The Mysteries Of Tibet Getting There Isn’t Easy, But A Journey To This Charismatic Land Is Well Worth The Effort

It is a measure of just how inaccessible Tibet is - just how much it is a place in another world - that to go there for eight days requires the better part of three weeks.

Three weeks spent in airplanes and airports and in 24-, 48-, 72-hour layovers (in Los Angeles, Singapore, and Katmandu) waiting for visas to be processed or for the next twice-weekly flight.

But the reward is Tibet - everything that one has spent most of a lifetime imagining and yet more extraordinary still.

There was Mount Everest (from a plane window, but still awesome). There was the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s monastery, seemingly suspended in the air above Lhasa. There were monks in a monastery courtyard debating Buddhist scripture. There were yaks (and both yak butter tea and yakburgers). There was turquoise-blue Yamdrok Lake, viewed from a mountain pass that, at three miles up, is as close to the roof of the world as I am ever likely to stand.

The idea of finally, actually, going to Tibet - not just dreaming about it - came, simultaneously, to my older daughter, Moira, and me at an exhibition of photographs taken by Heinrich Harrer during his seven years in Tibet in the late 1940s.

I turned away from one of his lost-in-time photographs and remarked to Moira, probably somewhat wistfully, that it was a place where I had always wanted to go. And she said, in a take-charge kind of way, “So, let’s go.”

You know that you are bound for a fabled place when, flying from Katmandu you follow the rock-crystal wall of the Himalayas and suddenly, rising high and unmistakable behind what had appeared as pretty impressive peaks, there is Everest, as if placed there just to heighten the anticipation.

Lhasa’s airport is a long 90 minutes from the city. The only benefit, except to a security-conscious military, is that the traveler gets an early view of traditional Tibet - the walled villages, the barley fields (it was harvest time when we were there in the early fall), and the vast stretches of scrubby land contained between the mountains - before reaching the city.

That is important, because the first impression of Lhasa itself is of a second-rate Chinese city, with its commercial corridor of quickie-built storefronts filled with oddly-styled clothes not worthy of export.

The eye keeps being drawn up toward the Potala, as if in search of a reminder that it is Tibet and not China, but the odd sense of being in a frontier town, which of course it is for the Chinese, remains.

We were booked at the Lhasa Hotel, no longer managed by the Holiday Inn chain. It lacks the roughing-it atmosphere of the older hotels, but guarantees hot water, and the all-important Western breakfast for those travelers who will relish the local cuisine anytime except in the morning.

Wisely, I think, we disregarded advice to stay put at the hotel the first afternoon to allow for a gradual adjustment to the altitude (at just over 2 miles up, every traveler can expect some ill effects such as shortness of breath or headaches for a day or two). Instead, we hopped a minibus for the short ride down Lhasa’s main street, past the Potala, to the Barkhor, the Tibetan market area around the Jokhang monastery, which is the heart of old Lhasa.

Immediately, we were caught up by the Tibet we had come halfway around the world to find.

We were pulled along in the stream of pilgrims making the ritual clockwise circuit of the Jokhang, past the counters draped with red, blue, yellow, and green prayer flags, and others displaying prayer wheels, brass mandalas, and yak-bone prayer beads, past the stalls selling yak butter in hefty yellow chunks, and past the grim storefronts whose displays of teeth advertised primitive dentistry operations.

By all safe-traveler standards, we should have headed back to the Lhasa for dinner, but we took the recommendation of an American couple who had already been in Lhasa long enough to scout the local restaurants, and had sweet-and-sour noodle soup and mo-mos (the Tibetan version of Peking dumplings), washed down with the local Lhasa beer - and were none the worse for it.

While no one goes to Tibet for the food - Paris or Florence it isn’t - we fared especially well, if not memorably, at the Himalaya in Lhasa (a hearty stir-fried yak and an overdone yak burger) and at the Yuanfu in Shigatse (actually, a “fish-tasting” eggplant that is worth a recommendation).

The first day in Lhasa usually involves a visit to the Potala, the soaring white-and-ocher palace-monastery of the dalai lamas. It was a major disappointment.

Rising a thousand feet above the surrounding valley, this 13-story wood-and-stone palace built in the 17th century occupies space in a grand and monumental manner.

But when the present Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, the hundreds of monks who lived there left, too - some fleeing with him, some killed in battles with Chinese troops, many executed or imprisoned, others just dispersed and vanished. The result is that the Potala is empty and lifeless. And the fact that only a dozen or so of its thousand rooms, mostly dark and cramped chapels, are now open means that once inside, the visitor loses any sense of the scale and grandeur of building - or of the culture and society it sustained.

Fortunately, there are still a good number of “working” monasteries in Lhasa and farther afield where the disappointment of the Potala is dispelled.

By any standard, an absolute highlight was the afternoon spent at Sera Monastery just north of the city.

Not only did it survive the wave of destruction that occurred during the Cultural Revolution, but it remains the home of several hundred monks - and every afternoon, they gather in a tree-shaded courtyard where individual teachers pose questions to the three or four monks who are their particular students.

As the session begins - the monks refer to it as “debating” - the teachers rise and face their students who sit on the stone paving of the courtyard. Then, slapping their hands together and often lunging toward the students, the teachers pose their questions. Within moments, the entire courtyard is alive with athletic movement and the sound of shouted questions and murmured answers.

Visitors are welcome to sit quietly on the sidelines, and while our guide could provide only the most general description of the dialogue between teachers and students, the sheer excitement and immediacy of the event opened a window into a culture that is threatened but not lost.

In a sense, the debating at Sera - and the unexpectedly large number of young monks there and at other monasteries we visited in Gyantse and Shigatse - validated the fervor of ordinary Tibetans who were a constant presence in the Jokhang and other monasteries, making the circuit of the altars, lighting yak-butter candles, and prostrating themselves before images of the Buddha, of bodisattvas and other deities, and of the “great” fifth and 13th dalai lamas (but never, of course, even pictures of the current, exiled Dalai Lama).

After three days in Lhasa, we headed for the market town of Gyantse, which lies some 160 miles southwest of Lhasa. It’s a five-hour drive on perilous dirt roads over the mountains - several hundred feet straight over the side with no guard rails - in one of the Toyota Land Cruisers that are the vehicles of choice throughout Tibet.

The road crested at the 3-mile-high Kamba-la Pass overlooking the turquoise-blue Yamdrok Lake, which coils across some 45 miles in what from the sky would appear as a winged dragon. It is a “dead” lake, one unplenished by rivers - although there is runoff from the mountains and glaciers that surround it - and is also one of four lakes considered holy by Tibetans. But the Chinese have announced plans to drain the lake for a hydroelectric power project, drawing protests similar - although not as well known in the West - to those raised against the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtse River.

Our guide, a native Tibetan, volunteered one of his rare political comments when we asked him whether there were fish in the lake - a question prompted by noting a singular lack of ducks, gulls, or other waterfowl.

There were fish, he told us, but since it was a holy lake, Tibetans did not fish there. “Only the Chinese do,” he said, “and we do not like that any more than the dam project.”

We stopped at the height of the pass and for the first time felt the chill of the high mountain winds that were ruffling the prayer flags flying from poles wedged into the rocks.

That whole day was a series of on-the-road adventures. Twice we had to stop while road repair crews - men and women from nearby villages - filled in potholes and wash-outs. Then, in the early afternoon the road led into the midst of a dam construction site and as our driver dodged around construction equipment, we were struck by the hierarchy of headgear - the Chinese Army supervisors and civilian engineers had hard hats, but among the locally recruited laborers, the men were bareheaded and the women had brightly colored woven scarves.

We arrived in Gyantse in mid-afternoon in time to visit the Palhkor Monastery and the nearby Kumbum stupa - two 15th-century structures that together make up the most important repository of Tibetan art. The monastery and stupa lie at the foot of a small (by Tibetan standards) hill over which snakes a small-scale version of China’s Great Wall.

The monastery is a dark, cramped place but in one chapel my eye caught a wall painting that remains indelibly in my mind - a small figure of a naked man, an expression of grief and sorrow on his face, his arms crossed on his breast, who is being hoisted shockingly, on a pole held in the grip of a demonic figure.

Leaving the monastery, we walked the mile into town along a broad roadway, paved with large granite blocks and bordered by traditional Tibetan houses, most of them with prayer flags fluttering from the rooftop, and by storefronts that have not been replaced by the jerry-built Chinese-style commercial blocks that line the main streets in Lhasa and Shigatse - and which sell things people use, like bridles and saddles, farm tools, and cooking pots.

The second-most-asked question since our return from Tibet - the first is whether it is completely overrun by Chinese influence, and I have tried to suggest that it hasn’t been - is whether we trekked.

The answer is no, for two simple reasons. Trekking in Tibet requires a commitment of more than a month - three weeks actually trekking and a week getting acclimated in Lhasa, plus the getting-to-and-from time - and we didn’t have that much time. And before trekking in the vast, empty countryside, I would want to know Lhasa and to have explored the monasteries and the marketplaces.

So that pretty much means that a return is at least being considered.