China

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Rem and Kristine

Before Kristine and I set foot into China, we spent three days on a boat cruising through the thousands of limestone islets flocking Halong Bay in Northern Vietnam. This is justifiably considered to be one of the natural wonders of the world. The weather, however, didn't do total justice to what is probably the most beautiful landscape in South East Asia; fog covered the area for most of the time we spent there, creating a mysterious, yet awesome atmosphere.

Halong Bay

A few days later, as we arrived in the Sino-Vietnamese border town of Lao Cai, I felt like absolute shit. I had come down with a terrible cold. I think it was from staying on the deck of the boat too long. Even though it was annoying to be sneezing all the time, it didn't prevent me from fulfilling the usual formalities at customs before proceeding on foot across the bridge separating Vietnam from China. We were both very excited at the prospect of venturing into China, and I felt butterflies in my stomach as the nosy official, after having riffled through my bag and examined my newly formed DVD collection, stamped my passport and cleared my way for entry.

The city of Hekou is no place to linger; you would have to be a serious Chinese border town enthusiast to want to hang out there. We were unfortunately forced to do so for several hours, in the biting cold, whilst waiting for the night bus to Yunnan's provincial capital. It did give us a foretaste of what our lives would be like during the coming weeks: loud-mouthed locals, impatient crowds and indecipherable characters making you feel like a complete illiterate moron.

Charming Hekou

The Chinese diet seems to consist of just about anything apart from sand and rocks; the streets are flooded with endless stalls stuffed with the usual vegetables and fruit, but also with food of fairly dubious nature (scorpions, cockroaches, snake, dog, grasshoppers and probably also rat meat). I tried my luck with some of the stuff and, surprizingly, it actually tasted quite good.

The Chinese diet


Looks pretty unappetizing, huh?

Upon arrival the next morning in Kunming, I went to a pharmacy selling only Chinese-made Western-style pills, which I'm convinced are completely useless. I was a bit disappointed that they didn't have any traditional Chinese medicine. I was actually looking forward to seeing if eating powdered frog testicles would cure my cold. Unfortunately, they were out of the powdered testicle of any animal that I could think of so I had to take it like a man and just sweat through it.


China is not so much another country as it is another world. Cut off from Asia by the Himalayas to the South and the Siberian steppe to the North, it has evolved somewhat on its own. While empires, nations and languages in the rest of the world have risen and disappeared without a trace, China has spent five millennia recycling itself. It is as though the Roman Empire would have survived into the twenty-first century, with over a billion people currently speaking classic Latin.
The fauna is also very diverse and it includes exotic reptiles and elephants in the South, pandas in the West, white bears in the North and a shitload of Chinese people on the Eastern seabord.


China is important due to the sheer size of its population, geography and now also its economy. It borders most countries in South Asia, with whom it shares a long history of interaction. From a geopolitical point of view, it is the guardian of the stability within the entire Asian continent. Most of neighbors’s view the “Middle Empire’s” remarkable progress as being beneficial to their own interests.

Remco studying

Being the third trading nation in the world, it has caught tremendous momentum over the last decade and managed to re-engineer itself into the world's upcoming superpower. Relations with India are also improving; the Prime ministers of the two most populous nations on the globe have just signed a bilateral agreement establishing the political foundations of an extensive collaboration in fields as diverse as science & research, information technology, manufacturing, education and foreign policy. By resolving an age-old border dispute, the agreement also aims at creating a vast free trade area between the countries. Consolidating the relation between these two Asian giants, home to one third of the Earth's population, will undoubtedly send a shockwave across world markets in the years to come.


The negative stories surrounding today's China, the oppression of dissidents, the imperialist behavior towards Tibet and the intimidating attitude towards Taiwan, are only one part of the picture. Away from politics, the country is progressing at giant leaps. Being the world's leading manufacturing hub, tens of millions of people are currently finding jobs that are earning them unprecedented levels of salaries.


Domestically however, the rapid pace of change means that there is a continuous pressure to modernize infrastructures. If you're a big fan of concrete cubicles with lots of windows for officials to peek through, you will love the architecture in China. For those of you with an inclination for History and culture, it is advisable to lower your expectation or risk disappointement, as plenty of monuments and villages are being obliterated under the wrecking ball as the government's rip-and-replace policy is enforced throughout the country. Despite all its progress, China is still considered a developing nation on a mission to reclaim its position at the center stage of world affairs

Chinese architecture in Kunming

One thing that strikes any visitor venturing into this alien world is the sheer density of the population; anywhere you look there's about a thousand Han descendants within spitting distance, thus making you feel overwhelmingly outnumbered. Any provincial town averages over a million inhabitants; every city is enormous and dotted with faceless high-rising dormitories, which, thanks to socialist uniformity, are just as charming as the remnants of the former Soviet Union.


Combining the inevitable culture shock and overpowering density with a huge language barrier can be quite intimidating. Despite the ubiquitous presence of most American franchises and western brands, it is difficult to blend in and feel at home. Chinese are neither gentle nor welcoming folks. In the Chinese collective psyche, anyone of Caucasian extraction is still considered to be a barbarian. I must admit I somewhat struggle with this prejudice. If a country's level of civilization were to be bench-marked against its social norms and sanitary infrastructure, China would be wildly off the mark.


I often wonder where the Chinese's roguish behavior comes from. Perhaps is it a a primitive survival instinct triggered as a response to an overpopulated environment, or maybe it is the collateral damage of being born as the family's little emperor under the single child policy? Whichever it is, only the result is clear, Chinese are, by western standards, profoundly antisocial (or barbarian for that matter).

Let me give you a few examples to try and illustrate my point. It is perfectly civilized, even within the most sophisticated entourage, to hork up some spit and send it flying fast and loud on the floor wherever one may fancy to do so (it adds a touch of class to a restaurent). By the same token, there is nothing wrong with pushing away the second person in a line, thereby jumping an entire queue. There also is obviously nothing wrong with lighting a cigarette right under a non-smoking sign on a bus, or tossing your empty soda can out of the car's window into the wilderness.But perhaps one of the most annoying habits I've been victim of consists in an impatient guy leaning over your shoulder, breathing loudly in your ears and peeking at the ATM screen, as if to try and put you under pressure to precipitate a transaction over which's speed you have absolutely no control.

When sitting at an information desk equipped with a computer, be very patient; the entire staff will ignore your customer status and huddle over to help your clerk finish a few games of solitaire, as the picture hereunder demonstrates.

Information desk

If you are of a sceptical nature and require some more convincing material, grant me the opportunity to pull out the wildcard that will discredit anyone attempting to define modern China as a civilized nation. Sooner or later during your visit to the country, nature will call and you'll have to descend deep into the foul abyss of mankind, the rancid anti-chamber of civilization: the Chinese toilet.


The Chinese toilet

/!\ if you're faint hearted, do yourself a favor and skip to the next paragraph.


As the human need to defecate is irrepressible, one can say that development in civilization and sanitation have always been closely intermingled. The more developed the society, the more sanitized it becomes. The toilet is part of history of human hygiene and it is a critical differentiator between a good and a bad environment.


There is little information on the subject of toilet as a private place to help the body relieve its waste. Sitting type toilets in human history appeared quite early. In the Harappa civilization in India, the people had water type toilets in each house that were connected with drains. It was a fine form of sanitary engineering, but with the decline of Indus valley civilization, this science disappeared. From then on, the toilets in Asia remained primitive and open defecation became widespread.


No need for archaeological excavations to confirm how primitive the Chinese toilet system is to this date. It consists of a sort of gutter used for public defecation. As luck will sometimes have it, there won't be the annoying wall separating you from your neighbors, so you can then continue to practice Mandarin in a squatting position whilst relieving yourself from your latest bowl of steaming noodles. There is no shyness in use of toilet and it is frequent to see dozens of locals lined next to each other, crapping, talking, smoking and emitting loud farts in these stinking shitholes.




The practice of covering waste with earth continues to this date in more remote areas such as Tibet, where one can observe remnants of such methodologies to dispose of human shit. Yes, modern China is still at a dark age from the point of view of hygiene.


It strikes me as odd that the Chinese, the creators of paper, saw no better use to their invention then it being simply a support for scribbling cryptic poetry. Around here, wiping one's ass is often still done with the use of the left hand, which is afterwards rubbed off on the nearby wall, transforming the latter into an interesting canvas for brownish fingerprinted artworks.


Considering the fact you are still reading this, you probably feel inclined to witness all these gore details with your own eyes. I therefore invite you drive to the nearest China Town in your area, as I'm sure they've imported these Flinstone practices across the world. I'm sick to my stomach by simply bringing back these disgusting memories and so I'll move on to my next topic: the Chinese Media.


Usually, jumping between such remotely related subjects should require at least some form of transition. In this case however, I won't bother, as I can see a clear relation between the two.


The Chinese media

For those of you who believe the world is a duller place without the Cold War and the 'Evil Empire', Beijing may be Asia's most exciting capital. The Cold War might be more than 10 years away, but almost unbelievably, the war of words is still being fought here. Take the country's only English-language newspaper, the China Daily, which remains under the iron grip of the Ministry of Information and Culture. It's motto, "Everything you want to know about China", should actually be "Everything we want you to know about China". You can kill some time reading their version of events written in a numbing prose, but don't expect to come out of this dull read even the slightest bit enlightened.


Aside from long lists of statistics about how good the government is doing, some sketchy details of 'working visits' by cadres and a concerted attempt never to publish any real news, the paper rambles about enemies abroad and the lies of the foreign media (bashing Japanese seems to be the editor's favorite hobby).If eventually you should find yourself picking up a copy, do yourself a favor and don't forget to bring it to the toilet, where it might fulfill it's rightful purpose and preserve the local’s manicure.


There's also the occasional item of interest on China Central TV, though you'd have to be extremely bored to resort to it for entertainment. Domestic travel and dull wildlife programs are common, as are traditional song and dance shows. Chinese war films, in which Japanese are always shown getting their butts mightily beaten, at least have the advantage that you don't need to speak Mandarin to know what the hell is going on.


The news coverage is simply outrageous for anyone used to freedom of expression. The Chinese news agency, Xinhua, is the national mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party. It has a monopoly on domestic and international news. Debates and controversial topics are systematically banned, thereby producing a government controlled propaganda spanning across all media. Watching the news feels just like dozing through a Walt Disney fairy tail.


Access to the Internet is also controlled at the service provider level and content of 'sensitive nature' is filtered out by the China Net firewall. Sites like the British Broadcast Corporation (suspected of discussing potentially dissident topics!) are simply blocked from access all across the country. Blogs are consistently inaccessible in order to strangle any form of public debate.


It was extremely frustrating for me to evolve in an environment where censorship is so openly put to practice but I guess when a country is trying to govern over a billion individuals, tightening the bolts of freedom is a small expense in order to avoid chaos. In all fairness, the current form of government, however similar to the imperialist past, is by far the best government the population has ever enjoyed throughout its long history; and there are no sign that the CCP is ready to let go even the slightest bit of control. It's motto seems to be: "Let's make a lot of money fast", and I rightfully don't see anyone in China complaining about that.


Moving away from these general considerations let me try to describe what we discovered by scratching only the surface of such an extraordinarily mysterious world. We penetrated China into the Southern province of Yunnan, where we explored the cities of Kunming, Dali and Lijiang.

Dali

Yunnan is the favorite province in China amongst travelers. It offers sharply contrasted landscapes of snowy mountains and steaming jungles, interesting wildlife, laid-back towns and cheap beer. There’s really nothing exciting to say about the provincial capital Kunming, apart from the fact that it is huge, surprisingly clean and amazingly silent for a city of ten million inhabitants. We quickly went to Dali, a nice town a few hours away up North.


I wrote in my post about Vietnam that I thought I’d come to terms with my rodent phobia; in a certain way that statement is true. However, I have never ever seen a place where rats roam around so freely. They were everywhere: in the guesthouse, on the streets, on curbs and as soon as the cook of the place we where having dinner at turned his back, we saw five of them run across the kitchen as you will see on the picture hereunder. I did some research and it turns out that in every human settlement, rats outnumber human beings by a ratio of 6:1. In China, that number becomes extremely scary. I mean, Dali is nice and all, but we got slightly paranoid and decided to take off and head to Lijiang.

See if you can spot the two rodents

Lijiang

Lijiang is a major center of culture and commerce in the Yunnan province since ancient time. Today's Lijiang is better known as the haven for China's new bobo types who spend their vacation here, doing nothing in particular but soaking up the enjoyable ambience of this beautiful ancient town. Lijiang’s ancient town started to take shape 800 years ago and later prospered as the most important hinge on the tea-trading route, linking the Yunnan province with Tibet and midland China.


Today's Lijiang showcases the harmonious fusion of different cultural traditions and has a true feel of sophistication that is rarely seen in any part of China. The ancient town is a Unesco World Heritage site since an earthquake almost wiped it out completely. It has all the attributes for modern vacationers: big-city amenities spread out in a picture-postcard setting; it almost looks too perfect. They must have had Disneyland in mind when they designed the city.


Cruising through Yunnan made us realize just how unrealistic our travel plans through China were. Moving from place to place consumes considerable amounts of time and money and we were faced with the dilemma of choosing which part we would need to skip over. We were keen on seeing the major landmarks around the capital and therefore chose to book a flight to Beijing.


Beijing

Beijing is a multi-cultural expatriate center that just doesn’t feel like the China we had been experiencing previously. Beijing is a city that exhales pride about its history and cultural heritage. It has a large range of activities and provides a mix of the country’s best culinary experiences.


Our hotel was located at a stone’s throw of the Forbidden City, which therefore quite naturally became the first site we explored.


The Forbidden City


The Forbidden City

A few hundred years ago, the price of entry into the Forbidden City was your head; today, just a handful of Yuan will do.


The place is exceptionally old, and it is perhaps the third largest tourist destination in all of China. The Forbidden City lies at the heart of Beijing and was the home of emperors until imperialism was overthrown and outlawed only a hundred years ago. It's a very interesting place, especially if you like the color red.



The Forbidden City

There is an audio tour available in English, which is narrated by 007's Roger Moore. I was pretty excited at the prospect of having James Bond himself talk me through the place. Perhaps would he lead us through a secret passage to the room where Q had designed the gunpowder that is currently used in Cambodia for recreational homicide.


Unfortunately, the tape proved to be nothing but a dull companion on a Sunday stroll. Roger was continually trying to spice up his narrative by describing the obvious "The statue on the right represents a lion", oh really, that's what the hell that thing is!


Or, “Take some time to stroll around on the terrace, or just sit down while you listen to me, and pay particular attention to the roof” Yes Roger, I’m staring, what’s gonna happen? Nothing. I think the famous spy has completely lost his touch. Nowhere in the Forbidden City did I see a single beautiful babe stripping. What a rip-off.


The Hall of Supreme Harmony is the largest structure in the Forbidden City, and the most important. You may recognize its profile as a logo for Beijing. Here, the emperor would receive anybody who had the guts to pay him a visit, or select his military leaders, and often throw orgies with a few thousand concubines, amongst other festivities. The whole place is currently undergoing a considerable face-lift, in order to be spick and span for the Olympics in 2008.


Tiananmen and Chairman Mao

Mao designed Tiananmen as the People’s square; it is the considered by the Chinese to be the heart of their nation. The place can receive crowds as large as five hundred thousand people at a time. It has been the center stage of the largest fiasco in Public Relations the CCP has encountered throughout its entire existence when, in 1989 it cracked down a student protest and the army physically rolled over dissidents with tanks. Thousands died, and I think the image of the student defying the tank is still printed on everyone’s retina. It was a defining moment for the CCP; as it made clear it would not tolerate any form of uprising, it cemented its iron grip at the helm of the country.


A large poster of Chairman Mao still dominates the square and is a spot under which any Chinese visitor must be photographed. In the middle of Tiananmen, an ugly concrete cubicle with pillars blocks the view: the Mao mausoleum. As I stood in the line in front of the Chairman’s mausoleum, I wondered what I was doing there. I realized I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of rounding up my macabre tour of gazing at former communist leaders’ corpses. As I progressed with the very fast line, I thought I was really a sick bastard.


I had seen Lenin’s mummified corpse in Moscow just over a decade ago. A few weeks back, I have had the privilege to pay homage to Colonel Sanders (you know, the guy who founded the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise). Did you know he rests in the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum in Hanoi. I still don’t understand what it is with Vietnamese and KFC; I know the ad says “it’s finger licking good”, but come on… embalm the dude? Anyway, I caught my glimpse of the stiff and walked as fast as I could out of this gloomy place; shivers were running down my spine despite the heat of the sun.


I don’t think it was in anyway related, but I still felt ill at this stage. My cold wouldn’t let go of me. Both Kristine and I were in a pretty poor condition and we concluded China didn’t really do it for us. With over two weeks on our chests, decided to bail out of there. Kristine found the address of the Beijing Tourist Bureau (an arm of the government’s Ministry of Tourism) and we meticulously planned every minute of our escape with the remarkably helpful clerk. Even though we were slightly disappointed to resort to this technique, the lady assembled us a program that was by far the most efficient way to take in as many of our must-see sites with a minimal amount of time and budget.

The Great Wall of China



Simatai

It is said that the Great Wall of China is the only human construction visible from space. It is indeed a huge building, but what I believe the astronauts failed to realize it that what they saw was not the actual wall, but the reflections from millions of Japanese tourist’s Nikon lenses around the site. Yup, the Wall is a crowded place around Beijing, so we decided to venture a bit further afield, at a section called Simatai. Here, the Wall is so steep and ruined in certain places, that it takes quite some sweat to accomplish the 12 Kilometer hike; something the Japanese package tourists are not particularly fond of.


At every one of the 32 tours on the way, a bony peasant hawker from Mongolia would follow in our footstep while trying to short change us with warm cans of soda or postcards and t-shirts. If we didn’t make our intentions very clear straight away, they would trail us the entire day.The views are extraordinary though, and at certain stages we had the wall completely for ourselves, which is truly great.

Xi'An and the Terracotta warriors



Terracotta Soldier

Despite the feeling of having turned eighty-two overnight, there were some tangible benefits in having CITS poke its nose into our travel plans; the CITS is supported by the government and therefore needs to preserve face by having you experience China under the best possible light. No more rat-infested guesthouses, no rattling buses, no hard sleeper trains, no cattle-class plane tickets; we got upgrades all the way, free of charge. We found ourselves lounging in an ultramodern and comfortable train from Beijing to Xi'An, equipped with plasma screens featuring Hollywood movies in English at the foot of each bed, a nice bar, good food, a helpful and friendly staff to accompany us.

Some of the other plans from the CITS didn't sit well with my concept of traveling though. After breakfast in our comfortable hotel in Xi'An, and despite my unimproved condition, we started our day's visit to the Terracotta Warriors. We hopped into a minibus packed with gray-haired tourists; a sure indication of the type of crap tour we had been booked on. We desperately tried to ignore the guide who was dreadfully rambling into her microphone and after an hour, we arrived at a place with a bunch of hawkers out front. The driver stopped, our guide dragged us out, saying that this was the place. We insistently asked if this was the Terracotta Warriors museum. Of course, it wasn't. It was a random park with a large hill and an outrageous admission fee.

My sinuses were completely clogged. I felt so light-headed that I was constantly tripping over everything. I was tempted to throw my growing collection of used tissues at a pesky vendor, but I was too tired for that. I sat in front of the park, waiting for lunch, huddled over miserably, blowing my nose, desperately waiting to be taken over to the guardians of the tomb of China's first and most insane emperor before going back to bed. I wondered what the fuck we where doing on this package tourist trip from hell, but I felt too weak to bounce and break free. We eventually made it to our destination.

The ticketing system at the Terracotta Warriors is the poster child of everything that doesn't make sense in China. The ticket that we'd been given had a magnetic strip so you could slip it through the optical reader and go through the turnstile automatically, like you see on most subway systems across the world. However, in front of each turnstile was a worker whose sole responsibility was to stand there and hand the ticket back, thereby completely defeating the purpose of investing in an expensive automated system; a typical example of how China is still balancing between the old world and the new.

Terracotta Army

The actual warriors were pretty cool though. The statues were supposed to secretly guard the tomb of Qin Shihuang, China's first and by far craziest emperor. It is probably the single most-visited site in all of China after the Great Wall and I'm sure it has been collecting huge revenues. It seems like they've been putting the money to good use in the form of a very modern looking museum explaining the historical background of the tomb.


It also provides tourists with an opportunity to meet the now glorified peasant who, in the early seventies, accidentally fished out a part of one of the 6.000 statues which where buried under his well, therewith unearthing what China unilaterally proclaimed to be the 8th Wonder of the World. The poor bugger was there, scribbling signatures in guidebooks that tourists bought on the premises. I thought it was good for him to be off the fields and regularly shake hands with prominent figures in world politics, but I couldn't blame him for looking very bored with the routine of dealing with the riffraff swarming around him. He must have noticed I was thinking just that when his gaze brushed passed me and he saw me nod my head in disgust; he discreetly gave me an approving wink.


I probably would have enjoyed the visit completely were it not for the fact that our guide tried to sheep us around behind her blue flag; another one of those dreadful Chinese customs. Fortunately for her, she didn't dare pushing it so far as to request us to wear the same orange baseball caps or colored jackets for immediate recognition, as is all too common for tourist groups around here; despite my condition, I would have snapped.


Straight after the visit, we hopped on the plane taking us to Chengdu, where our roads would eventually split after a great month of traveling together. To a certain extent, we had gone through hell together, and it is the kind of experience that tightens a relationship even more. I was really very sad to leave Kristine at this stage, but she was heading to Thailand and I was going to venture into Tibet. For both of us, Chengdu was the natural hub to be in.


Chengdu (Sichuan Province)


Chengdu is home to some of the world’s last giant pandas. My program for the day was quite hectic, so I had to give it a miss. I can’t be convinced that my move has been a bad one because I suspect Chinese zoos to be truly awful. Anyway, I had to work on my Tibet Tourist Permit, something I never suspected would be so tedious to obtain.


Imagine you are say, Roger Moore, a retired spy, longing for the busy days of the Cold War. Your mission is to head to Tibet and snap a few pictures of the Potala Palace. At Immigration in Chengdu, the hub for travelers on their way from China to Tibet, they punch in your passport number. Are you blacklisted? If you are, tough luck, you're looking at spending more time then you intended in the Sichuan province practicing Mandarin and socializing with Public Security Bureau (PSB) officers; otherwise grab a taxi and head into town. Look in the rearview mirror; is the Ministry of Interior tailing you in a clamped-out Volkswagen? Of course they are.


You check into a hotel, and in your room, scan the phone to see if it is bugged. Then you venture outside. Several men seem to be hanging out opposite, their eyes boring into your back as you walk away. Going to Tibet requires you to pay a visit the China International Tourist Service (CITS). As soon as you get close to the premises, you feel the rooftop cameras zero in on you.


Your request to visit this heavily militarized police-state province arises suspicion from the PSB. Who the hell would want to go there? They are suspicious about your motives and have to clear you. You are therefore met by a representative of the Beijing Tourism Bureau, who inspects the open airway ticket you possess and have genuinely purchased from Air China as part of a Round-the-World ticket. As you are trying to clarify this fact, you are cut short; "Sir, may I inform you that not even Chinese citizens are granted the privilege of open-tickets to Lhasa! How did you get hold of this?"


Well, I printed it in my basement, you stupid dumbo!


As you cut your way through all the red tape, you find yourself confronted with layers upon layers of government buffers and clerks carefully screening your documents, x-raying your bags, frisking you in search for controversial books or pictures of the Dalai Lama.

After an exhausting full day of sightseeing into China's bureaucracy, the supervisor realized someone accidentally misspelled my name, landing me right in the middle of Terry Gihliams’ movie ‘Brazil’. The BTB representative finally showed her worth as she valiantly decided to put an end to my misery and resorted to the age old technique of forgery; with a black pen, she simply changed LAFEHER into LAFEBER and almost had a heart attack while doing so. She must have felt in debt since it was her boss who had cocked up.

When the Head of Staff energetically slammed down his rubber stamp to grant me the permit, I felt I’d accomplished the first part of my mission and I had the creeps as the idea of being on my way to some Gulag materialized into my mind.


Upon leaving the Administrative Office in Chengdu, I realized that the following of all foreigners heading to Lhasa by secret police in unmarked Volkswagens is mandatory, but now I started wondering, "what about those taxi and tuk-tuk drivers with their dark aviator shades, are they watching me too?". No one outside the highest levels of government really knows, and only the result is clear, you don't need drugs to enjoy paranoia in this place. The Interior Ministry has a file with your name on it, so don't even think about smuggling a picture of the Dalai Lama in your bag. The bold man with round spectacles and an orange drape is considered a dangerous terrorist harboring a philosophy that is against the Chinese State's best interest for the Tibetan province.


Yes, Tibet can be really exciting... just in a Chinese kind of way

Impenetrable Tibet

Next morning, upon arrival at the airport, I discovered that my open ticket was such an oddity that it granted me an upgrade to first class. Nice, but at seven in the morning, even James Bond rules out the champagne and kicks back in his comfortable window seat to admire beautiful Tibetan mountain range.

The Tibetan Plateau

Tibet

I spent the first in Lhasa day doing pretty much jack shit because it took me about 24 hours getting acclimatized to the altitude. The Tibetan capital is nested 3700m high up on the Tibetan Plateau and the symptoms of AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) include headache, dizziness, troubled sleep and sometimes even the pleasures of a bleeding nose. You struggle to find your breath, which is probably the most uncomfortable of all feelings, since you can suck in only half the oxygen you would normally breathe.


Some time later, I strolled around town and finally got to the Potala Palace. After shooting a few mandatory pictures, my eyes were glued to the place. Despite the fact that it has been turned into a museum without purpose, it still looks very majestic from the outside. I thought about the fact that only until the early 20th century, apart from a handful of eccentrics and some hardcore adventurers (including Brad Pitt), not a single foreigner had ever managed to make it alive into Tibet in order to catch only but a glimpse of this building. It made my head spin to be there, at last. Obviously, enslaved Tibet is nothing else then a sad shadow of its own self, but the only remaining pride of its people, the Potala, still dominates in their capital and in their spirit.




As I stood there, I saw the steep flight of stairs; I saw the bar, weighed my options and went to get a drink.

This was a mistake; even with two glasses of the shit beer brewed throughout China, high altitude considerably affects your resistance to alcohol, as I quickly found out whilst stumbling back to my hotel, under the watchful eyes of the taxi drivers hidden behind their dark sunglasses.


The next days, I took some time exploring farther a field, since Lhasa unfortunately looks pretty much like any other Chinese metropolis. I went to a few monasteries, where the atmosphere is truly impressive. Inside, the deep voices of a hundred monks echoed in a candle-lit room as they chanted incantations and prayed to the heavy beat of a large drum.A few days later, it was time for me to leave Lhasa; my body had built sufficient red blood cells and I had drunk enough Yak butter tea to be able to resist higher altitudes. I was desperate to find someone to share the steep price of a Land Cruiser ride with so I posted notes on billboards to find partners for the ride. I didn’t want to cough up the dough on my own, and refused to fly.


Traveling by plane is comfortable and all, but can turn your trip into little more than a buffet table of convenient traveling. No, the masochist in me has been successfully convincing me that if the journey was too easy, I must have been doing something wrong. Following that logic, nothing beats a backbreaking overland journey. The agony of the trip justifies the destination - you've earned it. Alex, a German from Italy, agreed and joined in.

The 900 kilometers ride from Lhasa to Katmandu, through the highest mountain range in the world, the Himalayas, is one such rite de passage. The jeep ride covers the full distance in anything ranging between three days and a week. Friendship Highway, which is nothing but a very long dust trail weaving through the desolate Tibetan plateau, is the way to go.

This is by no means an easy trip. For those who haven't taken the time to acclimatize, AMS can be a real problem since the altitude seldom drops below 4.000m and sometimes peaks at 5.200m. The road is in poor conditions but the sights are absolutely awesome. It is by far the most scenic trip I've ever undertaken in my life.

Friendship Highway

The journey can also be quite dangerous, as a tourist traveling on board of a truck had tragically discovered two days before our passage there. The driver somewhat mysteriously missed a corner and sent the truck plummeting deep into the river bordering the road. We where stuck at the eerie site, and for a few hours we had the privilege of observing the incompetence of the thirty PSB officials dispatched to the premises, along with two scuba divers, a huge crane, a bulldozer and an ambulance.


PSB at wor in Tibet

They never managed to fish out the vehicle and only succeeded in creating a massive traffic jam on small a dirt path that normally sees nothing but the occasional flocks of yaks.


traffic jam

Sadly, we eventually heard that neither the driver, nor the accompanying guide, had survived to tell the tale, and it is in an emotion filled silence that we finally proceeded towards the Everest Base Camp a few hundred kilometer further down South. We were all secretly hoping that at least the tourist would survive his injuries.

Accident on Friendship Highway

As I pondered these thoughts, I watched the desolate landscape of the Tibetan plateau drifting outside my window. The barren mountains and valleys glowed in the sun. Nomads wrapped in filthy furry clothes wandered the dry lands with a bunch of sheep. Tiny villages of medieval stone houses where scattered across the landscape. In the desolate wasteland of the Tibetan plateau, where natural resources are scarce, even yak excrements are recycled, dried and burnt in the fire.


Most of the people in Tibet are profoundly religious. Buddhism is much more than a system of belief to the Tibetans; it encompasses the entirety of their culture and dominates their lives. At a small town were visiting on our way, we met a group of old women doing the seven year Tibetan pilgrimage. They had been prostrating throughout the country for over four years and displayed their devotion by bowing and lying down on the ground after every step of this 6.000 kilometer walk. Their cook, who uninterruptily turned a heavy copper prayer wheel clockwise as they passed, preceded them. I was struggling to understand what could possibly drive such a sacrifice for religious beliefs, and it's only later that day that some answer would take shape into my head.

Tibetan monks

Yaks and Sherpas at Mount Everest


Standing close to the roof of the world, at sunset, on a crystal clear day, filled me with an unprecedented feeling of fulfillment and happiness. I had been gearing towards this moment for a few months, terrified by the idea that the weather might ruin the experience. The instant the sight of this mighty mountain materialized in front of me, tears ran to my eyes.


As I stood in a sort of religious trance in front of this natural wonder, I felt as if being in closer contact with nature. The sun had already set down in the valley, where it was pitch black, but the North Face of Mount Everest was proudly culminating some 3500 meters above me. It was still soaking in the last rays of the day while the nearby Rongburi Monastery added a touch of Divine to the scene. Surrounded by such beauty and being so close to heavens, no wonder Tibetans are so fiercly religious.


Admiring Mount Everest was the best way to close the Chinese chapter of this trip, as it helped me come to terms with my slight distaste for this very different world. I came to realize that however frustrating the journey through China had been, the country did reward me with the sight of the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors, the Potala and the Roof of the World.I could think of worse places and decided to rule out the idea of showing the “Middle Empire” my middle finger as soon as I would cross the border.

Perhaps next time I will come back with a more realistic set of ambitions and I will be able to appreciate the complexity of this alien world. The secrets of this mysterious country would require several reincarnations to fully unravel.


Nepal


As I crossed into Nepal, I almost kissed the soil like the Pope, but refrained to do so on this filthy dirt road. I felt back home, right in the middle of the chaos of South Asia I’d grown accustomed to and fell in love with over the last months.



I had previously considered skipping Nepal over, due to the political unrest in the country. After all, I could be going to an exotic beach and swing back some cold ones just contemplating the challenging times I have had traveling through China. It would only a flight ticket away, an easy gig considering I have that open ticket in my pocket.



But no, I want a Marco Polo-style adventure, cutting through thick foliage, swinging my machete at all that stands in my path and progressing knee-deep through piranha-infested rivers all the while burning the leeches off my thighs. Not only does it give me much better stories to tell to my astonished ‘armchair-traveler’ friends back home, it also makes me feel like the strong man I'm not.



On my agenda for the coming weeks: an exciting jungle safari involving tigers, elephants, rhinoceros and lots of exotic wildlife; a exhausting and long trek around the Annapurnas, the thrills of paragliding between the highest peaks in the world, the scares of white water rafting, and the beauties of an awesome flight around the Himalayas. Perhaps I'll also let myself be tempted by a Bungee jump, who knows.



Nepal really is the place I expected it to be, a natural paradise for the adventure inclined. A wonderful place for me to stay before meeting up in Thailand with my great Dutch friend Rogier, from Belgium, whose father I just met in Beijing and spent a great evening with.



Rogier, you’d better get ready for a no holds-barred two weeks of insane partying in Thailand. I'll be looking forward to that later in May, for now, I am going to venture into this beautiful country.



Take care. I wish guys you all the best.

Namaste

Rem

Tibetan women

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