So Below is a collection of the last five entries. It be best to read them in this order, since they are written in order. Read it here, instead of reading each of the entries in the backward order.
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Just Beat It
Hey yall,
I know yall probably heard about the earthquake that occurred in an Tibetan area near Tibet Province. In fact, yall actually probably heard about it well before I did, since I was lost in a blizzard on another part of the Tibet's Everest foothills, fighting off hypothermia at the time the earthquake occurred. But I'll get that in a later email.
For the last week, I was in the very western part of the province of Yunnan with a friend from UGA, Shannon, and her friend Katherine. Historically and culturally, the place is actually the very Eastern part of Tibet. Tibet is not only the name of a province within China, but it also signifies the greater Tibetan region. Tibetans live not only in Tibet, but also throughout much of Qinghai (the province where the earthquake occurred), Western Sichuan and Western Yunnan (where I was).
The area that I went to used to be called Zhongdian, but, a few years ago, the Chinese government changed the name of the Tibetan area of Yunnan to "Shangri-la," claiming that they had discovered incontrovertible evidence that the area was the setting for James Hilton's entirely fictional Tibetan story, "Lost Horizons." Cynics suggested that renaming the county "Shangri-la" was actually just a cheesy attempt to boost tourist revenues. Either way.
As I was trying to think of where to start with this story of our journey in Shangri-la, I kept coming back to the night before we left for our four day hike through a remote part of "Shangri-la." We were eating in a kind-of touristy, Tibetan restaurant, chomping down on momo's, a traditional kind of Tibetan dumpling. We were talking about our upcoming journey, a hike through a series fairly unspoiled Tibetan mountain villages, and through the back door into a national park.
Then, all the sudden, Michel Jackson's "Beat It" started reverberating throughout the restaurant and the Tibetan restaurant owners jumped up from their seats and started dancing to it. "Beat it...beat it, no I won't be defeated! Show them how chunky and strong is your fight..." Though his lyrics were off, I was and always am struck by the globalization just suddenly pops its head up, even on the "Roof of the World."
But, as I thought more about it, the song was strangely appropriate for the Tibetan people, and the journey we would set off on. The song is a story about betting against the odds and coming out on top. On our trip, we had to face off against the Chinese government and the sometimes against the even more brutal forces of Nature. After both fights, we came out, worn but wiser.
We had wanted to go from Shangri-la to a small town on the edge of Tibet proper, Deqin, but we had found out that there was
construction on the road. Due to construction, the road was only open to traffic once every four days. @#$^ China!
We arrived at the Shangri-la bus station early one morning to buy tickets for the next day, the one day that the road was open. But at the ticket office, the lady rudely informed me that foreigners were not currently allowed on the bus. @%#@#@ China!
I should probably explain some background info. Foreigners are not allowed to enter Tibet without getting special permits, paying a fair amount of money and joining a tour group. However that does not normally prevent foreigners from going into Tibetan parts of other provinces like Yunnan or Sichuan. Well, they were not allowing foreigners onto the buses because the bus, due to construction, had to pass into parts of Tibet to get to Deqin. We could have taken a minivan, but that was crazy expensive. @#$&@ China!
Thinking up a way to beat the Chinese government, we meet up with an American named Kevin working in the area who happened to be going to another part of the county, where there was some good hiking. The plan was that he would drop us off at a small town, Luoji. From there, we would hike for two days, to a Tibetan village called Niru, and then hike into the backdoor of a national park (avoiding the US$30 entrance fee, again beating China). From there, we could get a bus back to Shangri-la and civilization.
So, despite all the road blocks China threw in our face, we still 'beat it.'
The next morning, we meet Kevin near the entrance to the touristy old town of Shangri-la and took off for Luoji in his Jeep. Blocked by construction at one point (they are doing construction throughout the county), he slipped it into four wheel drive instead of waiting for five minutes for them to let us pass. As the car leapt back onto the pavement, the gearbox made a strange crank and we noticed the smell of gasoline fumes filling the Jeep. "Yea," Kevin informed us, "its a great jeep, but a couple of weeks ago, a drunk Tibetan was driving it, and he drove it a hundred feet off a cliff and flipped it into a river. We pulled it out and got it repaired, but the gears are still a little funny and there's a bit of a gas leak. But hey, she's still beatin' it!"
As I said, this will be a story of fighting against China and nature, and, in the end, beating them both, if getting bruised along the way.
Beating it,
Lee
You're playin' with your life, this ain't no truth or dare
They'll kick you, then they beat you,
Then they'll tell you it's fair
So beat it, but you wanna be bad
- Micheal Jackson's 'Beat It'
Notice.
Persons attempting to find a political motive in the meaning of these lyrics will be prosecuted by the Chinese Government.
--------------------------------
Silver Dagger - Demons, Prayer Wheels and Other Tibetan Relics
Hey yall,
We got out of Kevin's Jeep in a little village called Luoji, a hot, two-dirt road town inhabited mostly by Yi people. From Luoji, we made our way up through a valley into an area that was mostly inhabited by Naxi people.
I've heard a lot of crap about how great Tibet is. I heard so much that I avoided Tibetan areas for a while, so as not to be that typical tourist searching for his own Shangri-la. But I have to say, there was something especially spiritual about the Tibetans. As we were hiking, we made our way out of Luoji, up into areas inhabited by the Naxi people. Some of the Naxi were nice enough. When we stopped to ask directions, a few of them gave us water and some bad-tasting apples. But later, as we were approaching the divide between the Naxi and Tibetan world, a drunk Naxi man approached me and told me that he would give us a ride to the village that we were trying to get to. For an absurd price, of course. We rebuffed his offer and he stumbled back to his friends, yelling.
But then we crossed an invisible line into the Tibetan world and the atmosphere seemed to change. We came upon a pile of stones with prayer flags tied to the top, shivering in the wind. The first house we passed shouted, welcoming us, drunk probably, but a friendly drunkenness.
That night, we eventually found someone who was willing to host us, a middle-aged lady taking care of her 88 year old grandfather (her husband off working in the mines). We threw our stuff in the room that looked like it might be a small hostel, and went to sit in her living room/kitchen area as she prepared us food. She scurried from the fire to the little plastic bags filled with dry meat and then back, preparing food for us, but her grandfather did nothing but sit next to us, cross his legs, spin a little handheld Tibetan prayer wheel while chanting Tibetan Buddhist scriptures (something like this http://www.singingbowlshop.com/prayer-wheel-12.html).
The chanting was a little haunting and humbling at the same time, reminding me of my own mortality and my lack of piety. Fortunately, he regularly punctuated his holiness with outburst of yelling at his granddaughter, lending an air of mortality to someone who seemed to already have one foot in the door of Heaven.
The family we lodged with the next night was just as friendly, and the setting of the guesthouse was something close to stunningly beautiful. We stayed in a place that was located at the top of a village called Niru, where houses clung to the hillsides above terraced potato and barley fields. The village was fairly large, a collection of about three hundred houses in this valley where two or three rivers came together.
In the terraced fields beneath us, there were three guys kicking an ox, trying to get him to plow a field. Pigs randomly appeared on trails, scurrying away to somewhere with an air of what appeared like urgency. Every ten minutes or so, the barking of dogs off somewhere unseen seemed to punctuate the bucolic calm. All was in the shadow of monuments wrapped in prayer flags and a mountain creatively named, "The Holy Mountain."
That evening we were invited to eat with the family, sharing a traditional meal of bread and slabs of pork fat (yummy). The grandfather of this household was not quite as old and not nearly as holy as last night's. He talked with us that night over the dinner, discussing life here in Tibet. After a few minutes, I asked the old man why he carried a silver dagger around his belt.
"Oh this, we used to have a problem with demons a hundred years ago, so we would use these silver daggers to kill them. Now, we keep them around just in case." He grinned in a way that didn't allow me to pin down how serious he was.
Towards the end of the night, I went outside to take a Sprite-induced bathroom break. As I stood on the porch in front of our room, I looked down on the village and the terraced fields. The rural scene was now blanketed in the silvery glow of starlight and the random twinkle of stove fires. A few pigs still seemed to wander busily from here to there as purposefully as they had earlier that day. Cows mooed and dogs barked, but all with less urgency than during the daytime.
At the village entrance, a sign had listed how far it was from there to Kunming, Tokyo, New York and so on. It seemed aptly placed since the bustle and hassle that is China seemed like it was a million miles away. The challenges that we had faced getting here seemed like they were already ancient history, completely beaten.
But the calmness of the scene brought a false sense of comfort and ease, one that did not prepare us for the battles that we would fight the next day.
Until then,
Lee
Then she picked up that silver dagger
And she stove it through her lily white breast
Sayin' goodbye mama, goodbye papa
I'll die for the one that I love best
"The Silver Dagger" by Old Crow Medicine Show
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Icarus - Flying too Close to the Sky
"When the boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher. . ."
Ovid, "Metamorphosis"
Hey Yall,
Somewhere in Eastern Tibet, the sprightly grandfather of the Tibetan family who I mentioned in the last email led us from his cabin to the bridge where the trail started. "First go and then turn left, then go and turn right. After that, keep going," were the only instructions that he gave us. Then, he said goodbye, and shook hands with each of us. Strangely, he insisted on using his left hand to shake hands. I couldn't figure out if he just didn't know how to shake hands, or if there was something else going on.
Our guide left us, and we started climbing. That day, we climbed a total of about 3,500 feet, about 7/10ths of a mile straight up, from a starting point of about 9,000 feet above sea level at the bridge. As we started to climb, it started to rain. The rain came lightly at first, but, slowly, the mist transformed into pellets, and the trail we were following metamorphed into mud. We passed a rock that the Tibetans claimed was the footprint of Buddha, on his way to bring salvation to the Tibetan people, but we had little time to contemplate this salvation, because there the trail turned even steeper upwards and we ascended into a Hades of our own.
As we moved up, the temperature dropped. When we reached the crest of the trail, we took a rest in a little cabin. But we soon realized that, as nice as it was to get out of the cold, we couldn't stay there for too long. We were soaked, and stopping would just make us colder, risking hypothermia. We nibbled on some of the bread that the Tibetan family had given to us that morning and then kept moving. By the time we left the shelter, the rain had morphed into snow. Things were getting worse.
We continued on. In the next hour, we past two small Tibetan caravans, three or four people with five to ten horses. They confirmed that we were going in the right direction. It could have been worse.
And soon it became worse. We descended a little ways into a big meadow, about three miles wide and one mile long. By this point, the snow was coming down hard, and a strong wind was whipping it across our faces and across the meadow. The ground wasn't cold enough for the snow to stick, so it just gelled into cold mud. Visibility was bad. I could just barely make out some cabins about a mile away, in the middle of the meadow. There was a sign and a trail, but where the sign pointed was not really clear and the trail led towards the cabins, so we made for the cabins. One of them was locked, so we went into the other one, an empty barn. We had a little powwow. Shannon thought that we should explore the area to our left, but I felt that our best chance was to go across the meadow, to a little outlet we could just barely make out on the horizon.
Neither were really good choices, but we went the way I thought was right. Along the way, the pathway dissipated, and we just walking through unmarked fields without any idea where we were going. As we walked, we came on several herds of Tibetan yaks, standing quietly in the gale, as if they couldn't feel the gusts of snow through their shaggy coats. They stared ominously at us as we passed by. We crept by, not sure why they were staring at us so intently.
After about thirty more minutes of walking through the fields, we found our way to another collection of cabins, cabins that had been invisible at first due to the blinding gusts of snow plowing their way across the meadow.
Once again, we broke into a house that wasn't locked. It was not a barn this time, but some one's house. We sat around their sitting room, trying to figure out our next move. It was 2:30 in the afternoon, so we decided to take our chances and descend from the meadow through the little outlet I had seen earlier. I couldn't stay in the cabin for too long in my wet clothes. I was now showing signs of hypothermia.
As we wondered across the meadow, through the white blaze of snow, faces wet and numb with the melting snow flakes dripping down them, it became clear that we had flown to close to the sky, taking on something that was too tough, at least in this weather. And now, like Icarus, we were falling.
After an hour of making our way across the meadow, we started descending through that little outlet that I had seen. The signs started out being good. The snow stopped, and, for a few moments, the sun even broke through the clouds, warming us up. We stopped to soak in his warm rays. That was only a temporary relief, though. Precipitation quickly returned, but, mercifully, it turned back into rain as we descended to lower elevations, not snow.
We continued on, through a small, hillside meadow with two houses clinging to the mountainside, but no one was home. So we descended farther into a gorge, hoping that where ever it ended, there would be a village or something. The gorge quickly narrowed, and the path we had been following disappeared. We continued slashing our way through bamboo and jumping over rocks down the narrow gorge. It was getting warmer as we descended, but there was no sign of human habitation.
Around six o'clock, just as we were starting to really worry about the coming darkness, we had a little miracle. We found a large rock-overhanging, with a dry plot ten feet by fifteen feet. Someone had used the spot as a campsite before, and they had built a little rock wall around it and left four blankets there.
We made camp there. Shannon took charge, telling us how to set up the campsite and making me and Katherine eat some of the pork fat that the Tibetan family had left us (pork fat is instant calories, warming you up immediately). We changed into dry clothes, pulled the blankets over us and tried to stay as warm as possible for the rest of the night.
Towards the end of the day, I remembered a quote which was comforting, if also a little disturbing. I shared it with Shannon, and she said, "If you had told me that quote when we were wandering through that blizzard, I would have mashed the *#$ out of your &*#@" (The contents of this email have been modified for a Southern/Mormon audience). Though Shannon didn't appreciate it at the time, I think I'm going to end this email with that quote, leaving yall at the point where the clouds were clearing away, the stars starting to twinkle through the trees, and nighttime was descending on Eastern Tibet.
Best,
Lee
"Although the road may be dangerous
and the destination far out of sight,
all journeys come to an end:
Do not despair."
Hafez (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez)
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(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take Me Away
Hey Yall,
As night fell on our make-shift campsite, things had started looking up. As I alluded to at the end of the last email, that night, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up, revealing a starry sky. The next morning, we awoke and packed up as quickly as we could. After chewing on some cookies that we still had left, we started back up the canyon.
We had decided to turn around. Instead of continuing down this canyon to lower ground and then onto where ever, we decided to climb out the way we had come down, out of the canyon, up to the meadow where we had gotten lost. The plan was that, at the meadow, we would see if we could figure out how to get to the lake and the national park that we were originally aiming to get to yesterday. And so we climbed back up the canyon.
Slowly and softly, the verdant but narrow canyon gave way to a wider forested valley. The forest dissipated and we found ourselves in a small meadow two hours after we had left camp. This is not the giant meadow that we had gotten lost in yesterday, but a smaller meadow, about a thirty minute walk from that big meadow. The day before we had seen two houses clinging to the hillside in this meadow, but they were apparently empty, so we had kept going.
I stopped to take a picture of the meadow. Shannon and Katherine started yelling at me. "Lee, get over here!" They had spotted someone, the first soul we had seen in twenty hours.
How should I begin the description of our hero. He was a Tibetan cowboy, making his living by grazing sheep, yaks and cows. He lived in one of the two houses we had passed by the day before in the small meadow, (he had still been watching over his flock somewhere else when we had passed by). He wore the coolest hat in the world. It reminded me of the WWII bomber hat that my grandfather had, with its felt lining and giant ear flaps. But, unlike that bomber hat, the body of the Tibetan cowboy's hat was more like a golden turban, shining bright like a little lighthouse, reflecting the morning sun. Though he wasn't that old, maybe 35 or 40, his skin looked as tough and tanned as leather. Not Chinese but Tibetan, his skin was browner, more like that of someone from Bombay than Beijing. Part of that was from spending every day of so many years trudging across open fields beneath the Tibetan sun, in the thin Tibetan air. A grungy mustache circled his lips and chin. His clothes looked like they were fifth generation hand-me-downs, though they weren't that old, his tshirt had the phrase "New York 32" on the front.
When we first showed up in his little meadow, Shannon and Katherine yelled, "Ni Hao" to him. He acknowledged the greeting, though he seemed perplexed at what the heck two white girls could be doing in his field in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Tibet. I climbed up the hill to his house to meet him. As I shook his hand, I detailed our travails from the night before to him.
"Yall went down THAT canyon?" he said, gesticulating the way we had come. "You know there's no road down there, right?"
"Yea, we found out when we went down there. But we were lost and we didn't see any other way."
"But no one goes down there. There's no road down there, you know that, right?"
He had trouble accepting that we had gone down a canyon that had no road.
After he calmed down (after two or three more "you know there's no road down there, right?"), I talked to him about the lake and the national park. "Yea, I know where the lake is. My other house is over by it," he commented.
"Oh really, would you be willing to take us to it? We need to get back to civilization. We'd pay you 100 rmb (US$ 14.5)."
"Sure. I'm going towards there anyways. But I need about thirty minutes to pack up."
We sat down in the mud in front of his hut, and our Tibetan cowboy packed up his house. Pot(s), water, rope, roof (a blue tarp), he gathered every thing from his house, and packed it up on the back of his three horses. Then he took the rest of his stuff, stuffed it into a basket and tied it onto his back. Everything he owned, except the wooden structure of his hut was either on his back, or on the backs of his horses.
And that's how we were rescued from the wilderness by a Tibetan Cowboy.
Thirty minutes after we left his hut, we emerged over the crest of the hill we were climbing and descended down into the big meadow that we had gotten lost in the day before. It was the same place but a different scene. Before, all we had seen was a blinding whiteness, but now every thing in the meadow was green or brown, flourishing and peaceful. The sky was blue and seemed almost eternal, like the big sky of Montana. The meadow was surrounded on three sides by peaks over 14,000 feet (we were already at about 12,500 feet in the meadow). These not-so-distant peaks were capped with a fresh dress of white from the day before's blizzard. I'm guessing Shannon and Katherine would not agree with me, but I kind of thought that getting lost and risking hypothermia in the blizzard was almost worth the beautiful scene we got that day.
As we spent an hour or so crossing the five or six mile long meadow, I talked with our Tibetan cowboy. How often does he have to migrate to reach his flock? (Most days), How much did he make a year selling meet and wool (10,000 rmb, roughly US$1500), Why was no one living in the big meadow (Still too cold). I also asked him about his silver dagger. He claimed it was actually just for cutting trees and things, not for fighting off demons.
After a few hours, we came to what I think was his other house. He tied up his horses, and then took us down the road. We had finally arrived in the national park, the doorstep to civilization.
And that was almost the end of our adventure. .
After we got on a tourist bus, we just sat, mostly silently. It was already late in the afternoon as the bus snaked its way through asphalt pathways that traversed the green valleys and small mountains of the national park. I was leaning silently against a pole when Shannon shouted, "Lee, Look!"
Our cowboy made one last appearance. He was leading his three horses alongside the road, in his eternal search for green pasture, and our bus passed him by. I stuck my head out and shouted and he waved back at us, grinning as we rode off into the Tibetan sunset.
And that was it.
Taken away by a Tibetan Cowboy,
Lee
I want to sit and not run, I don't want to sleep on the hard ground
I want to look at the horizon and see a soulless Chinese building standing tall
I don't want to be the only one for miles and miles around
I want to stand in a flood of Chinese on hard paved ground
Oh it sounds good to me.
(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take me away
Fly this guy as far away as you can from this wild blue
Set me free, oh I pray, closer to KFC and far away from you
Far away from you
"Cowboy, Take Me Away"
Written by Dixie Chicks, Modified by Me
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTYyMTcyNDg0.html
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The ialaD amaL and the Whore of Babylon - Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls
Hey Yall,
One final story on my trip to Tibetan Yunnan.
Note: Leonardo da Vinci often wrote things backwards to keep people
from reading his papers.
After being rescued by the Tibetan cowboy and returning from the
wilds, our group split up. Shannon and Katherine turned south, while I
stayed in Shangri-la for an extra day. For the afternoon I had alone,
I decided to take the local bus up to the Songzanlin Tibetan
Monastery. According to the Lonely Planet, this was a cool, peaceful
and ancient monastery with a small city's worth of monks attached to
the monastery. It sounded cool enough to spend an hour or two
wandering around.
But, when we first entered into the temple town, there was something
wrong. First, they had tried to charge me $12 dollars to get into the
monostary town, as if this were Colonial Williamsburg and not a real
working temple. Refusing to pay, I slipped through an unguarded door
without anyone noticing, and took the tourist bus up to the monastery.
When I got off the bus, I saw even more that seemed out of place. The
monastery was on the top of the hill, about three hundred feet above
us. The hilltop had two old-looking, red buildings, what you would
expect to see at a Tibetan monastery. Strangely though, in between
these two ancient-looking, monastic temples was a giant construction
project, big crane, concrete pourers, herds of poor laborers yelling
and jack-hammering. Not what you expect to find in an ancient temple.
As we followed a tour guide up the stairs, I noticed something else
strange: lining the sides of the ancient stone stairway were men
dressed in the orange robes of Tibetan monks, lazily toking on a
cigarette, leaning back in their chairs, chortling with each other in
front of tables full of cheesy knick-knacks that they tried to
convince us to buy. (Buddhist are forbidden to smoke, and they are
supposed to be in the process of freeing themselves from worldly
desires and attachments, not selling worthless curios ).
It appeared someone had Babylonned this temple from top to bottom.
Our tour guide continued on, explaining buildings in posture even more
listless than your normal Chinese tour guides. When we got to the top,
he took us through the temples, but, with the sound of jack-hammering
in the background and the Chinese tour group fluttering around me, it
was hard to find much that was spiritual about this place. At the end,
our tour guide told us that we could continue exploring the town and
the other temples on our own. As our tour guide,
dropped down into a folding chair and began texting on his phone, our
group dissipated, most of them either going back to the bus or getting
one more photo before going back to the bus.
I was pretty disappointed. This wasn't Tibet. This was a tourist
colony, whored out to materialistic outsiders, lamely searching for
their own Shangri-la.
Saddened, I wandered over to another temple, thinking something was
missing. I kept thinking that, in building a new temple, something was
being destroyed.
Then, a sprightly, seventeen-year-old monk ran past me, yelling
"Hello!" I returned a "Ni Hao," and he stopped to talk to me.
I asked him a question. "Why do yall charge money to get into this temple?"
"Oh, that's not us. Some tourist company is doing that. They started
doing it about 8 months ago. We don't get any of the money, either.
Just that tourist company... Where are you from?" The seventeen year
old queried back.
"America."
His face lit up and he did his best to speak English. "A-may-li-ka."
He looked around to make sure no one was nearby and then asked, "Have
you meet the ialaD amaL?"
"No....Wait, do you like the ialaD amaL?"
Again, he took a furtive glance in both directions before answering,
"Of course, we all love him, eight of the nine temple-leaders at this
monastery support him, but you know...with the Chinese government." A
sense of disappointment swept over his face, but then, he brightened
up and said, "Well, I got to go."
I continued wandering farther from the tourist pathway, and came upon
a big temple, bigger than the ones at the top of the hill. But, unlike
the ones at the top, this one was as silent as death.
Entering, I could just barely hear the sounds of water being poured,
of sandals sweeping against the ground and of candles flickering, not
really sounds, but a sort of rhythmic silence.
There were two monks working in the temple. I walked over to them as
casually as possible. I saw a picture of the Panchen Lama (the
counterpart to the ialaD amaL,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchen_Lama) on a little table with some
offerings, and, in an effort to strike up a conversation, I pretended
to be ignorant, asking, "I've seen this guy's picture in all the
temples. Who is that?"
"The Panchen Lama. He's the second most important monk in our
Buddhism." They waited a moment, calmly pouring water into small
offering cups and then returned a question to me. "Do you know who
that is?"
They gestured towards a table facing the one with photo of the Panchen
Lama. Surprised, I recognized the photo instantly. "That's the ialaD
amaL! But how come I have seen pictures of the Panchen Lama in every
temple, but I haven't seen any other photos of the ialaD amaL?" (Any
pictures of the ialaD amaL are illegal and could get people jailed in
a monastery like this).
The two monks looked at each other, one of them speaking to his
counterpart in Tibetan, and then they went back to sweeping and
pouring water, completely ignoring me. I stood there for a few
minutes, but they were already beyond answering my question.
I left that temple and kept walking away from tourist tracks, starting
to feel like this place's spirtuality hadn't been destroyed, just
pushed to the side.
I came to the last and oldest temple of the complex. By this time, the
sound of the jack-hammering had faded to a low-hum and the crane over
the construction site was little more than a glimmer in the falling
afternoon sun. This temple was small, nothing impressive. It looked as
if they had allowed the temple to remain standing only because it was
far enough away to not distract from the temple complex's main
attractions.
I entered into the temple and two real Tibetans, darkened faces, dirt
on their hands, cowboy hats on their heads, entered with me. Smiling,
they exchanged some reverent comments with one of the monks in there.
The monk draped some religious scarf around their neck, and they
proceeded to move slowly around the little temple. These kids, who
probably earned five bucks a day, were dropping a dime into each of
the ten or so donation boxes scattered around the temple, and then
dropping down on their knees, tapping their heads against the floor
and praying at each statue. As they went around doing this, I couldn't
help but be amazed by the fullness of their faith.
It was here that I felt like I had come to the real Tibet, something
unmolested and original, close to and yet so different from the
Babylonned-out tourist lane just ten minutes away. As the two kids
finished up, they chatted with the monks as he took the scarf back off
of them. I couldn't help but look on and wonder if this is what this
temple was like two hundred years ago.
But, as they were talking, the monk's cellphone went off, and, a
familiar, 90's R&B song started playing. Before the monk could silence
his phone, I was struck by how close I can feel to home despite being
so far away.
And now, I'll leave yall with that monk's ringtone, a song recorded in Atlanta.
Ciao,
Leo
Don't go chasing waterfalls
Please stick to the rivers and lakes that you're used to
I know you want to have it your way or nothing at all
But I think you're moving to fast
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNzY2NjQ1OTY=.html
P.S. These lyrics do not have any political meaning, they were just
the ringtone on the monk's cellphone. They are certainly not meant to
be read as a warning to either Beijing or the ialaD amaL as they try
to conduct diplomacy.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
The ialaD amaL and the Whore of Babylon - Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls
Hey Yall,
One final story on my trip to Tibetan Yunnan.
Note: Leonardo da Vinci often wrote things backwards to keep people
from reading his papers.
After being rescued by the Tibetan cowboy and returning from the
wilds, our group split up. Shannon and Katherine turned south, while I
stayed in Shangri-la for an extra day. For the afternoon I had alone,
I decided to take the local bus up to the Songzanlin Tibetan
Monastery. According to the Lonely Planet, this was a cool, peaceful
and ancient monastery with a small city's worth of monks attached to
the monastery. It sounded cool enough to spend an hour or two
wandering around.
But, when we first entered into the temple town, there was something
wrong. First, they had tried to charge me $12 dollars to get into the
monostary town, as if this were Colonial Williamsburg and not a real
working temple. Refusing to pay, I slipped through an unguarded door
without anyone noticing, and took the tourist bus up to the monastery.
When I got off the bus, I saw even more that seemed out of place. The
monastery was on the top of the hill, about three hundred feet above
us. The hilltop had two old-looking, red buildings, what you would
expect to see at a Tibetan monastery. Strangely though, in between
these two ancient-looking, monastic temples was a giant construction
project, big crane, concrete pourers, herds of poor laborers yelling
and jack-hammering. Not what you expect to find in an ancient temple.
As we followed a tour guide up the stairs, I noticed something else
strange: lining the sides of the ancient stone stairway were men
dressed in the orange robes of Tibetan monks, lazily toking on a
cigarette, leaning back in their chairs, chortling with each other in
front of tables full of cheesy knick-knacks that they tried to
convince us to buy. (Buddhist are forbidden to smoke, and they are
supposed to be in the process of freeing themselves from worldly
desires and attachments, not selling worthless curios ).
It appeared someone had Babylonned this temple from top to bottom.
Our tour guide continued on, explaining buildings in posture even more
listless than your normal Chinese tour guides. When we got to the top,
he took us through the temples, but, with the sound of jack-hammering
in the background and the Chinese tour group fluttering around me, it
was hard to find much that was spiritual about this place. At the end,
our tour guide told us that we could continue exploring the town and
the other temples on our own. As our tour guide,
dropped down into a folding chair and began texting on his phone, our
group dissipated, most of them either going back to the bus or getting
one more photo before going back to the bus.
I was pretty disappointed. This wasn't Tibet. This was a tourist
colony, whored out to materialistic outsiders, lamely searching for
their own Shangri-la.
Saddened, I wandered over to another temple, thinking something was
missing. I kept thinking that, in building a new temple, something was
being destroyed.
Then, a sprightly, seventeen-year-old monk ran past me, yelling
"Hello!" I returned a "Ni Hao," and he stopped to talk to me.
I asked him a question. "Why do yall charge money to get into this temple?"
"Oh, that's not us. Some tourist company is doing that. They started
doing it about 8 months ago. We don't get any of the money, either.
Just that tourist company... Where are you from?" The seventeen year
old queried back.
"America."
His face lit up and he did his best to speak English. "A-may-li-ka."
He looked around to make sure no one was nearby and then asked, "Have
you meet the ialaD amaL?"
"No....Wait, do you like the ialaD amaL?"
Again, he took a furtive glance in both directions before answering,
"Of course, we all love him, eight of the nine temple-leaders at this
monastery support him, but you know...with the Chinese government." A
sense of disappointment swept over his face, but then, he brightened
up and said, "Well, I got to go."
I continued wandering farther from the tourist pathway, and came upon
a big temple, bigger than the ones at the top of the hill. But, unlike
the ones at the top, this one was as silent as death.
Entering, I could just barely hear the sounds of water being poured,
of sandals sweeping against the ground and of candles flickering, not
really sounds, but a sort of rhythmic silence.
There were two monks working in the temple. I walked over to them as
casually as possible. I saw a picture of the Panchen Lama (the
counterpart to the ialaD amaL,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchen_Lama) on a little table with some
offerings, and, in an effort to strike up a conversation, I pretended
to be ignorant, asking, "I've seen this guy's picture in all the
temples. Who is that?"
"The Panchen Lama. He's the second most important monk in our
Buddhism." They waited a moment, calmly pouring water into small
offering cups and then returned a question to me. "Do you know who
that is?"
They gestured towards a table facing the one with photo of the Panchen
Lama. Surprised, I recognized the photo instantly. "That's the ialaD
amaL! But how come I have seen pictures of the Panchen Lama in every
temple, but I haven't seen any other photos of the ialaD amaL?" (Any
pictures of the ialaD amaL are illegal and could get people jailed in
a monastery like this).
The two monks looked at each other, one of them speaking to his
counterpart in Tibetan, and then they went back to sweeping and
pouring water, completely ignoring me. I stood there for a few
minutes, but they were already beyond answering my question.
I left that temple and kept walking away from tourist tracks, starting
to feel like this place's spirtuality hadn't been destroyed, just
pushed to the side.
I came to the last and oldest temple of the complex. By this time, the
sound of the jack-hammering had faded to a low-hum and the crane over
the construction site was little more than a glimmer in the falling
afternoon sun. This temple was small, nothing impressive. It looked as
if they had allowed the temple to remain standing only because it was
far enough away to not distract from the temple complex's main
attractions.
I entered into the temple and two real Tibetans, darkened faces, dirt
on their hands, cowboy hats on their heads, entered with me. Smiling,
they exchanged some reverent comments with one of the monks in there.
The monk draped some religious scarf around their neck, and they
proceeded to move slowly around the little temple. These kids, who
probably earned five bucks a day, were dropping a dime into each of
the ten or so donation boxes scattered around the temple, and then
dropping down on their knees, tapping their heads against the floor
and praying at each statue. As they went around doing this, I couldn't
help but be amazed by the fullness of their faith.
It was here that I felt like I had come to the real Tibet, something
unmolested and original, close to and yet so different from the
Babylonned-out tourist lane just ten minutes away. As the two kids
finished up, they chatted with the monks as he took the scarf back off
of them. I couldn't help but look on and wonder if this is what this
temple was like two hundred years ago.
But, as they were talking, the monk's cellphone went off, and, a
familiar, 90's R&B song started playing. Before the monk could silence
his phone, I was struck by how close I can feel to home despite being
so far away.
And now, I'll leave yall with that monk's ringtone, a song recorded in Atlanta.
Ciao,
Leo
Don't go chasing waterfalls
Please stick to the rivers and lakes that you're used to
I know you want to have it your way or nothing at all
But I think you're moving to fast
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNzY2NjQ1OTY=.html
P.S. These lyrics do not have any political meaning, they were just
the ringtone on the monk's cellphone. They are certainly not meant to
be read as a warning to either Beijing or the ialaD amaL as they try
to conduct diplomacy.
One final story on my trip to Tibetan Yunnan.
Note: Leonardo da Vinci often wrote things backwards to keep people
from reading his papers.
After being rescued by the Tibetan cowboy and returning from the
wilds, our group split up. Shannon and Katherine turned south, while I
stayed in Shangri-la for an extra day. For the afternoon I had alone,
I decided to take the local bus up to the Songzanlin Tibetan
Monastery. According to the Lonely Planet, this was a cool, peaceful
and ancient monastery with a small city's worth of monks attached to
the monastery. It sounded cool enough to spend an hour or two
wandering around.
But, when we first entered into the temple town, there was something
wrong. First, they had tried to charge me $12 dollars to get into the
monostary town, as if this were Colonial Williamsburg and not a real
working temple. Refusing to pay, I slipped through an unguarded door
without anyone noticing, and took the tourist bus up to the monastery.
When I got off the bus, I saw even more that seemed out of place. The
monastery was on the top of the hill, about three hundred feet above
us. The hilltop had two old-looking, red buildings, what you would
expect to see at a Tibetan monastery. Strangely though, in between
these two ancient-looking, monastic temples was a giant construction
project, big crane, concrete pourers, herds of poor laborers yelling
and jack-hammering. Not what you expect to find in an ancient temple.
As we followed a tour guide up the stairs, I noticed something else
strange: lining the sides of the ancient stone stairway were men
dressed in the orange robes of Tibetan monks, lazily toking on a
cigarette, leaning back in their chairs, chortling with each other in
front of tables full of cheesy knick-knacks that they tried to
convince us to buy. (Buddhist are forbidden to smoke, and they are
supposed to be in the process of freeing themselves from worldly
desires and attachments, not selling worthless curios ).
It appeared someone had Babylonned this temple from top to bottom.
Our tour guide continued on, explaining buildings in posture even more
listless than your normal Chinese tour guides. When we got to the top,
he took us through the temples, but, with the sound of jack-hammering
in the background and the Chinese tour group fluttering around me, it
was hard to find much that was spiritual about this place. At the end,
our tour guide told us that we could continue exploring the town and
the other temples on our own. As our tour guide,
dropped down into a folding chair and began texting on his phone, our
group dissipated, most of them either going back to the bus or getting
one more photo before going back to the bus.
I was pretty disappointed. This wasn't Tibet. This was a tourist
colony, whored out to materialistic outsiders, lamely searching for
their own Shangri-la.
Saddened, I wandered over to another temple, thinking something was
missing. I kept thinking that, in building a new temple, something was
being destroyed.
Then, a sprightly, seventeen-year-old monk ran past me, yelling
"Hello!" I returned a "Ni Hao," and he stopped to talk to me.
I asked him a question. "Why do yall charge money to get into this temple?"
"Oh, that's not us. Some tourist company is doing that. They started
doing it about 8 months ago. We don't get any of the money, either.
Just that tourist company... Where are you from?" The seventeen year
old queried back.
"America."
His face lit up and he did his best to speak English. "A-may-li-ka."
He looked around to make sure no one was nearby and then asked, "Have
you meet the ialaD amaL?"
"No....Wait, do you like the ialaD amaL?"
Again, he took a furtive glance in both directions before answering,
"Of course, we all love him, eight of the nine temple-leaders at this
monastery support him, but you know...with the Chinese government." A
sense of disappointment swept over his face, but then, he brightened
up and said, "Well, I got to go."
I continued wandering farther from the tourist pathway, and came upon
a big temple, bigger than the ones at the top of the hill. But, unlike
the ones at the top, this one was as silent as death.
Entering, I could just barely hear the sounds of water being poured,
of sandals sweeping against the ground and of candles flickering, not
really sounds, but a sort of rhythmic silence.
There were two monks working in the temple. I walked over to them as
casually as possible. I saw a picture of the Panchen Lama (the
counterpart to the ialaD amaL,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchen_Lama) on a little table with some
offerings, and, in an effort to strike up a conversation, I pretended
to be ignorant, asking, "I've seen this guy's picture in all the
temples. Who is that?"
"The Panchen Lama. He's the second most important monk in our
Buddhism." They waited a moment, calmly pouring water into small
offering cups and then returned a question to me. "Do you know who
that is?"
They gestured towards a table facing the one with photo of the Panchen
Lama. Surprised, I recognized the photo instantly. "That's the ialaD
amaL! But how come I have seen pictures of the Panchen Lama in every
temple, but I haven't seen any other photos of the ialaD amaL?" (Any
pictures of the ialaD amaL are illegal and could get people jailed in
a monastery like this).
The two monks looked at each other, one of them speaking to his
counterpart in Tibetan, and then they went back to sweeping and
pouring water, completely ignoring me. I stood there for a few
minutes, but they were already beyond answering my question.
I left that temple and kept walking away from tourist tracks, starting
to feel like this place's spirtuality hadn't been destroyed, just
pushed to the side.
I came to the last and oldest temple of the complex. By this time, the
sound of the jack-hammering had faded to a low-hum and the crane over
the construction site was little more than a glimmer in the falling
afternoon sun. This temple was small, nothing impressive. It looked as
if they had allowed the temple to remain standing only because it was
far enough away to not distract from the temple complex's main
attractions.
I entered into the temple and two real Tibetans, darkened faces, dirt
on their hands, cowboy hats on their heads, entered with me. Smiling,
they exchanged some reverent comments with one of the monks in there.
The monk draped some religious scarf around their neck, and they
proceeded to move slowly around the little temple. These kids, who
probably earned five bucks a day, were dropping a dime into each of
the ten or so donation boxes scattered around the temple, and then
dropping down on their knees, tapping their heads against the floor
and praying at each statue. As they went around doing this, I couldn't
help but be amazed by the fullness of their faith.
It was here that I felt like I had come to the real Tibet, something
unmolested and original, close to and yet so different from the
Babylonned-out tourist lane just ten minutes away. As the two kids
finished up, they chatted with the monks as he took the scarf back off
of them. I couldn't help but look on and wonder if this is what this
temple was like two hundred years ago.
But, as they were talking, the monk's cellphone went off, and, a
familiar, 90's R&B song started playing. Before the monk could silence
his phone, I was struck by how close I can feel to home despite being
so far away.
And now, I'll leave yall with that monk's ringtone, a song recorded in Atlanta.
Ciao,
Leo
Don't go chasing waterfalls
Please stick to the rivers and lakes that you're used to
I know you want to have it your way or nothing at all
But I think you're moving to fast
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNzY2NjQ1OTY=.html
P.S. These lyrics do not have any political meaning, they were just
the ringtone on the monk's cellphone. They are certainly not meant to
be read as a warning to either Beijing or the ialaD amaL as they try
to conduct diplomacy.
Friday, May 14, 2010
(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take Me Away
Hey Yall,
As night fell on our make-shift campsite, things had started looking up. As I alluded to at the end of the last email, that night, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up, revealing a starry sky. The next morning, we awoke and packed up as quickly as we could. After chewing on some cookies that we still had left, we started back up the canyon.
We had decided to turn around. Instead of continuing down this canyon to lower ground and then onto where ever, we decided to climb out the way we had come down, out of the canyon, up to the meadow where we had gotten lost. The plan was that, at the meadow, we would see if we could figure out how to get to the lake and the national park that we were originally aiming to get to yesterday. And so we climbed back up the canyon.
Slowly and softly, the verdant but narrow canyon gave way to a wider forested valley. The forest dissipated and we found ourselves in a small meadow two hours after we had left camp. This is not the giant meadow that we had gotten lost in yesterday, but a smaller meadow, about a thirty minute walk from that big meadow. The day before we had seen two houses clinging to the hillside in this meadow, but they were apparently empty, so we had kept going.
I stopped to take a picture of the meadow. Shannon and Katherine started yelling at me. "Lee, get over here!" They had spotted someone, the first soul we had seen in twenty hours.
How should I begin the description of our hero. He was a Tibetan cowboy, making his living by grazing sheep, yaks and cows. He lived in one of the two houses we had passed by the day before in the small meadow, (he had still been watching over his flock somewhere else when we had passed by). He wore the coolest hat in the world. It reminded me of the WWII bomber hat that my grandfather had, with its felt lining and giant ear flaps. But, unlike that bomber hat, the body of the Tibetan cowboy's hat was more like a golden turban, shining bright like a little lighthouse, reflecting the morning sun. Though he wasn't that old, maybe 35 or 40, his skin looked as tough and tanned as leather. Not Chinese but Tibetan, his skin was browner, more like that of someone from Bombay than Beijing. Part of that was from spending every day of so many years trudging across open fields beneath the Tibetan sun, in the thin Tibetan air. A grungy mustache circled his lips and chin. His clothes looked like they were fifth generation hand-me-downs, though they weren't that old, his tshirt had the phrase "New York 32" on the front.
When we first showed up in his little meadow, Shannon and Katherine yelled, "Ni Hao" to him. He acknowledged the greeting, though he seemed perplexed at what the heck two white girls could be doing in his field in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Tibet. I climbed up the hill to his house to meet him. As I shook his hand, I detailed our travails from the night before to him.
"Yall went down THAT canyon?" he said, gesticulating the way we had come. "You know there's no road down there, right?"
"Yea, we found out when we went down there. But we were lost and we didn't see any other way."
"But no one goes down there. There's no road down there, you know that, right?"
He had trouble accepting that we had gone down a canyon that had no road.
After he calmed down (after two or three more "you know there's no road down there, right?"), I talked to him about the lake and the national park. "Yea, I know where the lake is. My other house is over by it," he commented.
"Oh really, would you be willing to take us to it? We need to get back to civilization. We'd pay you 100 rmb (US$ 14.5)."
"Sure. I'm going towards there anyways. But I need about thirty minutes to pack up."
We sat down in the mud in front of his hut, and our Tibetan cowboy packed up his house. Pot(s), water, rope, roof (a blue tarp), he gathered every thing from his house, and packed it up on the back of his three horses. Then he took the rest of his stuff, stuffed it into a basket and tied it onto his back. Everything he owned, except the wooden structure of his hut was either on his back, or on the backs of his horses.
And that's how we were rescued from the wilderness by a Tibetan Cowboy.
Thirty minutes after we left his hut, we emerged over the crest of the hill we were climbing and descended down into the big meadow that we had gotten lost in the day before. It was the same place but a different scene. Before, all we had seen was a blinding whiteness, but now every thing in the meadow was green or brown, flourishing and peaceful. The sky was blue and seemed almost eternal, like the big sky of Montana. The meadow was surrounded on three sides by peaks over 14,000 feet (we were already at about 12,500 feet in the meadow). These not-so-distant peaks were capped with a fresh dress of white from the day before's blizzard. I'm guessing Shannon and Katherine would not agree with me, but I kind of thought that getting lost and risking hypothermia in the blizzard was almost worth the beautiful scene we got that day.
As we spent an hour or so crossing the five or six mile long meadow, I talked with our Tibetan cowboy. How often does he have to migrate to reach his flock? (Most days), How much did he make a year selling meet and wool (10,000 rmb, roughly US$1500), Why was no one living in the big meadow (Still too cold). I also asked him about his silver dagger. He claimed it was actually just for cutting trees and things, not for fighting off demons.
After a few hours, we came to what I think was his other house. He tied up his horses, and then took us down the road. We had finally arrived in the national park, the doorstep to civilization.
And that was almost the end of our adventure. .
After we got on a tourist bus, we just sat, mostly silently. It was already late in the afternoon as the bus snaked its way through asphalt pathways that traversed the green valleys and small mountains of the national park. I was leaning silently against a pole when Shannon shouted, "Lee, Look!"
Our cowboy made one last appearance. He was leading his three horses alongside the road, in his eternal search for green pasture, and our bus passed him by. I stuck my head out and shouted and he waved back at us, grinning as we rode off into the Tibetan sunset.
And that was it.
Taken away by a Tibetan Cowboy,
Lee
I want to sit and not run, I don't want to sleep on the hard ground
I want to look at the horizon and see a soulless Chinese building standing tall
I don't want to be the only one for miles and miles around
I want to stand in a flood of Chinese on hard paved ground
Oh it sounds good to me.
(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take me away
Fly this guy as far away as you can from this wild blue
Set me free, oh I pray, closer to KFC and far away from you
Far away from you
"Cowboy, Take Me Away"
Written by Dixie Chicks, Modified by Me
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTYyMTcyNDg0.html
As night fell on our make-shift campsite, things had started looking up. As I alluded to at the end of the last email, that night, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up, revealing a starry sky. The next morning, we awoke and packed up as quickly as we could. After chewing on some cookies that we still had left, we started back up the canyon.
We had decided to turn around. Instead of continuing down this canyon to lower ground and then onto where ever, we decided to climb out the way we had come down, out of the canyon, up to the meadow where we had gotten lost. The plan was that, at the meadow, we would see if we could figure out how to get to the lake and the national park that we were originally aiming to get to yesterday. And so we climbed back up the canyon.
Slowly and softly, the verdant but narrow canyon gave way to a wider forested valley. The forest dissipated and we found ourselves in a small meadow two hours after we had left camp. This is not the giant meadow that we had gotten lost in yesterday, but a smaller meadow, about a thirty minute walk from that big meadow. The day before we had seen two houses clinging to the hillside in this meadow, but they were apparently empty, so we had kept going.
I stopped to take a picture of the meadow. Shannon and Katherine started yelling at me. "Lee, get over here!" They had spotted someone, the first soul we had seen in twenty hours.
How should I begin the description of our hero. He was a Tibetan cowboy, making his living by grazing sheep, yaks and cows. He lived in one of the two houses we had passed by the day before in the small meadow, (he had still been watching over his flock somewhere else when we had passed by). He wore the coolest hat in the world. It reminded me of the WWII bomber hat that my grandfather had, with its felt lining and giant ear flaps. But, unlike that bomber hat, the body of the Tibetan cowboy's hat was more like a golden turban, shining bright like a little lighthouse, reflecting the morning sun. Though he wasn't that old, maybe 35 or 40, his skin looked as tough and tanned as leather. Not Chinese but Tibetan, his skin was browner, more like that of someone from Bombay than Beijing. Part of that was from spending every day of so many years trudging across open fields beneath the Tibetan sun, in the thin Tibetan air. A grungy mustache circled his lips and chin. His clothes looked like they were fifth generation hand-me-downs, though they weren't that old, his tshirt had the phrase "New York 32" on the front.
When we first showed up in his little meadow, Shannon and Katherine yelled, "Ni Hao" to him. He acknowledged the greeting, though he seemed perplexed at what the heck two white girls could be doing in his field in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Tibet. I climbed up the hill to his house to meet him. As I shook his hand, I detailed our travails from the night before to him.
"Yall went down THAT canyon?" he said, gesticulating the way we had come. "You know there's no road down there, right?"
"Yea, we found out when we went down there. But we were lost and we didn't see any other way."
"But no one goes down there. There's no road down there, you know that, right?"
He had trouble accepting that we had gone down a canyon that had no road.
After he calmed down (after two or three more "you know there's no road down there, right?"), I talked to him about the lake and the national park. "Yea, I know where the lake is. My other house is over by it," he commented.
"Oh really, would you be willing to take us to it? We need to get back to civilization. We'd pay you 100 rmb (US$ 14.5)."
"Sure. I'm going towards there anyways. But I need about thirty minutes to pack up."
We sat down in the mud in front of his hut, and our Tibetan cowboy packed up his house. Pot(s), water, rope, roof (a blue tarp), he gathered every thing from his house, and packed it up on the back of his three horses. Then he took the rest of his stuff, stuffed it into a basket and tied it onto his back. Everything he owned, except the wooden structure of his hut was either on his back, or on the backs of his horses.
And that's how we were rescued from the wilderness by a Tibetan Cowboy.
Thirty minutes after we left his hut, we emerged over the crest of the hill we were climbing and descended down into the big meadow that we had gotten lost in the day before. It was the same place but a different scene. Before, all we had seen was a blinding whiteness, but now every thing in the meadow was green or brown, flourishing and peaceful. The sky was blue and seemed almost eternal, like the big sky of Montana. The meadow was surrounded on three sides by peaks over 14,000 feet (we were already at about 12,500 feet in the meadow). These not-so-distant peaks were capped with a fresh dress of white from the day before's blizzard. I'm guessing Shannon and Katherine would not agree with me, but I kind of thought that getting lost and risking hypothermia in the blizzard was almost worth the beautiful scene we got that day.
As we spent an hour or so crossing the five or six mile long meadow, I talked with our Tibetan cowboy. How often does he have to migrate to reach his flock? (Most days), How much did he make a year selling meet and wool (10,000 rmb, roughly US$1500), Why was no one living in the big meadow (Still too cold). I also asked him about his silver dagger. He claimed it was actually just for cutting trees and things, not for fighting off demons.
After a few hours, we came to what I think was his other house. He tied up his horses, and then took us down the road. We had finally arrived in the national park, the doorstep to civilization.
And that was almost the end of our adventure. .
After we got on a tourist bus, we just sat, mostly silently. It was already late in the afternoon as the bus snaked its way through asphalt pathways that traversed the green valleys and small mountains of the national park. I was leaning silently against a pole when Shannon shouted, "Lee, Look!"
Our cowboy made one last appearance. He was leading his three horses alongside the road, in his eternal search for green pasture, and our bus passed him by. I stuck my head out and shouted and he waved back at us, grinning as we rode off into the Tibetan sunset.
And that was it.
Taken away by a Tibetan Cowboy,
Lee
I want to sit and not run, I don't want to sleep on the hard ground
I want to look at the horizon and see a soulless Chinese building standing tall
I don't want to be the only one for miles and miles around
I want to stand in a flood of Chinese on hard paved ground
Oh it sounds good to me.
(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take me away
Fly this guy as far away as you can from this wild blue
Set me free, oh I pray, closer to KFC and far away from you
Far away from you
"Cowboy, Take Me Away"
Written by Dixie Chicks, Modified by Me
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTYyMTcyNDg0.html
(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take Me Away
Hey Yall,
As night fell on our make-shift campsite, things had started looking up. As I alluded to at the end of the last email, that night, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up, revealing a starry sky. The next morning, we awoke and packed up as quickly as we could. After chewing on some cookies that we still had left, we started back up the canyon.
We had decided to turn around. Instead of continuing down this canyon to lower ground and then onto where ever, we decided to climb out the way we had come down, out of the canyon, up to the meadow where we had gotten lost. The plan was that, at the meadow, we would see if we could figure out how to get to the lake and the national park that we were originally aiming to get to yesterday. And so we climbed back up the canyon.
Slowly and softly, the verdant but narrow canyon gave way to a wider forested valley. The forest dissipated and we found ourselves in a small meadow two hours after we had left camp. This is not the giant meadow that we had gotten lost in yesterday, but a smaller meadow, about a thirty minute walk from that big meadow. The day before we had seen two houses clinging to the hillside in this meadow, but they were apparently empty, so we had kept going.
I stopped to take a picture of the meadow. Shannon and Katherine started yelling at me. "Lee, get over here!" They had spotted someone, the first soul we had seen in twenty hours.
How should I begin the description of our hero. He was a Tibetan cowboy, making his living by grazing sheep, yaks and cows. He lived in one of the two houses we had passed by the day before in the small meadow, (he had still been watching over his flock somewhere else when we had passed by). He wore the coolest hat in the world. It reminded me of the WWII bomber hat that my grandfather had, with its felt lining and giant ear flaps. But, unlike that bomber hat, the body of the Tibetan cowboy's hat was more like a golden turban, shining bright like a little lighthouse, reflecting the morning sun. Though he wasn't that old, maybe 35 or 40, his skin looked as tough and tanned as leather. Not Chinese but Tibetan, his skin was browner, more like that of someone from Bombay than Beijing. Part of that was from spending every day of so many years trudging across open fields beneath the Tibetan sun, in the thin Tibetan air. A grungy mustache circled his lips and chin. His clothes looked like they were fifth generation hand-me-downs, though they weren't that old, his tshirt had the phrase "New York 32" on the front.
When we first showed up in his little meadow, Shannon and Katherine yelled, "Ni Hao" to him. He acknowledged the greeting, though he seemed perplexed at what the heck two white girls could be doing in his field in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Tibet. I climbed up the hill to his house to meet him. As I shook his hand, I detailed our travails from the night before to him.
"Yall went down THAT canyon?" he said, gesticulating the way we had come. "You know there's no road down there, right?"
"Yea, we found out when we went down there. But we were lost and we didn't see any other way."
"But no one goes down there. There's no road down there, you know that, right?"
He had trouble accepting that we had gone down a canyon that had no road.
After he calmed down (after two or three more "you know there's no road down there, right?"), I talked to him about the lake and the national park. "Yea, I know where the lake is. My other house is over by it," he commented.
"Oh really, would you be willing to take us to it? We need to get back to civilization. We'd pay you 100 rmb (US$ 14.5)."
"Sure. I'm going towards there anyways. But I need about thirty minutes to pack up."
We sat down in the mud in front of his hut, and our Tibetan cowboy packed up his house. Pot(s), water, rope, roof (a blue tarp), he gathered every thing from his house, and packed it up on the back of his three horses. Then he took the rest of his stuff, stuffed it into a basket and tied it onto his back. Everything he owned, except the wooden structure of his hut was either on his back, or on the backs of his horses.
And that's how we were rescued from the wilderness by a Tibetan Cowboy.
Thirty minutes after we left his hut, we emerged over the crest of the hill we were climbing and descended down into the big meadow that we had gotten lost in the day before. It was the same place but a different scene. Before, all we had seen was a blinding whiteness, but now every thing in the meadow was green or brown, flourishing and peaceful. The sky was blue and seemed almost eternal, like the big sky of Montana. The meadow was surrounded on three sides by peaks over 14,000 feet (we were already at about 12,500 feet in the meadow). These not-so-distant peaks were capped with a fresh dress of white from the day before's blizzard. I'm guessing Shannon and Katherine would not agree with me, but I kind of thought that getting lost and risking hypothermia in the blizzard was almost worth the beautiful scene we got that day.
As we spent an hour or so crossing the five or six mile long meadow, I talked with our Tibetan cowboy. How often does he have to migrate to reach his flock? (Most days), How much did he make a year selling meet and wool (10,000 rmb, roughly US$1500), Why was no one living in the big meadow (Still too cold). I also asked him about his silver dagger. He claimed it was actually just for cutting trees and things, not for fighting off demons.
After a few hours, we came to what I think was his other house. He tied up his horses, and then took us down the road. We had finally arrived in the national park, the doorstep to civilization.
And that was almost the end of our adventure. .
After we got on a tourist bus, we just sat, mostly silently. It was already late in the afternoon as the bus snaked its way through asphalt pathways that traversed the green valleys and small mountains of the national park. I was leaning silently against a pole when Shannon shouted, "Lee, Look!"
Our cowboy made one last appearance. He was leading his three horses alongside the road, in his eternal search for green pasture, and our bus passed him by. I stuck my head out and shouted and he waved back at us, grinning as we rode off into the Tibetan sunset.
And that was it.
Taken away by a Tibetan Cowboy,
Lee
I want to sit and not run, I don't want to sleep on the hard ground
I want to look at the horizon and see a soulless Chinese building standing tall
I don't want to be the only one for miles and miles around
I want to stand in a flood of Chinese on hard paved ground
Oh it sounds good to me.
(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take me away
Fly this guy as far away as you can from this wild blue
Set me free, oh I pray, closer to KFC and far away from you
Far away from you
"Cowboy, Take Me Away"
Written by Dixie Chicks, Modified by Me
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTYyMTcyNDg0.html
As night fell on our make-shift campsite, things had started looking up. As I alluded to at the end of the last email, that night, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up, revealing a starry sky. The next morning, we awoke and packed up as quickly as we could. After chewing on some cookies that we still had left, we started back up the canyon.
We had decided to turn around. Instead of continuing down this canyon to lower ground and then onto where ever, we decided to climb out the way we had come down, out of the canyon, up to the meadow where we had gotten lost. The plan was that, at the meadow, we would see if we could figure out how to get to the lake and the national park that we were originally aiming to get to yesterday. And so we climbed back up the canyon.
Slowly and softly, the verdant but narrow canyon gave way to a wider forested valley. The forest dissipated and we found ourselves in a small meadow two hours after we had left camp. This is not the giant meadow that we had gotten lost in yesterday, but a smaller meadow, about a thirty minute walk from that big meadow. The day before we had seen two houses clinging to the hillside in this meadow, but they were apparently empty, so we had kept going.
I stopped to take a picture of the meadow. Shannon and Katherine started yelling at me. "Lee, get over here!" They had spotted someone, the first soul we had seen in twenty hours.
How should I begin the description of our hero. He was a Tibetan cowboy, making his living by grazing sheep, yaks and cows. He lived in one of the two houses we had passed by the day before in the small meadow, (he had still been watching over his flock somewhere else when we had passed by). He wore the coolest hat in the world. It reminded me of the WWII bomber hat that my grandfather had, with its felt lining and giant ear flaps. But, unlike that bomber hat, the body of the Tibetan cowboy's hat was more like a golden turban, shining bright like a little lighthouse, reflecting the morning sun. Though he wasn't that old, maybe 35 or 40, his skin looked as tough and tanned as leather. Not Chinese but Tibetan, his skin was browner, more like that of someone from Bombay than Beijing. Part of that was from spending every day of so many years trudging across open fields beneath the Tibetan sun, in the thin Tibetan air. A grungy mustache circled his lips and chin. His clothes looked like they were fifth generation hand-me-downs, though they weren't that old, his tshirt had the phrase "New York 32" on the front.
When we first showed up in his little meadow, Shannon and Katherine yelled, "Ni Hao" to him. He acknowledged the greeting, though he seemed perplexed at what the heck two white girls could be doing in his field in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Tibet. I climbed up the hill to his house to meet him. As I shook his hand, I detailed our travails from the night before to him.
"Yall went down THAT canyon?" he said, gesticulating the way we had come. "You know there's no road down there, right?"
"Yea, we found out when we went down there. But we were lost and we didn't see any other way."
"But no one goes down there. There's no road down there, you know that, right?"
He had trouble accepting that we had gone down a canyon that had no road.
After he calmed down (after two or three more "you know there's no road down there, right?"), I talked to him about the lake and the national park. "Yea, I know where the lake is. My other house is over by it," he commented.
"Oh really, would you be willing to take us to it? We need to get back to civilization. We'd pay you 100 rmb (US$ 14.5)."
"Sure. I'm going towards there anyways. But I need about thirty minutes to pack up."
We sat down in the mud in front of his hut, and our Tibetan cowboy packed up his house. Pot(s), water, rope, roof (a blue tarp), he gathered every thing from his house, and packed it up on the back of his three horses. Then he took the rest of his stuff, stuffed it into a basket and tied it onto his back. Everything he owned, except the wooden structure of his hut was either on his back, or on the backs of his horses.
And that's how we were rescued from the wilderness by a Tibetan Cowboy.
Thirty minutes after we left his hut, we emerged over the crest of the hill we were climbing and descended down into the big meadow that we had gotten lost in the day before. It was the same place but a different scene. Before, all we had seen was a blinding whiteness, but now every thing in the meadow was green or brown, flourishing and peaceful. The sky was blue and seemed almost eternal, like the big sky of Montana. The meadow was surrounded on three sides by peaks over 14,000 feet (we were already at about 12,500 feet in the meadow). These not-so-distant peaks were capped with a fresh dress of white from the day before's blizzard. I'm guessing Shannon and Katherine would not agree with me, but I kind of thought that getting lost and risking hypothermia in the blizzard was almost worth the beautiful scene we got that day.
As we spent an hour or so crossing the five or six mile long meadow, I talked with our Tibetan cowboy. How often does he have to migrate to reach his flock? (Most days), How much did he make a year selling meet and wool (10,000 rmb, roughly US$1500), Why was no one living in the big meadow (Still too cold). I also asked him about his silver dagger. He claimed it was actually just for cutting trees and things, not for fighting off demons.
After a few hours, we came to what I think was his other house. He tied up his horses, and then took us down the road. We had finally arrived in the national park, the doorstep to civilization.
And that was almost the end of our adventure. .
After we got on a tourist bus, we just sat, mostly silently. It was already late in the afternoon as the bus snaked its way through asphalt pathways that traversed the green valleys and small mountains of the national park. I was leaning silently against a pole when Shannon shouted, "Lee, Look!"
Our cowboy made one last appearance. He was leading his three horses alongside the road, in his eternal search for green pasture, and our bus passed him by. I stuck my head out and shouted and he waved back at us, grinning as we rode off into the Tibetan sunset.
And that was it.
Taken away by a Tibetan Cowboy,
Lee
I want to sit and not run, I don't want to sleep on the hard ground
I want to look at the horizon and see a soulless Chinese building standing tall
I don't want to be the only one for miles and miles around
I want to stand in a flood of Chinese on hard paved ground
Oh it sounds good to me.
(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take me away
Fly this guy as far away as you can from this wild blue
Set me free, oh I pray, closer to KFC and far away from you
Far away from you
"Cowboy, Take Me Away"
Written by Dixie Chicks, Modified by Me
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTYyMTcyNDg0.html
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Icarus - Flying Too Close to the Sky
"When the boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher. . ."
Ovid, "Metamorphosis"
Hey Yall,
Somewhere in Eastern Tibet, the sprightly grandfather of the Tibetan family who I mentioned in the last email led us from his cabin to the bridge where the trail started. "First go and then turn left, then go and turn right. After that, keep going," were the only instructions that he gave us. Then, he said goodbye, and shook hands with each of us. Strangely, he insisted on using his left hand to shake hands. I couldn't figure out if he just didn't know how to shake hands, or if there was something else going on.
Our guide left us, and we started climbing. That day, we climbed a total of about 3,500 feet, about 7/10ths of a mile straight up, from a starting point of about 9,000 feet above sea level at the bridge. As we started to climb, it started to rain. The rain came lightly at first, but, slowly, the mist transformed into pellets, and the trail we were following metamorphed into mud. We passed a rock that the Tibetans claimed was the footprint of Buddha, on his way to bring salvation to the Tibetan people, but we had little time to contemplate this salvation, because there the trail turned even steeper upwards and we ascended into a Hades of our own.
As we moved up, the temperature dropped. When we reached the crest of the trail, we took a rest in a little cabin. But we soon realized that, as nice as it was to get out of the cold, we couldn't stay there for too long. We were soaked, and stopping would just make us colder, risking hypothermia. We nibbled on some of the bread that the Tibetan family had given to us that morning and then kept moving. By the time we left the shelter, the rain had morphed into snow. Things were getting worse.
We continued on. In the next hour, we past two small Tibetan caravans, three or four people with five to ten horses. They confirmed that we were going in the right direction. It could have been worse.
And soon it became worse. We descended a little ways into a big meadow, about three miles wide and one mile long. By this point, the snow was coming down hard, and a strong wind was whipping it across our faces and across the meadow. The ground wasn't cold enough for the snow to stick, so it just gelled into cold mud. Visibility was bad. I could just barely make out some cabins about a mile away, in the middle of the meadow. There was a sign and a trail, but where the sign pointed was not really clear and the trail led towards the cabins, so we made for the cabins. One of them was locked, so we went into the other one, an empty barn. We had a little powwow. Shannon thought that we should explore the area to our left, but I felt that our best chance was to go across the meadow, to a little outlet we could just barely make out on the horizon.
Neither were really good choices, but we went the way I thought was right. Along the way, the pathway dissipated, and we just walking through unmarked fields without any idea where we were going. As we walked, we came on several herds of Tibetan yaks, standing quietly in the gale, as if they couldn't feel the gusts of snow through their shaggy coats. They stared ominously at us as we passed by. We crept by, not sure why they were staring at us so intently.
After about thirty more minutes of walking through the fields, we found our way to another collection of cabins, cabins that had been invisible at first due to the blinding gusts of snow plowing their way across the meadow.
Once again, we broke into a house that wasn't locked. It was not a barn this time, but some one's house. We sat around their sitting room, trying to figure out our next move. It was 2:30 in the afternoon, so we decided to take our chances and descend from the meadow through the little outlet I had seen earlier. I couldn't stay in the cabin for too long in my wet clothes. I was now showing signs of hypothermia.
As we wondered across the meadow, through the white blaze of snow, faces wet and numb with the melting snow flakes dripping down them, it became clear that we had flown to close to the sky, taking on something that was too tough, at least in this weather. And now, like Icarus, we were falling.
After an hour of making our way across the meadow, we started descending through that little outlet that I had seen. The signs started out being good. The snow stopped, and, for a few moments, the sun even broke through the clouds, warming us up. We stopped to soak in his warm rays. That was only a temporary relief, though. Precipitation quickly returned, but, mercifully, it turned back into rain as we descended to lower elevations, not snow.
We continued on, through a small, hillside meadow with two houses clinging to the mountainside, but no one was home. So we descended farther into a gorge, hoping that where ever it ended, there would be a village or something. The gorge quickly narrowed, and the path we had been following disappeared. We continued slashing our way through bamboo and jumping over rocks down the narrow gorge. It was getting warmer as we descended, but there was no sign of human habitation.
Around six o'clock, just as we were starting to really worry about the coming darkness, we had a little miracle. We found a large rock-overhanging, with a dry plot ten feet by fifteen feet. Someone had used the spot as a campsite before, and they had built a little rock wall around it and left four blankets there.
We made camp there. Shannon took charge, telling us how to set up the campsite and making me and Katherine eat some of the pork fat that the Tibetan family had left us (pork fat is instant calories, warming you up immediately). We changed into dry clothes, pulled the blankets over us and tried to stay as warm as possible for the rest of the night.
Towards the end of the day, I remembered a quote which was comforting, if also a little disturbing. I shared it with Shannon, and she said, "If you had told me that quote when we were wandering through that blizzard, I would have mashed the *#$ out of your &*#@" (The contents of this email have been modified for a Southern/Mormon audience). Though Shannon didn't appreciate it at the time, I think I'm going to end this email with that quote, leaving yall at the point where the clouds were clearing away, the stars starting to twinkle through the trees, and nighttime was descending on Eastern Tibet.
Best,
Lee
"Although the road may be dangerous
and the destination far out of sight,
all journeys come to an end:
Do not despair."
Hafez (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez)
Ovid, "Metamorphosis"
Hey Yall,
Somewhere in Eastern Tibet, the sprightly grandfather of the Tibetan family who I mentioned in the last email led us from his cabin to the bridge where the trail started. "First go and then turn left, then go and turn right. After that, keep going," were the only instructions that he gave us. Then, he said goodbye, and shook hands with each of us. Strangely, he insisted on using his left hand to shake hands. I couldn't figure out if he just didn't know how to shake hands, or if there was something else going on.
Our guide left us, and we started climbing. That day, we climbed a total of about 3,500 feet, about 7/10ths of a mile straight up, from a starting point of about 9,000 feet above sea level at the bridge. As we started to climb, it started to rain. The rain came lightly at first, but, slowly, the mist transformed into pellets, and the trail we were following metamorphed into mud. We passed a rock that the Tibetans claimed was the footprint of Buddha, on his way to bring salvation to the Tibetan people, but we had little time to contemplate this salvation, because there the trail turned even steeper upwards and we ascended into a Hades of our own.
As we moved up, the temperature dropped. When we reached the crest of the trail, we took a rest in a little cabin. But we soon realized that, as nice as it was to get out of the cold, we couldn't stay there for too long. We were soaked, and stopping would just make us colder, risking hypothermia. We nibbled on some of the bread that the Tibetan family had given to us that morning and then kept moving. By the time we left the shelter, the rain had morphed into snow. Things were getting worse.
We continued on. In the next hour, we past two small Tibetan caravans, three or four people with five to ten horses. They confirmed that we were going in the right direction. It could have been worse.
And soon it became worse. We descended a little ways into a big meadow, about three miles wide and one mile long. By this point, the snow was coming down hard, and a strong wind was whipping it across our faces and across the meadow. The ground wasn't cold enough for the snow to stick, so it just gelled into cold mud. Visibility was bad. I could just barely make out some cabins about a mile away, in the middle of the meadow. There was a sign and a trail, but where the sign pointed was not really clear and the trail led towards the cabins, so we made for the cabins. One of them was locked, so we went into the other one, an empty barn. We had a little powwow. Shannon thought that we should explore the area to our left, but I felt that our best chance was to go across the meadow, to a little outlet we could just barely make out on the horizon.
Neither were really good choices, but we went the way I thought was right. Along the way, the pathway dissipated, and we just walking through unmarked fields without any idea where we were going. As we walked, we came on several herds of Tibetan yaks, standing quietly in the gale, as if they couldn't feel the gusts of snow through their shaggy coats. They stared ominously at us as we passed by. We crept by, not sure why they were staring at us so intently.
After about thirty more minutes of walking through the fields, we found our way to another collection of cabins, cabins that had been invisible at first due to the blinding gusts of snow plowing their way across the meadow.
Once again, we broke into a house that wasn't locked. It was not a barn this time, but some one's house. We sat around their sitting room, trying to figure out our next move. It was 2:30 in the afternoon, so we decided to take our chances and descend from the meadow through the little outlet I had seen earlier. I couldn't stay in the cabin for too long in my wet clothes. I was now showing signs of hypothermia.
As we wondered across the meadow, through the white blaze of snow, faces wet and numb with the melting snow flakes dripping down them, it became clear that we had flown to close to the sky, taking on something that was too tough, at least in this weather. And now, like Icarus, we were falling.
After an hour of making our way across the meadow, we started descending through that little outlet that I had seen. The signs started out being good. The snow stopped, and, for a few moments, the sun even broke through the clouds, warming us up. We stopped to soak in his warm rays. That was only a temporary relief, though. Precipitation quickly returned, but, mercifully, it turned back into rain as we descended to lower elevations, not snow.
We continued on, through a small, hillside meadow with two houses clinging to the mountainside, but no one was home. So we descended farther into a gorge, hoping that where ever it ended, there would be a village or something. The gorge quickly narrowed, and the path we had been following disappeared. We continued slashing our way through bamboo and jumping over rocks down the narrow gorge. It was getting warmer as we descended, but there was no sign of human habitation.
Around six o'clock, just as we were starting to really worry about the coming darkness, we had a little miracle. We found a large rock-overhanging, with a dry plot ten feet by fifteen feet. Someone had used the spot as a campsite before, and they had built a little rock wall around it and left four blankets there.
We made camp there. Shannon took charge, telling us how to set up the campsite and making me and Katherine eat some of the pork fat that the Tibetan family had left us (pork fat is instant calories, warming you up immediately). We changed into dry clothes, pulled the blankets over us and tried to stay as warm as possible for the rest of the night.
Towards the end of the day, I remembered a quote which was comforting, if also a little disturbing. I shared it with Shannon, and she said, "If you had told me that quote when we were wandering through that blizzard, I would have mashed the *#$ out of your &*#@" (The contents of this email have been modified for a Southern/Mormon audience). Though Shannon didn't appreciate it at the time, I think I'm going to end this email with that quote, leaving yall at the point where the clouds were clearing away, the stars starting to twinkle through the trees, and nighttime was descending on Eastern Tibet.
Best,
Lee
"Although the road may be dangerous
and the destination far out of sight,
all journeys come to an end:
Do not despair."
Hafez (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez)
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Silver Dagger - Demons, Prayer Wheels and other Tibetan Relics
Hey yall,
We got out of Kevin's Jeep in a little village called Luoji, a hot, two-dirt road town inhabited mostly by Yi people. From Luoji, we made our way up through a valley into an area that was mostly inhabited by Naxi people.
I've heard a lot of crap about how great Tibet is. I heard so much that I avoided Tibetan areas for a while, so as not to be that typical tourist searching for his own Shangri-la. But I have to say, there was something especially spiritual about the Tibetans. As we were hiking, we made our way out of Luoji, up into areas inhabited by the Naxi people. Some of the Naxi were nice enough. When we stopped to ask directions, a few of them gave us water and some bad-tasting apples. But later, as we were approaching the divide between the Naxi and Tibetan world, a drunk Naxi man approached me and told me that he would give us a ride to the village that we were trying to get to. For an absurd price, of course. We rebuffed his offer and he stumbled back to his friends, yelling.
But then we crossed an invisible line into the Tibetan world and the atmosphere seemed to change. We came upon a pile of stones with prayer flags tied to the top, shivering in the wind. The first house we passed shouted, welcoming us, drunk probably, but a friendly drunkenness.
That night, we eventually found someone who was willing to host us, a middle-aged lady taking care of her 88 year old grandfather (her husband off working in the mines). We threw our stuff in the room that looked like it might be a small hostel, and went to sit in her living room/kitchen area as she prepared us food. She scurried from the fire to the little plastic bags filled with dry meat and then back, preparing food for us, but her grandfather did nothing but sit next to us, cross his legs, spin a little handheld Tibetan prayer wheel while chanting Tibetan Buddhist scriptures (something like this http://www.singingbowlshop.com/prayer-wheel-12.html).
The chanting was a little haunting and humbling at the same time, reminding me of my own mortality and my lack of piety. Fortunately, he regularly punctuated his holiness with outburst of yelling at his granddaughter, lending an air of mortality to someone who seemed to already have one foot in the door of Heaven.
The family we lodged with the next night was just as friendly, and the setting of the guesthouse was something close to stunningly beautiful. We stayed in a place that was located at the top of a village called Niru, where houses clung to the hillsides above terraced potato and barley fields. The village was fairly large, a collection of about three hundred houses in this valley where two or three rivers came together.
In the terraced fields beneath us, there were three guys kicking an ox, trying to get him to plow a field. Pigs randomly appeared on trails, scurrying away to somewhere with an air of what appeared like urgency. Every ten minutes or so, the barking of dogs off somewhere unseen seemed to punctuate the bucolic calm. All was in the shadow of monuments wrapped in prayer flags and a mountain creatively named, "The Holy Mountain."
That evening we were invited to eat with the family, sharing a traditional meal of bread and slabs of pork fat (yummy). The grandfather of this household was not quite as old and not nearly as holy as last night's. He talked with us that night over the dinner, discussing life here in Tibet. After a few minutes, I asked the old man why he carried a silver dagger around his belt.
"Oh this, we used to have a problem with demons a hundred years ago, so we would use these silver daggers to kill them. Now, we keep them around just in case." He grinned in a way that didn't allow me to pin down how serious he was.
Towards the end of the night, I went outside to take a Sprite-induced bathroom break. As I stood on the porch in front of our room, I looked down on the village and the terraced fields. The rural scene was now blanketed in the silvery glow of starlight and the random twinkle of stove fires. A few pigs still seemed to wander busily from here to there as purposefully as they had earlier that day. Cows mooed and dogs barked, but all with less urgency than during the daytime.
At the village entrance, a sign had listed how far it was from there to Kunming, Tokyo, New York and so on. It seemed aptly placed since the bustle and hassle that is China seemed like it was a million miles away. The challenges that we had faced getting here seemed like they were already ancient history, completely beaten.
But the calmness of the scene brought a false sense of comfort and ease, one that did not prepare us for the battles that we would fight the next day.
Until then,
Lee
Then she picked up that silver dagger
And she stove it through her lily white breast
Sayin' goodbye mama, goodbye papa
I'll die for the one that I love best
"The Silver Dagger" by Old Crow Medicine Show
We got out of Kevin's Jeep in a little village called Luoji, a hot, two-dirt road town inhabited mostly by Yi people. From Luoji, we made our way up through a valley into an area that was mostly inhabited by Naxi people.
I've heard a lot of crap about how great Tibet is. I heard so much that I avoided Tibetan areas for a while, so as not to be that typical tourist searching for his own Shangri-la. But I have to say, there was something especially spiritual about the Tibetans. As we were hiking, we made our way out of Luoji, up into areas inhabited by the Naxi people. Some of the Naxi were nice enough. When we stopped to ask directions, a few of them gave us water and some bad-tasting apples. But later, as we were approaching the divide between the Naxi and Tibetan world, a drunk Naxi man approached me and told me that he would give us a ride to the village that we were trying to get to. For an absurd price, of course. We rebuffed his offer and he stumbled back to his friends, yelling.
But then we crossed an invisible line into the Tibetan world and the atmosphere seemed to change. We came upon a pile of stones with prayer flags tied to the top, shivering in the wind. The first house we passed shouted, welcoming us, drunk probably, but a friendly drunkenness.
That night, we eventually found someone who was willing to host us, a middle-aged lady taking care of her 88 year old grandfather (her husband off working in the mines). We threw our stuff in the room that looked like it might be a small hostel, and went to sit in her living room/kitchen area as she prepared us food. She scurried from the fire to the little plastic bags filled with dry meat and then back, preparing food for us, but her grandfather did nothing but sit next to us, cross his legs, spin a little handheld Tibetan prayer wheel while chanting Tibetan Buddhist scriptures (something like this http://www.singingbowlshop.com/prayer-wheel-12.html).
The chanting was a little haunting and humbling at the same time, reminding me of my own mortality and my lack of piety. Fortunately, he regularly punctuated his holiness with outburst of yelling at his granddaughter, lending an air of mortality to someone who seemed to already have one foot in the door of Heaven.
The family we lodged with the next night was just as friendly, and the setting of the guesthouse was something close to stunningly beautiful. We stayed in a place that was located at the top of a village called Niru, where houses clung to the hillsides above terraced potato and barley fields. The village was fairly large, a collection of about three hundred houses in this valley where two or three rivers came together.
In the terraced fields beneath us, there were three guys kicking an ox, trying to get him to plow a field. Pigs randomly appeared on trails, scurrying away to somewhere with an air of what appeared like urgency. Every ten minutes or so, the barking of dogs off somewhere unseen seemed to punctuate the bucolic calm. All was in the shadow of monuments wrapped in prayer flags and a mountain creatively named, "The Holy Mountain."
That evening we were invited to eat with the family, sharing a traditional meal of bread and slabs of pork fat (yummy). The grandfather of this household was not quite as old and not nearly as holy as last night's. He talked with us that night over the dinner, discussing life here in Tibet. After a few minutes, I asked the old man why he carried a silver dagger around his belt.
"Oh this, we used to have a problem with demons a hundred years ago, so we would use these silver daggers to kill them. Now, we keep them around just in case." He grinned in a way that didn't allow me to pin down how serious he was.
Towards the end of the night, I went outside to take a Sprite-induced bathroom break. As I stood on the porch in front of our room, I looked down on the village and the terraced fields. The rural scene was now blanketed in the silvery glow of starlight and the random twinkle of stove fires. A few pigs still seemed to wander busily from here to there as purposefully as they had earlier that day. Cows mooed and dogs barked, but all with less urgency than during the daytime.
At the village entrance, a sign had listed how far it was from there to Kunming, Tokyo, New York and so on. It seemed aptly placed since the bustle and hassle that is China seemed like it was a million miles away. The challenges that we had faced getting here seemed like they were already ancient history, completely beaten.
But the calmness of the scene brought a false sense of comfort and ease, one that did not prepare us for the battles that we would fight the next day.
Until then,
Lee
Then she picked up that silver dagger
And she stove it through her lily white breast
Sayin' goodbye mama, goodbye papa
I'll die for the one that I love best
"The Silver Dagger" by Old Crow Medicine Show
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Just Beat It - Tibet in Yunnan
I know yall probably heard about the earthquake that occurred in an Tibetan area near Tibet Province. In fact, yall actually probably heard about it well before I did, since I was lost in a blizzard on another part of the Tibet's Everest foothills, fighting off hypothermia at the time the earthquake occurred. But I'll get that in a later email.
For the last week, I was in the very western part of the province of Yunnan with a friend from UGA, Shannon, and her friend Katherine. Historically and culturally, the place is actually the very Eastern part of Tibet. Tibet is not only the name of a province within China, but it also signifies the greater Tibetan region. Tibetans live not only in Tibet, but also throughout much of Qinghai (the province where the earthquake occurred), Western Sichuan and Western Yunnan (where I was).
The area that I went to used to be called Zhongdian, but, a few years ago, the Chinese government changed the name of the Tibetan area of Yunnan to "Shangri-la," claiming that they had discovered incontrovertible evidence that the area was the setting for James Hilton's entirely fictional Tibetan story, "Lost Horizons." Cynics suggested that renaming the county "Shangri-la" was actually just a cheesy attempt to boost tourist revenues. Either way.
As I was trying to think of where to start with this story of our journey in Shangri-la, I kept coming back to the night before we left for our four day hike through a remote part of "Shangri-la." We were eating in a kind-of touristy, Tibetan restaurant, chomping down on momo's, a traditional kind of Tibetan dumpling. We were talking about our upcoming journey, a hike through a series fairly unspoiled Tibetan mountain villages, and through the back door into a national park.
Then, all the sudden, Michel Jackson's "Beat It" started reverberating throughout the restaurant and the Tibetan restaurant owners jumped up from their seats and started dancing to it. "Beat it...beat it, no I won't be defeated! Show them how chunky and strong is your fight..." Though his lyrics were off, I was and always am struck by the globalization just suddenly pops its head up, even on the "Roof of the World."
But, as I thought more about it, the song was strangely appropriate for the Tibetan people, and the journey we would set off on. The song is a story about betting against the odds and coming out on top. On our trip, we had to face off against the Chinese government and the sometimes against the even more brutal forces of Nature. After both fights, we came out, worn but wiser.
We had wanted to go from Shangri-la to a small town on the edge of Tibet proper, Deqin, but we had found out that there was
construction on the road. Due to construction, the road was only open to traffic once every four days. @#$^ China!
We arrived at the Shangri-la bus station early one morning to buy tickets for the next day, the one day that the road was open. But at the ticket office, the lady rudely informed me that foreigners were not currently allowed on the bus. @%#@#@ China!
I should probably explain some background info. Foreigners are not allowed to enter Tibet without getting special permits, paying a fair amount of money and joining a tour group. However that does not normally prevent foreigners from going into Tibetan parts of other provinces like Yunnan or Sichuan. Well, they were not allowing foreigners onto the buses because the bus, due to construction, had to pass into parts of Tibet to get to Deqin. We could have taken a minivan, but that was crazy expensive. @#$&@ China!
Thinking up a way to beat the Chinese government, we meet up with an American named Kevin working in the area who happened to be going to another part of the county, where there was some good hiking. The plan was that he would drop us off at a small town, Luoji. From there, we would hike for two days, to a Tibetan village called Niru, and then hike into the backdoor of a national park (avoiding the US$30 entrance fee, again beating China). From there, we could get a bus back to Shangri-la and civilization.
So, despite all the road blocks China threw in our face, we still 'beat it.'
The next morning, we meet Kevin near the entrance to the touristy old town of Shangri-la and took off for Luoji in his Jeep. Blocked by construction at one point (they are doing construction throughout the county), he slipped it into four wheel drive instead of waiting for five minutes for them to let us pass. As the car leapt back onto the pavement, the gearbox made a strange crank and we noticed the smell of gasoline fumes filling the Jeep. "Yea," Kevin informed us, "its a great jeep, but a couple of weeks ago, a drunk Tibetan was driving it, and he drove it a hundred feet off a cliff and flipped it into a river. We pulled it out and got it repaired, but the gears are still a little funny and there's a bit of a gas leak. But hey, she's still beatin' it!"
As I said, this will be a story of fighting against China and nature, and, in the end, beating them both, if getting bruised along the way.
Beating it,
Lee
You're playin' with your life, this ain't no truth or dare
They'll kick you, then they beat you,
Then they'll tell you it's fair
So beat it, but you wanna be bad
- Micheal Jackson's 'Beat It'
Notice.
Persons attempting to find a political motive in the meaning of these lyrics will be prosecuted by the Chinese Government.
For the last week, I was in the very western part of the province of Yunnan with a friend from UGA, Shannon, and her friend Katherine. Historically and culturally, the place is actually the very Eastern part of Tibet. Tibet is not only the name of a province within China, but it also signifies the greater Tibetan region. Tibetans live not only in Tibet, but also throughout much of Qinghai (the province where the earthquake occurred), Western Sichuan and Western Yunnan (where I was).
The area that I went to used to be called Zhongdian, but, a few years ago, the Chinese government changed the name of the Tibetan area of Yunnan to "Shangri-la," claiming that they had discovered incontrovertible evidence that the area was the setting for James Hilton's entirely fictional Tibetan story, "Lost Horizons." Cynics suggested that renaming the county "Shangri-la" was actually just a cheesy attempt to boost tourist revenues. Either way.
As I was trying to think of where to start with this story of our journey in Shangri-la, I kept coming back to the night before we left for our four day hike through a remote part of "Shangri-la." We were eating in a kind-of touristy, Tibetan restaurant, chomping down on momo's, a traditional kind of Tibetan dumpling. We were talking about our upcoming journey, a hike through a series fairly unspoiled Tibetan mountain villages, and through the back door into a national park.
Then, all the sudden, Michel Jackson's "Beat It" started reverberating throughout the restaurant and the Tibetan restaurant owners jumped up from their seats and started dancing to it. "Beat it...beat it, no I won't be defeated! Show them how chunky and strong is your fight..." Though his lyrics were off, I was and always am struck by the globalization just suddenly pops its head up, even on the "Roof of the World."
But, as I thought more about it, the song was strangely appropriate for the Tibetan people, and the journey we would set off on. The song is a story about betting against the odds and coming out on top. On our trip, we had to face off against the Chinese government and the sometimes against the even more brutal forces of Nature. After both fights, we came out, worn but wiser.
We had wanted to go from Shangri-la to a small town on the edge of Tibet proper, Deqin, but we had found out that there was
construction on the road. Due to construction, the road was only open to traffic once every four days. @#$^ China!
We arrived at the Shangri-la bus station early one morning to buy tickets for the next day, the one day that the road was open. But at the ticket office, the lady rudely informed me that foreigners were not currently allowed on the bus. @%#@#@ China!
I should probably explain some background info. Foreigners are not allowed to enter Tibet without getting special permits, paying a fair amount of money and joining a tour group. However that does not normally prevent foreigners from going into Tibetan parts of other provinces like Yunnan or Sichuan. Well, they were not allowing foreigners onto the buses because the bus, due to construction, had to pass into parts of Tibet to get to Deqin. We could have taken a minivan, but that was crazy expensive. @#$&@ China!
Thinking up a way to beat the Chinese government, we meet up with an American named Kevin working in the area who happened to be going to another part of the county, where there was some good hiking. The plan was that he would drop us off at a small town, Luoji. From there, we would hike for two days, to a Tibetan village called Niru, and then hike into the backdoor of a national park (avoiding the US$30 entrance fee, again beating China). From there, we could get a bus back to Shangri-la and civilization.
So, despite all the road blocks China threw in our face, we still 'beat it.'
The next morning, we meet Kevin near the entrance to the touristy old town of Shangri-la and took off for Luoji in his Jeep. Blocked by construction at one point (they are doing construction throughout the county), he slipped it into four wheel drive instead of waiting for five minutes for them to let us pass. As the car leapt back onto the pavement, the gearbox made a strange crank and we noticed the smell of gasoline fumes filling the Jeep. "Yea," Kevin informed us, "its a great jeep, but a couple of weeks ago, a drunk Tibetan was driving it, and he drove it a hundred feet off a cliff and flipped it into a river. We pulled it out and got it repaired, but the gears are still a little funny and there's a bit of a gas leak. But hey, she's still beatin' it!"
As I said, this will be a story of fighting against China and nature, and, in the end, beating them both, if getting bruised along the way.
Beating it,
Lee
You're playin' with your life, this ain't no truth or dare
They'll kick you, then they beat you,
Then they'll tell you it's fair
So beat it, but you wanna be bad
- Micheal Jackson's 'Beat It'
Notice.
Persons attempting to find a political motive in the meaning of these lyrics will be prosecuted by the Chinese Government.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Burma Road
This is my last of three posts about my trip to Xishuangbanna. I'll have others on other things I'm doing here in Kunming and elsewhere, as I continue this blog, if anyone is reading.
During the wedding, my friend and I took off back to his place. I took a nap, tired from all the festivities, and, when I woke up there was an old man in the house who I hadn't seen before. The family had laid some food out on the floor, and the old man was looking at my friend's hand.
Later, my friend told me that he was having his fortune told, and I think he said the ceremony was kind of a blessing. The next day, he would be leaving the Yako village to go down into the valley to work a van driver. I'm not sure of this, but these groups tend to have a fear of the valleys and the oppressive states in valleys. I kind of think that they called in this 'wizard' to bless him as he left his mountain village to go down into the valley.
Later that night, I went back to the wedding. I won't retell the wedding events here, but, when I was leaving the wedding at sometime between ten pm and three am (time is of little consequence in a place without clocks), I looked across the star-lit valley to the otherside and noticed a section of field on fire, burning in patches. These groups practice slash-and-burn (swidden) agriculture, but this is slowly coming to an end.These were some of the last fields that were going to be burned before the Hani people switched entirely over to farming Puer Tea for rich Chinese people in the North, quiting their old ways. For a few minutes, I stood, watching the fire burn it all down.
The next morning, my friend left before I could say goodbye, and I didn't wait too long after him, heading the other direction, up the mountain.
The only way from the Yako's valley to the next valley over was to hike to a road that straddled a ridgeline that divided China from Burma. I was half worried and half enticed by the prospect of visiting this remote border.
The border really only existed on paper. The folks of Yako cross the border like its not even there. "We tend to go over into Burma, not every day, maybe not even every week, but it wouldn't be unusual for someone to go into Burma at least once a week." It was only a few miles away from their village, and it really doesn't divide the people, socially at least. A lot of the guys I was hanging out with at the wedding had come over from Burma that day, relatives or friends of the newly-wed couple. The wife of my friend's brother was from Burma. One of the little kids staying in my friends house was also from Burma. The wife came to get married, but the boy had left his family to go to school here in China. The border didn't divide their families or their societies, but there was a clear divide of the quality of education.
While I walked along the border, a man and his wife passed me by on a motorcycle. I waved them down on the little dirt pathway and asked, "Hey, is this the road to Bulangshan."
"Yep. Just that way." He pointed.
"And is this road the border?"
"Yep."
"And this is Burma." I pointed to the left of the path.
"Yep."
"And this is China." I pointed to the right of the path.
"Yep."
He drove off, smiling. I was stoked. I hopped a few feet into what may have been Burma, and snapped a picture of me in a new country, with Burma in the background. For a few minutes, I stood and looked across the Burma's Shan state's rolling hills.
This is the area that used to be called the Golden Triangle, famous for opium smuggling. It's easy to see why it was used for drug smuggling. The only government presence or evidence of a border was a guard tower I passed on one of the hills on my way into the other valley. Motorcycles passed through two or three an hour with no one there to care. It would have been easy enough to smuggle opium here.
As I passed by that guard tower, the dirt road started to slowly descend down into the next valley. I could see villages scattered throughout the green forests and the brown fields.
At one point on a lonely stretch of the dry, red dirtroad, I stopped to do my personal part to 'relieve the drought,' as the kids say. But the lonely road turned out to be not so lonely. I heard the sound of a motorcycle fast approaching and tried to zip up and arrange myself to look like I hadn't been doing any thing at all. Before I was able to look natural, I heard the motorcycle behind me slowing down and then stopping. I turned around. It was another dude on another motorcycle, like the five or so that had passed me throughout my hike, but this guy was grinning broadly.
He leaned towards me and asked, "Do you remember me?"
I thought for a second. I had to have met him at the wedding. I had met a herd of people in those dark houses, so I just assumed he was one of them. "Yea, the wedding, right? What are you doing now?"
"After the wedding, I wanted to pick up some stuff up at the market. Now I'm heading back home, back to Burma."
He kicked his Honda into gear and sped off, yelling one last thing: "Bai, Bai."
As I walked off, a thought crossed my mind: I've been here, along the edge of Burma and China, for a handful of days, and I'm already running into old friends. I guess I must be doing something right.
Lee
PS - I've put the pictures up for this on mapvivo. If yall want to see pigs deflated of blood, old men checking swine hearts for a baby count, and me 40 inches deep into Burma, check it out at:
http://mapvivo.com/journey/11190
During the wedding, my friend and I took off back to his place. I took a nap, tired from all the festivities, and, when I woke up there was an old man in the house who I hadn't seen before. The family had laid some food out on the floor, and the old man was looking at my friend's hand.
Later, my friend told me that he was having his fortune told, and I think he said the ceremony was kind of a blessing. The next day, he would be leaving the Yako village to go down into the valley to work a van driver. I'm not sure of this, but these groups tend to have a fear of the valleys and the oppressive states in valleys. I kind of think that they called in this 'wizard' to bless him as he left his mountain village to go down into the valley.
Later that night, I went back to the wedding. I won't retell the wedding events here, but, when I was leaving the wedding at sometime between ten pm and three am (time is of little consequence in a place without clocks), I looked across the star-lit valley to the otherside and noticed a section of field on fire, burning in patches. These groups practice slash-and-burn (swidden) agriculture, but this is slowly coming to an end.These were some of the last fields that were going to be burned before the Hani people switched entirely over to farming Puer Tea for rich Chinese people in the North, quiting their old ways. For a few minutes, I stood, watching the fire burn it all down.
The next morning, my friend left before I could say goodbye, and I didn't wait too long after him, heading the other direction, up the mountain.
The only way from the Yako's valley to the next valley over was to hike to a road that straddled a ridgeline that divided China from Burma. I was half worried and half enticed by the prospect of visiting this remote border.
The border really only existed on paper. The folks of Yako cross the border like its not even there. "We tend to go over into Burma, not every day, maybe not even every week, but it wouldn't be unusual for someone to go into Burma at least once a week." It was only a few miles away from their village, and it really doesn't divide the people, socially at least. A lot of the guys I was hanging out with at the wedding had come over from Burma that day, relatives or friends of the newly-wed couple. The wife of my friend's brother was from Burma. One of the little kids staying in my friends house was also from Burma. The wife came to get married, but the boy had left his family to go to school here in China. The border didn't divide their families or their societies, but there was a clear divide of the quality of education.
While I walked along the border, a man and his wife passed me by on a motorcycle. I waved them down on the little dirt pathway and asked, "Hey, is this the road to Bulangshan."
"Yep. Just that way." He pointed.
"And is this road the border?"
"Yep."
"And this is Burma." I pointed to the left of the path.
"Yep."
"And this is China." I pointed to the right of the path.
"Yep."
He drove off, smiling. I was stoked. I hopped a few feet into what may have been Burma, and snapped a picture of me in a new country, with Burma in the background. For a few minutes, I stood and looked across the Burma's Shan state's rolling hills.
This is the area that used to be called the Golden Triangle, famous for opium smuggling. It's easy to see why it was used for drug smuggling. The only government presence or evidence of a border was a guard tower I passed on one of the hills on my way into the other valley. Motorcycles passed through two or three an hour with no one there to care. It would have been easy enough to smuggle opium here.
As I passed by that guard tower, the dirt road started to slowly descend down into the next valley. I could see villages scattered throughout the green forests and the brown fields.
At one point on a lonely stretch of the dry, red dirtroad, I stopped to do my personal part to 'relieve the drought,' as the kids say. But the lonely road turned out to be not so lonely. I heard the sound of a motorcycle fast approaching and tried to zip up and arrange myself to look like I hadn't been doing any thing at all. Before I was able to look natural, I heard the motorcycle behind me slowing down and then stopping. I turned around. It was another dude on another motorcycle, like the five or so that had passed me throughout my hike, but this guy was grinning broadly.
He leaned towards me and asked, "Do you remember me?"
I thought for a second. I had to have met him at the wedding. I had met a herd of people in those dark houses, so I just assumed he was one of them. "Yea, the wedding, right? What are you doing now?"
"After the wedding, I wanted to pick up some stuff up at the market. Now I'm heading back home, back to Burma."
He kicked his Honda into gear and sped off, yelling one last thing: "Bai, Bai."
As I walked off, a thought crossed my mind: I've been here, along the edge of Burma and China, for a handful of days, and I'm already running into old friends. I guess I must be doing something right.
Lee
PS - I've put the pictures up for this on mapvivo. If yall want to see pigs deflated of blood, old men checking swine hearts for a baby count, and me 40 inches deep into Burma, check it out at:
http://mapvivo.com/journey/11190
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Wedding in the Wilderness
Picking up where I left off in my last posts:
On my third day in the village, my friend, the guy who had picked me up from the dirt road, shook me awake at around 9:30 (constantly breathing in smoke makes me tired and sleepy like something else). "Lee Mo" (my Chinese name), "Lee Mo, let's go to the wedding."
We first went to the house of the groom, just two minutes down the main dirt pathway that divided the village. We ate a meal for about thirty minutes, breakfast-ish. Then, everyone in the groom's party, including me, tromped fifteen minutes down into a little gully and then back up the other side to the nearest village.
Here, the groom's troops entered into the bridal family's house. Following local tradition, the bride's family had hidden a little bag of something that looked like parsley somewhere in the house, and the groom's troop's had to tear the house apart trying to find it. For about fifteen or twenty minutes, twenty guys tore through boxes and pots, turned over clothes and searched the wooden rafters while the bride's family looked on, acting innocent, as if they had no idea what we were looking for. Finally a shout went up. Someone had found it, hidden deep in a bag of rice.
"Okay, now they have to feed us," my friend told me. And feed us they did. A few minutes after the parsley search ended, I was roused by a demonic scream, and went outside to see what the ruckus was.
They were carrying a 200 pound hog towards the house. Both of the hog's legs were tied up around a wooden pole they were using to drag it, and he was screaming like he knew he was about to die. "We eat a pig at every wedding," my friend informed me.
They laid him on a tarp in a shallow hole freshly dug and cut his throat open. He continued screaming for a little while as the streams of blood gushed out of him. They collected the blood in big bowls about a foot in diameter as the pigs body deflated. After a few minutes of draining several pans of blood, they reached into the pig's chest and pulled out his heart.
According to tradition, you can tell how many boys and girls a newly married couple is going to have by looking at the heart of the the pig slaughtered during the wedding. I watched as they put the heart on a small wooden plate, and took it into the house. A bevy of old men congregated around the fresh heart, poking and examining in a very scientific manner. A few minutes later, the old men scattered and the heart was taken away. I asked my friend whether the old men examining the heart had determined how many children the new couple was going to have.
"Yes."
"Well, how many?"
He became perplexed a little, as if he hadn't ever really considered the question.
"I don't know." Apparently they figure out how many kids the couple is going to have, but they keep it to themselves.
And then we ate and drank and were merry. The local alcohol is basically fire water, spicy and about 40 percent alcohol, drunk from a bowl (I know this from my last trip to the area, on this trip I was enjoying sprite). Many of the men drank the fire water with one fist, while in the other fist they swigged green bottles of Chinese beer.
And they ate. Peanuts, potatos, noodles, pork rinds, beans, corn, crickets, and of course, fresh pork. It was all placed on a little wooden wicker table that we squatted around.
That meal went from about two in the afternoon until four. After that, we left the bride's house, now with troops from both families tailing the couple. Halfway in between the two villages, some of the groom's family were blocking our path. They forced the groom to drink copious amounts of the fire water on the pathway before being allowed to pass and return to his house.
We returned to the groom's house for another meal, but first that meal had to be prepared. During the prep time, my friend and I returned to his house to nap. That evening, the groom's house was so full, that some of us had to be feasted in someone else's house. Anyways, it was the same old story. Lots of food, lots of booze. After eating, about ten friends of the groom got into a row and, each holding a bowl full of that fire water, forced him to down each and every bowl. Then the bride and groom went around collecting donations from everybody.
After the meal, I went back to the groom's family's hut, and watched. They danced late until the night with old ladies in their long, blue cloth garments and tall black head coveringss, looking on. Before I left, I went over to this clutch of old ladies and toasted each and every one of them. I think everybody got a kick out of that.
But by that time, I was pretty tired, and I'm sure yall are even more tired of reading this. So I'll end it here, at the end of my all-day adventure.
PS - As some of yall may have heard, I'm going to be married in September. I'm considering including the pig slaughter as a part of my ceremony, but I don't know who would look at the heart to see how many kids we will have. Please let me know if yall think this is a good idea, and if any of yall know how to use a pig's heart to predict offspring.
On my third day in the village, my friend, the guy who had picked me up from the dirt road, shook me awake at around 9:30 (constantly breathing in smoke makes me tired and sleepy like something else). "Lee Mo" (my Chinese name), "Lee Mo, let's go to the wedding."
We first went to the house of the groom, just two minutes down the main dirt pathway that divided the village. We ate a meal for about thirty minutes, breakfast-ish. Then, everyone in the groom's party, including me, tromped fifteen minutes down into a little gully and then back up the other side to the nearest village.
Here, the groom's troops entered into the bridal family's house. Following local tradition, the bride's family had hidden a little bag of something that looked like parsley somewhere in the house, and the groom's troop's had to tear the house apart trying to find it. For about fifteen or twenty minutes, twenty guys tore through boxes and pots, turned over clothes and searched the wooden rafters while the bride's family looked on, acting innocent, as if they had no idea what we were looking for. Finally a shout went up. Someone had found it, hidden deep in a bag of rice.
"Okay, now they have to feed us," my friend told me. And feed us they did. A few minutes after the parsley search ended, I was roused by a demonic scream, and went outside to see what the ruckus was.
They were carrying a 200 pound hog towards the house. Both of the hog's legs were tied up around a wooden pole they were using to drag it, and he was screaming like he knew he was about to die. "We eat a pig at every wedding," my friend informed me.
They laid him on a tarp in a shallow hole freshly dug and cut his throat open. He continued screaming for a little while as the streams of blood gushed out of him. They collected the blood in big bowls about a foot in diameter as the pigs body deflated. After a few minutes of draining several pans of blood, they reached into the pig's chest and pulled out his heart.
According to tradition, you can tell how many boys and girls a newly married couple is going to have by looking at the heart of the the pig slaughtered during the wedding. I watched as they put the heart on a small wooden plate, and took it into the house. A bevy of old men congregated around the fresh heart, poking and examining in a very scientific manner. A few minutes later, the old men scattered and the heart was taken away. I asked my friend whether the old men examining the heart had determined how many children the new couple was going to have.
"Yes."
"Well, how many?"
He became perplexed a little, as if he hadn't ever really considered the question.
"I don't know." Apparently they figure out how many kids the couple is going to have, but they keep it to themselves.
And then we ate and drank and were merry. The local alcohol is basically fire water, spicy and about 40 percent alcohol, drunk from a bowl (I know this from my last trip to the area, on this trip I was enjoying sprite). Many of the men drank the fire water with one fist, while in the other fist they swigged green bottles of Chinese beer.
And they ate. Peanuts, potatos, noodles, pork rinds, beans, corn, crickets, and of course, fresh pork. It was all placed on a little wooden wicker table that we squatted around.
That meal went from about two in the afternoon until four. After that, we left the bride's house, now with troops from both families tailing the couple. Halfway in between the two villages, some of the groom's family were blocking our path. They forced the groom to drink copious amounts of the fire water on the pathway before being allowed to pass and return to his house.
We returned to the groom's house for another meal, but first that meal had to be prepared. During the prep time, my friend and I returned to his house to nap. That evening, the groom's house was so full, that some of us had to be feasted in someone else's house. Anyways, it was the same old story. Lots of food, lots of booze. After eating, about ten friends of the groom got into a row and, each holding a bowl full of that fire water, forced him to down each and every bowl. Then the bride and groom went around collecting donations from everybody.
After the meal, I went back to the groom's family's hut, and watched. They danced late until the night with old ladies in their long, blue cloth garments and tall black head coveringss, looking on. Before I left, I went over to this clutch of old ladies and toasted each and every one of them. I think everybody got a kick out of that.
But by that time, I was pretty tired, and I'm sure yall are even more tired of reading this. So I'll end it here, at the end of my all-day adventure.
PS - As some of yall may have heard, I'm going to be married in September. I'm considering including the pig slaughter as a part of my ceremony, but I don't know who would look at the heart to see how many kids we will have. Please let me know if yall think this is a good idea, and if any of yall know how to use a pig's heart to predict offspring.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Along the Edges of World
I was going to talk a little bit about the Philippines, but I have been encouraged to make these posts less "dissertation-ish" so I won't bore yall with the rest of my trip, other than to say that after the 'cruise' with Tao Expeditions we did a few more things: I scubaed on some Japanese ships sunk on September 24th, 1944 in an extention of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, we hung out in the highlands of the Philippines, and then wandered around Manila for a few days. No interesting stories, just "dissertation-ish" observations that can all be found in my mapvivo site:
http://mapvivo.com/journey/10984
After that, I returned to China, and Lisa returned to the US. In a few weeks, I had to start my internship, so I flew down to Kunming, but I still had about two weeks before my internship started. During that time, I had to find something to do. I feared traveling because it was Chinese new year, the largest annual migration in the world. Trains are jammed packed standing room only, and things become more expensive.
So I decided to get as far away from China without actually leaving China. I headed down to Xishuangbanna. This is one of the southern-most counties in all of China, sharing a border with Vietnam, Laos and Burma. I had been here before three years before, hiking with some of my Swedish friends.
Strangely, this part of China is doesn't actually have that many 'Chinese' people. In fact, Xishuangbanna is only one third Han 'Chinese' people, another third of the population is a group of ethnic Thailanders, and the final third is a mixture of different tribal groups.
I took the a series of buses out to some Thai villages, and then on, farther out, to a little village near the China-Burma border where the pavement ends. From there, I just started walking through the bamboo forests, further and further away from civilization. I had some idea of where I was going, a village called Yako. I just didn't know how to get there. Every time I meet someone, I asked them how to get to the village and they pointed me along the right direction. I ran into some guys, and I asked them the same question. They offered to take me half way there in their 'tractor' (it was really just an engine on top a piece of sheet metal and two wheels and two steering poles sticking out of it so the the driver could steer).
These guys were members of the Hani ethnic group, the same ethnic group as the people in the village Yako. The Hani are an ethnic group who live in the border regions along Yunnan, Burma, Laos and Vietnam. They live mostly on the sides of mountains (having been pushed out of the valleys by stronger ethnic groups like the Thai and the Chinese). They lived by slash and burn subsistence farming until recently when they started making (relatively) lots of money by growing tea for Chinese people. According to legends, the Hani used to have a written language that was written on cow hide, but their ancestors were once starving, and, they ate all the cow-hide books in order to survive. From then on, they forgot their written language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hani_people
The guys giving me a ride told me all this, and then we had to get out of their tractor. They had to chop down some rainforest before the day was over, so they pointed me on towards Yako and wished me a good journey.
I didn't walk but ten more minutes before a truck stopped an asked me if I needed a ride. I told him that I was going to Yako, and he said, "I live in Yako. Do you want to stay at my place?" And within a few minutes of talking to the guy I had been invited to a wedding the village was having a few days later.
As we drove along the windy mountain dirt road, through patches of tea farms hewed out of the rainforest climbing up the mountainside, that was how my journey to the along the edge of the Chinese and Burmese states began.
I'll try and write the rest of the journey soon...
http://mapvivo.com/journey/10984
After that, I returned to China, and Lisa returned to the US. In a few weeks, I had to start my internship, so I flew down to Kunming, but I still had about two weeks before my internship started. During that time, I had to find something to do. I feared traveling because it was Chinese new year, the largest annual migration in the world. Trains are jammed packed standing room only, and things become more expensive.
So I decided to get as far away from China without actually leaving China. I headed down to Xishuangbanna. This is one of the southern-most counties in all of China, sharing a border with Vietnam, Laos and Burma. I had been here before three years before, hiking with some of my Swedish friends.
Strangely, this part of China is doesn't actually have that many 'Chinese' people. In fact, Xishuangbanna is only one third Han 'Chinese' people, another third of the population is a group of ethnic Thailanders, and the final third is a mixture of different tribal groups.
I took the a series of buses out to some Thai villages, and then on, farther out, to a little village near the China-Burma border where the pavement ends. From there, I just started walking through the bamboo forests, further and further away from civilization. I had some idea of where I was going, a village called Yako. I just didn't know how to get there. Every time I meet someone, I asked them how to get to the village and they pointed me along the right direction. I ran into some guys, and I asked them the same question. They offered to take me half way there in their 'tractor' (it was really just an engine on top a piece of sheet metal and two wheels and two steering poles sticking out of it so the the driver could steer).
These guys were members of the Hani ethnic group, the same ethnic group as the people in the village Yako. The Hani are an ethnic group who live in the border regions along Yunnan, Burma, Laos and Vietnam. They live mostly on the sides of mountains (having been pushed out of the valleys by stronger ethnic groups like the Thai and the Chinese). They lived by slash and burn subsistence farming until recently when they started making (relatively) lots of money by growing tea for Chinese people. According to legends, the Hani used to have a written language that was written on cow hide, but their ancestors were once starving, and, they ate all the cow-hide books in order to survive. From then on, they forgot their written language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hani_people
The guys giving me a ride told me all this, and then we had to get out of their tractor. They had to chop down some rainforest before the day was over, so they pointed me on towards Yako and wished me a good journey.
I didn't walk but ten more minutes before a truck stopped an asked me if I needed a ride. I told him that I was going to Yako, and he said, "I live in Yako. Do you want to stay at my place?" And within a few minutes of talking to the guy I had been invited to a wedding the village was having a few days later.
As we drove along the windy mountain dirt road, through patches of tea farms hewed out of the rainforest climbing up the mountainside, that was how my journey to the along the edge of the Chinese and Burmese states began.
I'll try and write the rest of the journey soon...
Sunday, February 21, 2010
My First White People
As I mentioned I'm going to be making these posts as a series to catch yall up on what I've been doing since January.
I've finished my mapvivo site for this trip, a website that mixes texts, pictures and google maps. If you want to see the pictures from the journey below, just click:
http://mapvivo.com/journey/10984
After travelling in around the Philippines for about a week, we did this cruise thing. I say 'cruise thing' because its hard to call what we did a cruise. The journey took us by boat from El Nido, a small tourist center on the north end of Palawan island, through an tropical archipelago sparsely populated with fishing villages and subsistence farmers over the span of five days. Here's an article on Tao expeditions that might be helpful in explaining things:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/jun/13/Philippines-boat-tour-beach-safari
Some of the islands were actually pretty much deserted islands, with rich people living on them for only two or three weeks a year, and then abandoning them for the rest of the year. Others had small fishing villages trying to eek out a living on them by selling their catch in some of the nearby market towns. None of the places we went had roads connecting them, just dirt alleyways of the town, and maybe a few dirt motorcycle paths connecting the village to other parts of the islands.
This is basically a kind of eco-tourism, a new form of tourism that encourages people to travel in environmentally and culturally sustainable ways. Thus, the guy who runs this company has a lot of projects to help the people in the area, and most of the places that we stayed were in huts attached to the villages he was 'sponsoring.' In one village, he was tripling the government salary of a teacher; before the post was unfulfilled since the salary was just too low and no one wanted to work on Bumbleflip Island for next to nothing. Now, the village is building their own school house and Tao Expeditions will soon have a teacher willing to teach there.
This kind of corporate sponsorship has made the company very popular in the area and the boss is the godfather to a lot of people on these islands. On one of the islands we were stopping at, one of his godsons was getting married and lots of folk from other islands were there to attend the wedding. One of the Brits we were sailing with broke out his guitar and we got into a little jamboree, the four British passengers enjoying their rum and the Filipinos crooning away in Tagalog on the guitar. The climax of the night occurred when the captain of our boat stumbled up to us and broke out with Elvis' "My Way." We were amazed that he could sing it so well, but it turns out that the song is so popular that some people have been murdered over the song in Karaoke bouts. See below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/world/asia/07karaoke.html?ref=world
One final story, in one of those fishing villages, we were walking along a sandy path when we happened to pass by the school house. The second graders turned from the blackboard with subjects, verbs and objects scribbled on it, and the teacher greeted us with a loud, "Hello." We responded and the children also echoed our "hello." Then the teacher informed us that we were the first white people that the children had ever seen. "Look children, their big noses are so..." she paused to think of the most polite thing that she could say "...interesting." We talked to the children for a minute or so and then headed into the village, energized knowing we might be the first Americans who had ever been there.
As we were getting back on the boat, I was just feeling like I couldn't be any farther away from everything I had ever known, like I was on the edge of the world, a world almost untouched by modern society. But I heard a song playing from a nearby radio. It was a song that had been playing everywhere in China, by a Korean Girlband now touring with the Jonas Brothers. Just before, I had thought the world had been quite large, but hearing this K-pop sensation reminded me that in a globalized world, you're never that far from what you know. And its that song that I'm going to end this post with.
Lyrics:
I want nobody nobody But You, I want nobody nobody But You
How can I be with another, I don't want any other
I want nobody nobody nobody nobody
- Nobody by Wonder Girls
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTI1MzcwOTE2.html
I've finished my mapvivo site for this trip, a website that mixes texts, pictures and google maps. If you want to see the pictures from the journey below, just click:
http://mapvivo.com/journey/10984
After travelling in around the Philippines for about a week, we did this cruise thing. I say 'cruise thing' because its hard to call what we did a cruise. The journey took us by boat from El Nido, a small tourist center on the north end of Palawan island, through an tropical archipelago sparsely populated with fishing villages and subsistence farmers over the span of five days. Here's an article on Tao expeditions that might be helpful in explaining things:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/jun/13/Philippines-boat-tour-beach-safari
Some of the islands were actually pretty much deserted islands, with rich people living on them for only two or three weeks a year, and then abandoning them for the rest of the year. Others had small fishing villages trying to eek out a living on them by selling their catch in some of the nearby market towns. None of the places we went had roads connecting them, just dirt alleyways of the town, and maybe a few dirt motorcycle paths connecting the village to other parts of the islands.
This is basically a kind of eco-tourism, a new form of tourism that encourages people to travel in environmentally and culturally sustainable ways. Thus, the guy who runs this company has a lot of projects to help the people in the area, and most of the places that we stayed were in huts attached to the villages he was 'sponsoring.' In one village, he was tripling the government salary of a teacher; before the post was unfulfilled since the salary was just too low and no one wanted to work on Bumbleflip Island for next to nothing. Now, the village is building their own school house and Tao Expeditions will soon have a teacher willing to teach there.
This kind of corporate sponsorship has made the company very popular in the area and the boss is the godfather to a lot of people on these islands. On one of the islands we were stopping at, one of his godsons was getting married and lots of folk from other islands were there to attend the wedding. One of the Brits we were sailing with broke out his guitar and we got into a little jamboree, the four British passengers enjoying their rum and the Filipinos crooning away in Tagalog on the guitar. The climax of the night occurred when the captain of our boat stumbled up to us and broke out with Elvis' "My Way." We were amazed that he could sing it so well, but it turns out that the song is so popular that some people have been murdered over the song in Karaoke bouts. See below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/world/asia/07karaoke.html?ref=world
One final story, in one of those fishing villages, we were walking along a sandy path when we happened to pass by the school house. The second graders turned from the blackboard with subjects, verbs and objects scribbled on it, and the teacher greeted us with a loud, "Hello." We responded and the children also echoed our "hello." Then the teacher informed us that we were the first white people that the children had ever seen. "Look children, their big noses are so..." she paused to think of the most polite thing that she could say "...interesting." We talked to the children for a minute or so and then headed into the village, energized knowing we might be the first Americans who had ever been there.
As we were getting back on the boat, I was just feeling like I couldn't be any farther away from everything I had ever known, like I was on the edge of the world, a world almost untouched by modern society. But I heard a song playing from a nearby radio. It was a song that had been playing everywhere in China, by a Korean Girlband now touring with the Jonas Brothers. Just before, I had thought the world had been quite large, but hearing this K-pop sensation reminded me that in a globalized world, you're never that far from what you know. And its that song that I'm going to end this post with.
Lyrics:
I want nobody nobody But You, I want nobody nobody But You
How can I be with another, I don't want any other
I want nobody nobody nobody nobody
- Nobody by Wonder Girls
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTI1MzcwOTE2.html
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Central America in Asia
It's been a while since I last posted. I apologize. I've been
quite busy. For a while, there wasn't too much interesting to say. I
was just finishing up with finals, writing papers, and what not.
Then, Lisa arrived. It had been 8 months since we had last been
together, so yall might imagine that I was somewhat excited.
After a few days of tying lose ends together, I left Nanjing. Lisa and
I traveled to Macao and Hong Kong, and then on to the Philippines. We
spent almost three week in the Philippines, and then, after a brief
stopover in Nanjing, Lisa returned to the US, and I left Nanjing for
good.
Now I'm in the south of China, just a mile or two from the Burmese
border. But more on that later. The next series of emails will try and
catch yall up on my travels, from the Philippines to here.
While in the Philippines, I was been struck by how much it reminded me
of the trip Lisa and I to Central America in the summer of 2008. Like
Central America, the Philippines was colonized by the Spaniards, but
then was dominated by the United States for most of the 20th century.
The Spanish influence appears widespread. Most people have
Spanishesque names, Romeo, Juan and Gloria. And Catholicism is big.
The few Sundays we spent there, we saw people standing outside of
cathedrals, peeking over the heads of their neighbors, trying to hear
what was being said by the priest.
But the Spanish influence is more superficial, whereas the American
influence runs deeper. American English functions as the lingua franca
in the country where almost 80 languages are spoken, and hotdogs are a
favorite breakfast dish.
This seemed to have created a culture similar to nothing I had seen in
Asia, but instead, something a lot like Central America. Rum is cheap,
$1.30 for a big bottle, and the people indulge in it, much like
Central America. Getting things done is not so important and the
somnolent atmosphere of siesta seems to hang over all activities.
10% of the country's economy comes from remissions of Filipinos
living in other countries, working on cruise ships in the Caribbean,
as nurses in Los Angeles or as maids in Oman. Filipinos who want to
work hard get out of the Philippines, because something about the
country seems to stifle opportunity.
And just in the way Central America took the US boring yellow school
bus and painted the heck out of them, Philippines took American jeeps
and converted them into 'jeepneys', about the size of a short bus but
only as high off the ground as an SUV.
Wandering through the Philippines has been strange, like a journey
back to a place you had traveled before.
Anyways, I'll tell yall more in the next post.
writing 1 mile from Burma,
Lee
quite busy. For a while, there wasn't too much interesting to say. I
was just finishing up with finals, writing papers, and what not.
Then, Lisa arrived. It had been 8 months since we had last been
together, so yall might imagine that I was somewhat excited.
After a few days of tying lose ends together, I left Nanjing. Lisa and
I traveled to Macao and Hong Kong, and then on to the Philippines. We
spent almost three week in the Philippines, and then, after a brief
stopover in Nanjing, Lisa returned to the US, and I left Nanjing for
good.
Now I'm in the south of China, just a mile or two from the Burmese
border. But more on that later. The next series of emails will try and
catch yall up on my travels, from the Philippines to here.
While in the Philippines, I was been struck by how much it reminded me
of the trip Lisa and I to Central America in the summer of 2008. Like
Central America, the Philippines was colonized by the Spaniards, but
then was dominated by the United States for most of the 20th century.
The Spanish influence appears widespread. Most people have
Spanishesque names, Romeo, Juan and Gloria. And Catholicism is big.
The few Sundays we spent there, we saw people standing outside of
cathedrals, peeking over the heads of their neighbors, trying to hear
what was being said by the priest.
But the Spanish influence is more superficial, whereas the American
influence runs deeper. American English functions as the lingua franca
in the country where almost 80 languages are spoken, and hotdogs are a
favorite breakfast dish.
This seemed to have created a culture similar to nothing I had seen in
Asia, but instead, something a lot like Central America. Rum is cheap,
$1.30 for a big bottle, and the people indulge in it, much like
Central America. Getting things done is not so important and the
somnolent atmosphere of siesta seems to hang over all activities.
10% of the country's economy comes from remissions of Filipinos
living in other countries, working on cruise ships in the Caribbean,
as nurses in Los Angeles or as maids in Oman. Filipinos who want to
work hard get out of the Philippines, because something about the
country seems to stifle opportunity.
And just in the way Central America took the US boring yellow school
bus and painted the heck out of them, Philippines took American jeeps
and converted them into 'jeepneys', about the size of a short bus but
only as high off the ground as an SUV.
Wandering through the Philippines has been strange, like a journey
back to a place you had traveled before.
Anyways, I'll tell yall more in the next post.
writing 1 mile from Burma,
Lee
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