Saturday, June 16, 2001

Keep on Truckin' (14 June)

We escaped from the pig truck to the refuge of a quirky dorm room, planning to take it easy the next day. Unfortunately our next ride found me on my way back from the bathroom in the morning.

A word or two on Chinese toilets while we're on the subject. They're just one of the many things that make me realize how easy I had it in India. As poor and undeveloped as India is at least there's running water, even in the smallest villages. In Chinese villages on the other hand, I consider myself lucky if there are no toilets at all because then at least I can go outisde in nature. If there are such facilities they're most likely to be in the form of a cement outhouse with slots in the floor, up through which the most unpleasant smells waft from the deep pool below, as well as enough different species of flies to keep an entomologist occupied for as long as it took him to complete his task. Even worse, there's evidence all around of the strangest scatological misbehaviors; the concept of the hole in the floor seems like a simple one to grasp, but the offerings of previous visitors are scattered in a bewildering range of distances from these holes -- starting as close as an accidental inch away, and continuing all the way outside the building. Carry a flashlight if you go at night for land mine detection.

Anyway, in this particular dorm there were no bathrooms -- in fact, the entire guesthouse was merely a single room; a row of beds which steadily filled up with truckers as the night progressed. So it was on my way back from answering the call of nature in the great outdoors that a man waved me over and asked if I wanted a ride to Ali. The caveat was that they were leaving in fifteen minutes and our still soggy belongings were spread all over the guesthouse as if water balloons had exploded in our backpacks. We quickly stuffed everything back in -- giving up the idea of a day of relaxation -- and grabbed a potfull of plain rice to eat in the truck, catching it just as it was pulling out.

Sitting in the driver's bed behind the seats seemed luxurious compared with the pig truck, which was already becoming yesterday's bad dream. The driver and his passenger were neither mean nor particularly engaging, maintaining a businesslike distance most of the time.

At a lunch stop, the tiny trucker restaurant refused to serve us -- we interpreted that it was because making food for only two people was too much work, five seeming to be the minimum order. It was strange to be discriminated against because we didn't eat meat, but one of the other truckers took pity on us and gave us each a bagel.

As we travelled farther and farther south, the scenery became more interesting, and for the first time we felt well enough to appreciate it. We began to see Tibetan nomad tents by the side of the road, a shepherd nearby minding his flock as they grazed on the tundra. The road skirted Nyak lake, a huge and very beautiful body of blue which stretches clear to India. It began to sink in to our travel-shocked minds that we had finally entered Tibet.

The driver motioned for us to lie down under the blanket -- we were approaching Rutog, a small town with a police checkpoint. I couldn't make up my mind whether to be nervous about the simplicity of this cloak and dagger attempt or to laugh at it, so I just sat tight and waited. The truck stopped, a few words were exchanged. I thought of the two pairs of hiking boots sitting defiantly on the gearbox cover between the two front seats, and the suspiciously lumpy blanket spread across the bed in back, and wondered if anyone could possibly miss the fact that there were two foreigners stowed away in the cab. Apparently so, because the truck pulled out with no incident. We stopped two more times, then the driver gave us an "Uy!" to let us know we could come out of hiding. What a relief, we'd snuck through our first checkpoint!

As the sun set, the driver's musical preference changed from Chinese ballads to Eurotrash pop music. At first it was funny, to think of a Chinese truck driver in the badlands of Tibet keeping himself awake with "Boom boom boom boom, I want you in my room," but then he turned evil. When a song finished, he'd rewind it and play it again, so we ended up trying to sleep to half-hour extended remixes of such international chart-toppers as "Macarena," "My Little Butterfly," and some hell-spawned hits I'd never heard before like one about Tarzan and Jane (with brilliant lines such as "Hey monkey, get funky; hey Cheetah, get banana," and "I'm Tarzan and my hair is long; I'm Jane and I like to ride an elephant"). After a few hours of pop music hell I began to recall the pig truck fondly.

Everything looked good for arriving in Ali in the evening until, when we were ten kilometers away, the driver pulled over and told us it was time for bed. We were (hardly for the first time) very confused -- why would he sleep here, when we were so close? Plus it meant Juliette and I had to try to sleep on the front seats, since the driver and his buddy had dibs on the bed in back.

"Chen," the driver demanded -- he wanted us to pay him the money now.

"Ali," we told him, not wanting to risk being abandoned. Later I realized he was probably worried about the same thing, which was why he wanted the cash first, but I didn't have his interests foremost in my mind at that moment.

"Chen!" he repeated impatiently. As a compromise, I pulled a hundred quai note out of my wallet and handed it to him -- we'd already paid 200 in advance out of the 500 quai we'd agreed on, and I hoped having 300 in his pocket would satisfy him. It didn't. After a bit more exasperated discussion, he flatly refused my negotiation attempt and angrily handed the bill back to me.

"Shay-shay," I thanked him in Chinese. I didn't realize how sarcastic that was until a moment later when the driver's buddy whacked me on the back of the head for being a smart-ass. Whoops -- politeness is a virtue when transacting business with strangers in the middle of nowhere. At any rate they gave up trying to get us to pay and promptly fell asleep. As for us, we spent a long night tossing and turning in the front seats; many failed experiments in attempting to sleep in positions we wouldn't normally choose even for being awake.

Finally, the sun lit up the rocky peaks surrounding the valley and we waited patiently for the driver to wake up. Sure enough, half an hour after he'd yawned and stretched, emerging from the comfort of his horizontal slumber, he was shooing us out of his truck with 300 yuan in his hand. We had arrived in Ali, a place to which we'd tried so hard and for so long to get, and yet we didn't even really want to be here. But we had to be, in order to confront the next challenge: getting a permit from the Public Security Bureau, the police.

As we walked to the PSB office we realized how long we'd been away from civilization. Ali, a town with one traffic signal, seemed like a giant city. We bought fried bread on the street; even the simplest food was exciting to us because it was something different from noodles and rice.

We glanced at each other nervously and walked into the PSB office. A Chinese man, middle-aged and a bit portly, greeted us in English.

"We'd like to get permits for Mount Kailash," Juliette told him bravely. This was the moment of truth -- were the rumors true, that it was possible to sneak in to western Tibet and then become legal, or was all our suffering in van?

"Okay, come this way," he answered, leading us to a desk with several clerks. We breathed a sigh of relief and began filling out forms. Two more westerners showed up, also without permits, having just hitched from Lhasa. This was business as usual, it seemed, and half an hour later the four of us walked out with grins on our faces. We were each $44 poorer but, the PSB officer assured us, we were "free to choose our way" to Kailash and even to Lhasa. We marveled at how easy it was, and laughed at ourselves for being so nervous.

Over breakfast we swapped hitching stories with Jutta and Martin, a German girl and New Zealand guy respectively, the first westerners we'd seen in weeks. The ten hard days it had taken them to hitch from Lhasa had taken a toll on their relationship. They'd been traveling together since meeting on the bus from Kathmandu to Lhasa, but lately they'd been arguing a lot, they each reported when the other wasn't around. This made me realize how lucky Juliette and I were -- we were also traveling together for the first time, and had gone through some of the toughest experiences of our lives in terms of physical hardship and patience, all the while with very little time to ourselves, and yet we still managed to enjoy each other's company. We were very lucky travelers.

We checked into one of Ali's two tourist guesthouses, promising ourselves a rest day for real this time. I think I remember taking a nap, bathing from a bucket, and Juliette calling her sister to let her know we were safe. We'd finally completed the first leg of our journey, arriving in Ali. Already we began preparing for the next step, the pilgrimage to Kailash.