage that would normally require eight or ten hours. It took just two-and-a-half days to travel the 150 miles to Shigatse.
Shigatse is the jumping-off point for Western Tibet. This was one of the last places to get supplies and news. I tried to gather all the most recent news on road conditions and the police from people who had just come back from Western Tibet. I heard rumors of an American guy who ran into significant problems with the police on his failed attempt to get to Mt. Kailash.
I strolled over to the Orchard Hotel and tracked down an American called Jay. With a shaky voice he invited me into his room where he chain-smoked cheap Chinese cigarettes, and paced the room in a nervous fashion. He quickly gave the disclaimer of having not smoked for the previous five years but he was feeling rather strung-out currently. Jay had spent the last few years guiding Western Hindu pilgrims in the Himalaya of north India. He had spent a lot of time in India, but he had never ventured into Tibet before. For the last fifteen years he had dreamed of going on pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash. He was one of the lucky few who had been permitted to cross the border from Nepal to Tibet. For most of the last ten years this border crossing had remained closed to foreigners. Jay had hitched a ride from Zhangmu, at the Tibet border, across a shortcut through the desert of Western Tibet to the town of Saga.
He had never traveled in Tibet before and did not speak any Tibetan or Chinese. The rules of the country and culture were unknown to him. His trouble started early. The first night in Saga a gang of Khampa men invited him to go out drinking. Jay did not know when it happened but somehow he greatly offended the Khampas during the outing. He was more or less chased out of town at gunpoint the following morning. From Saga he started walking west on the “south” road to Mt. Kailash. He brought a decent amount of food and water with him, which he carried in his backpack. He could walk a few stretches of the road, but he would take a ride in a truck whenever he could get one. After walking for a day he hitched a ride to Drongba. The truck driver dropped him at the edge of town during the cover of nighttime. By the next morning, the police had tracked him down. Jay immediately offered a crisp US$100 bill to the policeman to let him pass. The officer curtly turned him down and took Jay to the local police station. Things in Tibet do not work the same as in India. A US$100 bill in India would grease the wheels enough to get anyone passed just about any checkpoint. At some point in time during his few-day stay in the Drongba police station, the chief policeman picked up a pistol and held it to Jay’s head. Jay asked him, “Do you want to kill me? You want to kill me? Go ahead and pull the trigger. Pull the trigger if you want to kill me. You can’t do it, can you?” The officer put the gun down and walked away. The police released Jay a short while later and sent him back to Shigatse where I met him.