A Short Stint in Tibet: Captured by Chinese Horse Soldiers, a Couple Is Taken on a Wild Journey of Body and Mind

Copyright © 2005 by Ernst Aebi

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Excerpts from this manuscript have appeared in the Explorers Journal, Archaeology Magazine, and Cruising World.

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-34710-0 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-67145-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-79453-9 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-34710-X (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-67145-4 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-595-79453-X (ebk)

Nothing is in the mind

That has not been

In the senses first

—René Descartes

NOTE

Although an account of true events, some of the names in this story have been changed to protect the bearers who might get into serious trouble if their involve- ment became known to authorities.

Contents

Chapter 1 PROLOGUE: CHANG LA

Chapter 2 CRASHERS OF THE HOLY GATE

Chapter 3 KATHMANDU

Chapter 4 STARTING TO JUMP THROUGH HOOPS

Chapter 5 A TRAILHEAD IN THE FAR WEST

Chapter 6 THE LONG DOJAMCHAUR

Chapter 7 TSIRING’S WORLD

Chapter 8 OF YETIS AND COMMUNISTS

Chapter 9 OF PIXIES AND ELVES

Chapter 10 REVELATION

Chapter 11 CHANG LA

Chapter 12 WILD NATURE, EMILIE, AND I

Chapter 13 ANOTHER SOURCE?

Chapter 14 TIBET WITHOUT TIBETANS

Chapter 15 TIBETANS AT LAST

Chapter 16 MY KINGDOM FOR A YAK

Chapter 17 TRANSPORT TO NOWHERE

Chapter 18 JAILERS OR SAVIORS?

Chapter 19 DETENTION?

Chapter 20 PLA: PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY

Chapter 21 THE CALLIGRAPHER COLONEL

Chapter 22 A STAMP AT LAST

Chapter 23 A FISHING ARMY CONVOY

Chapter 24 GONG AN JU: THE INTERNAL SECURITY POLICE

Chapter 25 CHASING OUR OWN TAILS IN ALI

Chapter 26 REALLY WITH TIBETANS

Chapter 27 TIBET UNDER THE LOOKING GLASS

Chapter 28 TIBETAN BUDDHISM FOR ALL

Chapter 29 LHASA

Chapter 30 POSTSCRIPT

Chapter 31 THE OTHER STORY (Our Hope to Dream)

1

PROLOGUE:

CHANG LA

Violent gusts preceding a snow-laden monsoon front tore at our sweat-drenched clothes. Ramu, our guide, had led us to this forsaken spot on the Himalayan water divide, the remote source of mighty Brahmaputra, which Tibetans call Tsangpo, the Son of God.

Ramu dipped a boot into a dribble of frigid glacier outflow. "This is it, he said, mustering his best English. You must be happy to be here. Then he pointed to the leaden sky that barely illuminated the threatening barren Tibetan wasteland spreading in its immense vastness toward the northern horizon below us. How you make it there all by yourselves? No way!"

Tsiring Lhama, the local guide, barely managing to remain upright in the squall’s furious blasts, twisted his usually inscrutable Tibetan face into a grimace, indicating agreement with Ramu. He stood on a rock to keep his naked toes off the blue ice. Dirt crust, purple blisters, blood-smeared scrapes and all, they peeked into the cold from shredded sneakers.

The leaden wall of black clouds gathered ranks behind us, cloaking the jagged Himalayan crags. Another snowstorm, preceded by squall-borne flying debris, was about to curtain the dismal view of the forbidding—and forbidden—Tibetan pla- teau. Our first glimpse at the barren land, leading into a mist-shrouded infinity, had the effect of hammer blows to our waning resolve. Seventeen thousand three hun- dred ninety feet above sea level, heaving gulps of thin high-altitude air, Emilie, my wife, was slumped on a naked boulder. She was withdrawn deep into her Russian down jacket, which shed a stream of feathers into the screaming wind.

Already during the climb she’d looked miserable, but now her headache, com- pounded with nausea—signs of dreaded mountain sickness—caused all of us to worry. Laboring to regain her breath, she managed a feeble smile to reassure Ramu and me that, yes, aside from the headache and nausea (and aching limbs, blistered feet, dehydration, numbing exhaustion, and a sore throat, all of which could be guessed at by simply looking at her and listening to her voice) she was fine. A timid rivulet bubbled through cracks in the ice at her feet, the first of many virginal drips feeding the later mighty Brahmaputra. The water’s gentle gurgle was lost in the overture to the certain-to-follow storm’s crescendo.

Emilie pulled herself visibly together, trying to sound resolute. Yes, Ramu, we’ll go on without you. Please don’t worry about us, she said haltingly, all the while gulping for air. Her intended reassuring smile turned out to look rather like a grotesque grimace.

• • •

With all the sweat, planning, hassle, dollars, and rupees that had gone into finally landing us at this intermediate waypoint along the way to our hoped-for destina- tion, we couldn’t just let go, even though at that moment we both felt hopelessly out of touch with rationality.

Our resolve was born from having reached the source of Brahmaputra—the secret back door, as we dared to assume, to off-limits western Tibet’s Lake Mana- sarowar and Mount Kailas, the sacred lake and mountain that represent for Bud- dhists and many Hindus the Navel of the World, the birthplace of all life. The spot attracted us like a powerful magnet because it was supposed to be practically unreachable for Westerners like us. It was the inaccessibility of the region that tied us into knots over it. Neither Emilie nor I have the spiritual urge of pilgrims that might have drawn us to such a holy site. It was purely the quest for adven- ture, to explore a forbidden region, that spurred us on.

Going on was a chance to grab the golden ring on our lives’ merry-go-round, another climax in our frequent quests for reaching unreachable goals. It might be difficult to understand that compulsion of ours but I suspect the unfolding story will give the reader a glimpse into what spurns us on.

2

CRASHERS OF THE HOLY GATE

Today I still ask myself how Emilie and I became interested in Lake Manasarowar and Mount Kailas. Without remembering specifics, I suppose that someone in a long-forgotten conversation had mentioned it as a significant spot on our planet that was extremely difficult to reach and under most circumstances forbidden to visit. These characteristics must have hit a chord within us that kindled our obsession for challenging chases after faraway windmills. The mysterious call from the forbidden and unattainable location grew gradually into a siren song that compelled us to start reading whatever we could find about that mysterious lake and mountain in western Tibet.

The existence of Tibet was unknown in Europe before the fourteenth century when a Franciscan friar by the name of Odoric returned from the remote Far East with wild tales of an obscure land high above the clouds that was blessed with unimaginable riches of gold. Possibly he had only been in the general area—maybe on the then frequently traveled, relatively nearby Silk Road—and his reports about the mysterious country in the lofty heights were nothing but the hearsay of regional lore. His discovery was interpreted by many of his time, still the dark Middle Ages, as being the legendary kingdom of the mystical Christian prince, Prester John.

Odoric’s account acted like an irresistible magnet to medieval papal emissaries in search of Prester John’s kingdom, as well as to adventurers, spies, and seekers of fortune, all attempting, for their own reasons, to penetrate the distant land’s imposing mountain defenses. They had to get past a phalanx of hostile tribes that guarded the border approaches and, even more fiercely, the interior. Few got in and those who did rarely were seen again.

Fearing potential gate-crashers, the rulers of the xenophobic theocracy, albeit not Prester John’s, had closed their Himalayan island in the clouds to all outsiders.

All sorts of curious legends circulated about that mysterious faraway land. One stated that it is where everything began. Before the world existed, so the story goes, there was a void, which gave birth to a most wonderful egg. When it burst open five months later, space, heat, fire, oceans, and mountains issued from it, and from its very interior came forth man.

So alluring is humanity’s dream of a faraway mysterious Garden of Eden that even in modern times, James Hilton’s Shangri-La, a literary creation about an earthly utopia placed somewhere in enigmatic Tibet, causes many to want to believe it is real.

For much of my life I have tried to arrive at difficult-to-reach destinations for the satisfaction gained when I’d made it. The greater the adversity and hardship to reach such a goal, the more I felt that special sense of elation when I reached it. Many of my friends and family, instead of admiring the feats, call me demented, but bully to them, I can’t—or won’t—step out of my skin.

Nowadays Emilie and I do most of our journeys together, although Emilie accuses me rightly of preferring to wreck-dive in the murk of New York’s harbor than ponder colorful parrotfish in the warm, clear waters of a coral reef. As a pro- fessional photographer, she likes it when we plan our forays into the wildest part of the wild but doesn’t always share my enthusiasm for unbridled adventure.

Just the same, we have made tracks in the Sahara by car, truck, and camel, and we were attacked at gunpoint by Tuareg rebels who robbed us of our camels and belongings, even our shoes. After that less-than-joyous event, we walked 110 kilometers back through the desert to Timbuktu—barefoot. To wean us off the Sahara, which we love despite what happened there, we bought and refitted an abandoned sailboat we’d found stuck in the muck off Dakar in Senegal and sailed it to Fort Lauderdale in Florida—where we sold it for a healthy profit.

We lived in West Africa with the animistic cliff-dwelling Dogons and in the Siberian tundra with vodka-guzzling, reindeer-herding Dolgans. While traveling the Australian Outback, we slept under the Southern Cross, and when trekking in Northeastern Siberia, we slept on permafrost and marveled at Polaris right above us even though the midnight sun was kissing the horizon. We have tried to crash the land borders of Burma in defiance of SLORC, the country’s brutal junta.

• • •

Now, after reading about it in general terms, we were determined to find a way to see western Tibet together. Pouring over maps and travel reports in our New York SoHo loft, we discovered that the only legal and permissible way at the time for foreigners (unless they are Indian or Nepali pilgrims) to get to Lake Manasa- rowar and Mount Kailas was by paying a king’s ransom for a two-thousand-mile, three-week-long Land Cruiser trip from Lhasa, organized by the Chinese Bureau of Tourism. That kind of lame excursion, prearranged and prepaid, with a bab- bling guide holding our hands and tucking us into our sleeping bags, is not on our list of preferred ways to go. Travel restrictions, even more benign ones, abuse our perhaps naive but persisting belief that the planet belongs to everyone to see, enjoy, and use wisely. If a nation wants to control its borders, fine, but not close them arbitrarily and completely. I decided we’d become gate-crashers in forbid- den southwestern Tibet—somehow.

Ernst, darling, let’s not do anything rash, Emilie said. Hugging me and pat- ting my back maternally, she added, Let’s first check out the situation. We don’t know anything about the region and maybe our problems will start already in Nepal. The Nepali might not let us go to the part of their country adjoining western Tibet. She handed me the Lonely Planet trekking guide for Nepal, open to Contents. Under the heading Western Nepal, none of the settlements and trails near the Chinese border were mentioned, strongly suggesting that the area was not open for trekking—at least not officially.

Let’s check out the Nepal situation and then make more definitive plans, she said. Watching me pace, she added, We always wanted to go to Nepal, didn’t we?

• • •

The best map we found covering the area we were interested in was in a daunting scale of 1:500,000, on which a hundred thousand breath-robbing high-mountain foot steps in the terrain barely cover an inch on the map. We decided that the

5,300 meters (17,390 feet) high Chang La-Bhanjyan pass appeared to be the approach where we ran the least risk of being intercepted by a Chinese border patrol because the area seemed to be completely devoid of human habitation. As an added bonus for us would-be explorers, Chang La also appeared to be the cra- dle of mighty Brahmaputra—which Tibetans call Tsangpo, the Son of God.

3

KATHMANDU

An international clique of young trekkers, bona fide mountaineers, and midlife crisis-driven, born-again adventurers know Nepal as a frontier of exotic traveling. The small monarchy, nestled on the southern slopes of the Himalayas’ water divide, has become a Mecca for the get-away-from-it-all-for-a-while aspirants with a burning desire to climb out of a rut. Also find-yourself-again souls, the lost humans with a need for spiritual enlightenment, hope to find their personal healing niche. Even the desperate individuals who see themselves hopelessly stuck between a rock and a hard place, the better-do-something-for-your-body-and- mind-or-else afflicted, hope to find there the healing fountain of life.

Thamel, the northern district of Kathmandu, is the usual staging point for most forays into Nepal. We had not brought any equipment from home, in the assumption that we would be better off with local gear.

Thamel turned out to be a provisioning and outfitting paradise where new arrivals can burrow through mountains of slightly used, high-tech, state-of-the- art mountaineering and trekking equipment from the United States, Europe, and Australia, all of it at a fraction of original cost. That is because trekkers, climbers, and even more sedate tourists sell their gear cheaply before returning home, all to make room in their luggage for Nepal’s other famous offering: a tremendous sup- ply of local souvenirs such as hand-knotted carpets, embroidered native dresses, elaborate daggers, ceremonial masks of wood, hair, and bones, and intricately worked silver, jade, and turquoise jewelry.

Apart from offering paraphernalia for the cutting-edge technical climbers and every other kind of tourist, they also post ads for outfitting and guide services for white-water rafting adventures and elephant safaris. They supply porters, horses, yaks, and cooks to spoil you with your favorite food, which you can choose before leaving and which will be carried along when you take off into the wild.

Referral services to ashrams, advertised on posters featuring likenesses of pious-looking bearded and beaded gurus, complete with wall-to-wall restaurants, bars, and pubs offering international fare. On the same bulletin boards they post cut rates for international telephone calls and show times for the latest videos of pirated Western films.

The urban neo-Buddhists who are drawn to the land are not highly visible because they tend to disappear into remote caves to meditate with swamis and hermits to find and explore cannabis-induced inner or outer space. Some others join gurus in ashrams. They remove themselves from our ugly materialistic world. The gurus and swamis, in their infinite kindness and wisdom, liberate their disci- ples from cumbersome material clutter, such as their bank accounts.

The new inductees into ethereal existence tend to levitate in bliss. They don’t need real physical food anymore, and most look as though they haven’t had any in a long time.

In either case, because of their different orbit, it would be rare for Emilie and me to run into many of them, but still, you can’t avoid them completely. One floated toward us at a bus stop, with deep sunken eyes that looked like holes in his shaved head. His emaciated body, thin as a starched shoelace, was lost in a threadbare orange shroud. He waited to see if a bus ticket might materialize from our aura.

When Emilie asked where he was from, he answered in a monotone: I was reincarnated in Minneapolis.

Emilie asked what his previous incarnation had been.

Lowering his eyes bashfully, he declared that this was too embarrassing for him. I have not even divulged that to my soul mate, he said.

• • •

Between a gilded, flower-bedecked Buddha on a pedestal and an altar of food offerings and smoking incense sticks, a hip young barber cut my hair in his tiny shop. He spared no effort to make me feel as if I were his oldest and best friend as he massaged my scalp, forehead, and neck. Like most people in town who live and work near foreign guesthouses, he spoke fair English.

Some of my brothers are guides, he said. Would you like to go trekking? Mountain climbing? White-water rafting? They can arrange it all for you. He nodded my head for me by whipping it up and down while massaging it. My reflection in the blind mirror danced in sync. Sinking pleasurably deeper into the pillows on his wooden chair, I told him that I hadn’t yet made up my mind about what to do in Nepal. He massaged a sweet-smelling lotion into my freshly cut hair. The sister of my best friend would like to meet a handsome foreigner like you, he said. The massage became even more soothing. Would you be inter- ested in an introduction? She is beautiful.

Thank you, I said, but my wife in the Kathmandu Guesthouse would probably not appreciate it if I accepted.

He laughed at my unexpected answer.

He was a standard-issue goodwill ambassador for the country’s only worth- while industry: Tourism. Just try to find a Nepali in Thamel who will not seize any opportunity to make certain you know he is willing to provide whatever you might wish; you’d probably be out of luck. But he won’t pester you with hard sell. Say no to a Nepali and he or she will leave you alone. He’ll nod at you with a smile and greet you with the melodic namaste when he sees you again.

Even the few neighborhood beggars in Thamel have class. The shriveled woman who sat on the floor by the entrance of our guesthouse rewarded Emilie the next day with a flower for the coins she had received in the evening.

A favorite story making its rounds in Kathmandu is about the foreign tourist who arrives by plane from some so-called First World country. Shocked by the dirt, sloppily served food, filthy hotels, and lack of accustomed comfort, he escapes the urban mess and goes for a three-week trek into the mountains. On his return to town, he is astonished, speechless, completely floored. The filthy place seems to have improved, totally transformed during his absence. Offerings in restaurants have become culinary highlights, epicurean delights. Hotels that he’d called fleabags now seem to be palaces; the city that once looked so disgustingly dirty, lacking even the most rudimentary amenities, now appears spotless and provides the height of comfort.

4

STARTING TO JUMP THROUGH HOOPS

Our preparations started in earnest in Nepal with the search for a local contact. We had a referral.

Bill Rosser, a documentary filmmaker who had become a friend when we trav- eled together across the Sahara, told us how he once lived in a remote part of Nepal for several months trying to capture a feeding snow leopard on film. The crafty animal ate many of the goats that Bill had tethered for bait but somehow managed to always do it when the intrepid cameraman was buried deep in his soggy sleeping bag, dreaming in the frigid mountain air of balmy beaches and gently whispering palms.

During his stay in the Himalayas where the leopards so cunningly eluded him, Bill had better luck with humans. His quest for the elusive animal was aided by a resourceful Nepalese who was reputed to always find handy shortcuts through bureaucratic tangles, which have a tendency to crop up when one attempts some- thing out of the ordinary, even in easygoing Nepal.

We needed such a skillful expediter to start our own unusual quest, and Bill had given us his phone number. When I called, a choking female voice asked, Who are you?

A friend of Bill Rosser, and I would like to talk to Surrendra. My husband died two weeks ago in an airplane crash, she said. I heard her sob.

I offered her my heartfelt condolences but felt totally helpless. I couldn’t think of a single constructive thing I could do for the poor woman.

• • •

That first step in our attempt to organize our expedition, clearly a bad omen, put a damper on our enthusiasm. The woman’s distress about losing her husband made us sad and gloomy, and besides, we were without a hoped-for local helper.

Spam’s, a popular dark English pub in Thamel, seemed like a good place to find out about how we might contact someone else with local knowledge to help organize our journey.

Behind the bar was a sign:

GET YOU HOME! PIGGYBACK SERVICE

100 RUPEES PER TEN KILOS AND PER 200 METERS.

Because of our attempt to drown our sorrow over the death of Bill’s friend, we just barely avoided needing the piggyback service, and our search for an expeditor turned out to be fruitless to boot.

The following morning, trying yet another tack in our hunt for local help and ignoring my pounding temples, I leaned across the reception desk at our guest-house for a chat with the courteous and accommodating receptionist lady.

Do you know of guests who made unusual trips, or of people who attempt out-of-the-ordinary trips? I said.

She didn’t have a clue about what I was getting at.

I couldn’t very well ask her outright if she knew someone who organizes illegal treks. I mean, how could I say bluntly that we wanted to be guided to a place that is off-limits for us? A little more to the point, but hoping to still be sort of subtle,

I said, Does it happen sometimes that people, ah, you know…when they return from a trip, they, ah…sometimes get a visit from the police or other government people? Like suggesting they had troubles or something?

She looked at me, puzzled, still not getting my drift.

At a loss about how to get my message across without incriminating ourselves, I blurted out, You see, the reason for my questions is that we, my wife and I, we’d sort of like to make a trip a little different from others, you know, like, how do I say, go where others don’t, go places where one isn’t supposed to go.

This time she nodded vaguely, it seemed with a glimmer of understanding, but to judge from the looks she gave me, she probably wondered what kind of a weirdo I was. Still, she remained mute.

Do you know who can organize such unusual trips? I said. Who goes with them, like who is their guide, makes necessary contacts, who can get impossible-to-get permits and…you know what I mean, stuff like that?

She smiled—an indulgent Nepali smile—and said, You looking for trouble or something?

I didn’t exactly say yes but told her that I would like to meet such a crafty organizer if she knew one.

Perhaps Pema of Happy Mountain Treks. Most of us who know him think him maybe a bit crazy, but… Her expression spoke volumes I didn’t care to read. She gave me Pema’s phone number.

Pema too, when I tried to tell him over the phone what we had in mind, didn’t quite get it, but he agreed to meet with us.

• • •

In the airy Kathmandu Guesthouse lobby, two very different types of people cir- culate. Some wear clean hiking boots and clothes, and their unsoiled luggage is neatly packed. The well-groomed women tend to be pale with hints of makeup and soignée fingernails. The men are clean-shaven, appear tense, and talk in hushed tones. Some pore over maps and others seem absorbed by reading dog- eared guidebooks. Both women and men are writing postcards fastidiously, preparations before tackling faraway mountains and trails.

The other group is boisterous with grimy boots and clothes, their fingernails edged in black. They are clearly avoiding contact with soap and water, which would remove their trophies, the proof that they had conquered a challenging mountain or a tough trail. Tanned a deep reddish brown with their eyes circled in white, imprints of dark sunglasses they wore to avoid snow blindness, they look like negative images of raccoons. They compare notes about guides, porters, heights above sea level, thickness of snow cover, distance from habitations, hypo- thermia, hypoxia, dehydration, vertigo, acclimatization, sleep and food depriva- tions; they show each other blisters, scrapes, and crusty scabs. Their happy and relaxed expressions shine like beacons among the tense new arrivals, who dread the upcoming plunge into the wilderness. They insist to incredulous novices that Kathmandu serves the best food in the world. After you find out what you eat out there, you’ll know what I mean was the usual explanation for their claims, in response to skeptical looks.

Pema from Happy Mountain Treks came to see us in the bustling lobby. A Nepali, especially one with a reputation for being eccentric, he looked completely out of place in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and necktie. He didn’t project the image of an arranger of out-of-the-ordinary trips. With no other choice, we con- fided in him.

We want to cross the Himalayas and enter western Tibet, I said. Illegal, Pema said deadpan.

We know that, that’s why we contacted you, I said. Fortunately for your plan, this very month, the western part of the Nepal, the area around Simikot, has been declared open for trekking and climbing. Because of the region’s remoteness, the government charges seventy dollars per person per day for the required trekking permit. You must also hire an army liaison officer to accompany you. In addition you must pay for his transport, his porters, his accommodation, and his food. This is a firm condition since the Nepali government wants a guarantee that you don’t cross into China.

Tibet, you mean? I said.

Same thing, he said.

"So? How can we cross into Tibet with an officer tagging along whose job it is

to see we don’t?" I asked.

The officer is not a problem, you can get rid of him, he said. You can pay him off to stay home. Pema made a motion with his hand as if brushing an insect away and continued. But you must have a local guide, and out there you’re not likely to find one who speaks English. That means you’ll have to bring one from here who can translate for you. That makes two guides. Also, since the area has just opened, I don’t know what you’ll find there and I don’t know of anyone who does. He took off his jacket and crumpled it under an arm. All I know is that the western region is very poor, so you can’t buy anything there. This means you’ll have to bring all provisions from here. Finding porters is no problem, there are always men looking for work and, of course, I’ll get you an English-speaking guide here.

As he ticked off problems and obstacles, immediately followed with suggestions for solutions, I realized he had that Nepali knack we had already come to admire in our few contacts with the locals. They managed to make everything seem easy.

You know anything about Tibet? I said.

Yeah. You got to have a visa.

We thought of that too, but we can’t officially go to…you know.

The only way they’ll issue you a visa at the Chinese embassy here, he said,

is if you sign up for a packaged tour from Kathmandu to Lhasa, by prepaying hotels, cars, plane, food, and guide…everything. It’s expensive but you might avoid worse when you’re caught later wandering around in Tibet. With some kind of visa, even if it isn’t the right one since they won’t give you a permit for the place you want to go to, they’ll be less likely to throw the book at you.

How much? I said.

He grinned and said, Oh, I’ll make a commission on the tour but I’ll con- sider that as part of my fee for arranging your expedition.

"So, how much for that