Tibet - October 2009

Yes I know it's been a while. China banned the blogger website, along with Facebook and hundreds of others because they incite violence and facilitate protests. I will do this entry by simply commenting of photos. Btw, there are many more photos posted on our Facebook site now including the top 50 Chinglish signs and about 70 Tibet and about the same China photos (there are links on the right hand side of this page, as well as an updated map of where we have travelled at the bottom).

Out the front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Religion normally doesn't impress me, but you couldn't help but be captivated by the extent to which Tibetan Buddhists will express their devotion. Each day people of all ages will circumnavigate all the major temples in the city, spinning their prayer wheels, walking their dogs, talking with friends. Some pilgrims have walked or even crawled hundreds of kilometres to get to the Jokang Temple where they then spend the entire day in full sun, prostrating themselves in front of the door.

In the background are prayer wheels affixed to the walls which people can spin as they walk along. You must always spin it clockwise and also do your lap of the temple clockwise. The Tibetan people are so photogenic too, our travelling companion, Laura, who takes some excellent photos, has some really nice portraits of Tibetan people that I will have to copy off her!

This is a view from Everest Base Camp, with the big mountain in the background. We were at 5200m altitude here, so it was only another 3650 to the top! Easy! The stacks of rocks are put there by people who have recently lost a loved one and they represent the spirit rising up, or so we were told. It got down to -2 degrees at night here, all our water was frozen, and most of us had headaches from mild altitude sickness.

One of the remarkable roads we travelled on during our trip from Lhasa to Zhangmu on the Nepalese border. Most of the time we drove along the Friendship Highway which is a spectacular paved highway, but we did make several detours off it to see some of the out of the way sights. You can only access Tibet by signing up for a (expensive) tour, there is no independent travel in Tibet, due to the Chinese governments paranoia of what people might do in such a sacred place.

At one of the many mountain passes along the way. The landscape consisted of lots of moon like rubble with snow capped mountains in the background. As we descended towards Nepal, the scenery greened up considerably.

Some prayer flags infront of one of the many crystal blue creeks and rivers.

A Tibetan snow dog and his master, in the countryside south of Lhasa.

From the train, Xining to Lhasa. 26 hours and 1990km, this 4 billion US dollar trainline was a feat of engineering. There is much debate about whether the trainline is a good thing, on the positive side it facilitates transporting important goods from China into Tibet along with tourists and modernises Tibet. On the other hand it is like an umbillical cord connecting China to Tibet, stymieing the Free Tibet movement. We also hear that trains arrive in Lhasa jampacked full but return somewhat less full, as China is encouraging Han Chinese to move to Lhasa to help Chinese the place up. It also helps transporting ore back to Beijing easier too.
All this aside, it was definately a remarkable train journey, filled with amazing scenery, wildlife etc. We reached a max altitude of 5040m and they provided tubes which you could plug into the walls for oxygen as the atmosphere thinned.

A glacier with the obligatory prayer flags in front of it somewhere between Gyantse and Lhasa.

Here's the Potala Palace, the (supposed to be) Winter residence of the Dalai Lama. We went inside as well, many many rooms filled with tributes to Buddhism, ornate sculptures, boxes of scriptures, meditation rooms, recieving rooms etc etc. Of course China has built a giant statue out the front with something about how great it is that China is here, a big Chinese flagpole guarded by two soldiers, as well as the groups of armed soldiers parading all around the square too, renaming the road that runs out the front of the palace Beijing Road. They really know how to rub Tibet's nose in it.

Shall I go on... making it law that all shop signs have the Chinese translation in the biggest font, not the Tibetan translation; forcing them to use the Chinese currency, each note of which bears the face of Mao Tse-Tung, the man who orchestrated the Cultural Revolution which saw half of the Potala Palace and countless significant monastries in Tibet destroyed; searching all of our bags at the border, not looking for drugs, but flicking through every book, scrutinising the pictures looking for images of the Dalai Lama or the Tibetan Flag, which you could easily buy 100m up the road in Nepal. Ugh.

And here's a man who oils the prayer wheels so they can spin freely all day long.

As I said, there are many more photos put up on our Facebook page.

I promise we'll be more active with the blog!

Ben