Thursday, June 7, 2001
It's hard to say when we actually made the decision
to try for Kailash.
Juliette and I had been talking about it since India, always
putting off the final decision until later. Even when we met
in Kashgar, the starting point for the hypothetical journey,
we hadn't made up our minds completely. Our proposed route
was the least common way to Mount Kailash, but it was also
the cheapest, and so for me the only way possible to visit
the revered mountain and undeveloped western Tibet. The trade-off
for saving perhaps $600 was a host of unknown and unpredictable factors.
The thousand miles of dirt road, winding through high-altitude
passes and a plateau above 5000 meters, was officially closed
to foreigners by the Chinese government. Steep fines were levied
against truck drivers -- the only kind of driver brave enough to
challenge the road -- who picked up foreign hitchhikers. Even
if we could make it to Ali without being turned back at a
checkpoint, only with luck could we hope to procure a permit
for Kailash -- without a permit it would be nearly impossible to
make it to the kora, the pilgrimage route around the sacred
mountain. The effects of high altitudes on our bodies and
minds were unpredictable ahead of time, as was the weather.
We met a lot of travelers who, like us, wanted to do this
route, but almost none who actually had, so even anecdotal
information was scarce. Among all these risks were a number
of encouraging factors; June is the ideal time of year to travel
in this area; we had a tent, a camp stove, and good sleeping bags;
and we were both in good health and confident we could withstand
some hardships. Really what it came down to was that we had a
strong will to try, accepting the possibilities of whatever might
happen. And so we found ourselves boarding the bus to Yecheng where
the rocky road to Kailash begins, with a week's supply of food and
a sense of unreality about what we were about to do.
June 2
Yecheng was a bored little town
with a desert to the north and barren brown foothills to the
south. Like in Kashgar, the people I think of as Chinese were in
the minority, outnumbered by Uygers, most of whom were curious and friendly
but entirely unwilling to turn their televisions down. After
some very confusing discussions (in our limited Chinese) with a
few tourist hotels in town, we discovered that it was illegal
for anyone to store our luggage for any reason -- an attempt,
we surmised, to discourage foreigners from traveling light to
Tibet. Not to be defeated so easily, I took the bus back to
Kashgar to drop off our unnecessary weight. I ended up sleeping
in the hotel lobby as all the dorms were full, then in the
morning boarded the bus once again for Yecheng.
Now we had no more excuses; it was time to find a ride into the
unknown. In Kashgar I'd tried to search the web for some trip reports
from people who'd done this before, but there wasn't much.
Juliette translated one report from German -- I'd written
down the parts that looked relevant, without really having any
idea what it was saying. The German traveler led us to a truck
stop two kilometers from the beginning of Road 219, the long road to Tibet.
We'd given up trying to be covert in our inquiries; being the
only foreigners in town made us stand out like a sore thumb
("Like a sore thumb?" Juliette laughs. We swap idioms in our
spare time.) and everyone seemed to know where we were headed.
The truck drivers were a friendly bunch, endlessly poring over
our map of China as if they'd never seen one before. I was
amused to see everyone's eyes riveted to the television as
it played "Hard Boiled," a popular Chinese action movie.
One driver easily agreed to take us to Ali for 250 Yuan --
about $30, less than we'd expected. The problem, we discovered,
was that none of the drivers were leaving until the tenth,
which gave us nothing to do for six days. We discussed a few
unexciting options like going back up to Khunjerab pass to
prepare our bodies for the altitude, but finally just decided
to wait and see what happened the next day. As the truck stop
wasn't licensed to accept foreigners in their rooms, we camped
in a nearby field. In the morning we tried the truck
stop again and found a driver, but
either he changed his mind for some reason or we had
misunderstood him to begin with -- it turned out he too wouldn't
take us until the tenth because, we interpreted, there was a
police checkpoint which would go away on that day for some reason.
If we couldn't go all the way to Ali, we finally decided, we could at
least try to get into the mountains to acclimatize to the altitude
in the meantime. So we hiked out to the road and prepared to wait.
It didn't take long before the first truck stopped. He didn't
talk much, but motioned us in anyway. Half an hour later we were
back on the road again, watching our first ride disappear on the
left fork when we wanted to go right. Again we waited, this time
feeling somewhat more commited as now we were in the middle of nowhere.
I played my mouth harp, the twangy sounds bringing to mind images
from American road movies, as several cars passed on the left fork.
Finally a truck pulled over to give us a lift. We piled our backpacks
in the back on top of bags of rice and onions, and nestled our way
into the cab. It only took an hour and a half for a breakdown, but it
was soon fixed -- I guess there was some conflict between the bumpy
road and the engine; they lifted the engine block with a jack and
twisted some wire around the bushings to keep them in place. I would
have done the same, I'm sure.
Our destination, as they pointed out on our map,
was midway between two villages. We got out of the truck to be greeted
by a group of mountain Muslims and their camels. Apparently we were
delivering food to them, which I suppose they paid for with the
handsome profits they earned by their business of selling rocks.
I helped unload the truck, then load it again with boulders,
each painted with its weight -- from as light as six kilograms,
all the way up to the triple digits, which we could only get into
the truck bed by rolling them end over end. I figured there must be
a scale around somewhere, so we asked them to weigh our backpacks.
Juliette's came to 22 kilos and mine weighed in at 27 -- this left
me feeling a bit wimpy, as I'd estimated at least 40!
Our truck driver drove back to Yecheng with his load of rocks, and
Juliette and I set up camp in the neighbor's driveway. Rather than
shoo us off their property, when the occupants returned home they
invited us to stay in one of their empty rooms, then insisted we
at least take a candle. These were people who seemed to have fewer
belongings in their house than we had in our backpacks.
In the morning we broke camp to prepare for our next ride. The rock-selling
camel-riding Mountain Muslims invited us to share their breakfast,
hand-pulled noodles with cabbage (or "garbage," as Juliette has been
known to call it unintentionally -- English is a tough language to
master, but it sure is amusing to watch someone try). One man offered
to trade shoes with me, but his laceless canvas army shoes were even
less insulated than the used hiking shoes I'd bought in Pakistan, so
I declined.
As our friends stacked cans of petrol and bags of onions onto
the humped backs of their camels, we caught our third lift towards
Tibet. Our 49 kilos of baggage strapped to the top of a full
load in back, Juliette and I squeezed into the cab with five Chinese.
This truck was going all the way to Ali, so after a few bumpy
kilometers we brought up the issue of price, settling on only
200 yuan. We'd saved six dollars by catching a ride at the rock-sellers
rather than waiting in Yecheng, we were happy to calculate.
At a lunch stop we found ourselves shoulder to shoulder with a policeman.
Are we busted? Do we have to turn around and hitch back? Are we going
to grow old eating modly rice in a Chinese prison? All of these
questions (and us) he blithely ignored, and we went on our way
more fearless than ever.
After lunch we began a steady ascent to the second big pass, around
4700 meters -- the same as Khunjerab pass, the highest I'd ever been.
On the way up, the driver began yawning deeply and complaining of
tiredness and headache, and even asked me to drive at one point.
I was perfectly, if somewhat stupidly, willing to try to get this
ten-geared beast up the twisty gravel road as snow began to fall, but
fortunately for all of us the transmission had problems and it
stalled when I shifted into first gear. This gave the driver time
to reconsider, and he wisely took over again.
The stereo ate three tapes in a row, so for musical entertainment I
played my mouth harp. Meanwhile the driver's friends fed him altitude
sickness medicine and we inched our way up to the pass. Every
half hour or so he'd have to stop to fiddle with the transmission,
else we couldn't get into second gear. Finally at the top, Juliette
jumped out to use the bathroom and was surprised to feel a wave of
dizziness and shortness of breath. I stayed in the cab and merely
felt nervous about whether the driver would stay conscious enough
to get us down the mountain.
Once we were headed downhill I think we all felt a lot more comfortable,
even though the driver was obviously still suffering from the altitude.
Finally we reached the next village, Mazar, a tiny row of
restaurants-cum-guesthouses made of pressboard and plastic sheets,
which served as a truck stop at the junction heading up to Khunjerab.
The driver dropped us at one of the little restaurants, saying he'd pick
us up at ten the next morning. That was the last we ever saw of him.