We were instructed to lay our bags opposite where we were lined up. ‘Why?’ ‘Just do it, OK.’ I left everything, including a plastic bag stuffed with crackers, bananas and water. A man with a hose came along and drenched it in disinfectant. ‘That’ll improve the taste,’ I told him. We were made to step in single file across the Immigration window, and were rebuked if we stepped too fast. I thought of Russia and the USA, Syria and the Gulf states, Myanmar and North Korea. Is Orwell’s oligarchical collectivism the ideal state of the post-modern world, its dark projection and unholy wish? Of course it is. Only idiots believe that globalization can actually loosen the grip of passport control and identity checks, opening the world up to carnival and endless inter-continental clubbing. This is the age of CCTV, metal-detectors and tazer guns. ‘You may stand here,’ a Chinese officer in a leaf-green uniform said—at least I think he said that. Whatever he said, he said it very politely. (Another officer would discreetly take my photograph when we left Tibet.) Coincidentally, the word ‘courtesy’ has roots in medieval law whereby a man gained custodianship of his dead wife’s inheritance—rather than the lesser violence of courtly love; the word ‘polite’ derives its buttoned-up fury from the Latin ‘politus,’ signifying neatness, order, discipline. The clay must fit the mould, not the mould the clay.
Round the corner, a row of moulds waited. This was a fleet of identical beige Land Cruisers. One of these would be taking T and I (and two others, as agreed upon with the agent in Kathmandu) up to Zhangmu—or Dram, as Tibetans called it—and thence to Lhasa, or so I thought. But some sort of altercation was taking place. The brother was having courteous words with another man. This man had a ponytail, North Face trekker’s gear, and the shriller voice. They spoke in English for our benefit. The road from Zhangmu to Nyalam was nearly impassable, due to landslides, and so we would have to traverse it in four-wheel drive jeeps, not the coach everyone had paid for. This meant we would each have to pay an extra 10 US dollars. I say ‘each’ and ‘we’ no longer meaning T and me (and the two others) but a company of 30 or more. (This eventuality had not begun to dawn on me when we’d been herded on to the bus—its roof bent double with backpacks—but only a few minutes ago, when the brothers addressed us all as one.) ‘What? But I thought we’d paid for a jeep already!’ This supposition proved as grounded as the suggestion that a yeti was presently making water on the other side of the road. The shrill man, whom I will call Mosca (he would be our Tibetan guide), grew shriller. Some of us began to smell a rat, though none of us could be sure where it was, or on which side of the border it had died. ‘What the hell is going on?’ a white giant enquired closely of a tiny brown man. Another man, hair apparently filled with static, told Mosca what he thought of him (‘Cheat! Brigand!’), then strode about striking operatic poses (‘Ladrón! Ratero!’). ‘You always do this,’ the brother told Mosca, folding his arms across his chest and staring off into the distance with trembling lip. ‘Every time.’
This episode could be taken as a mis-en-scenic foreshadowing of what we were getting ourselves into, or of what had been ignored in all those choices we’d made in getting this far. It was not possible to enter Tibet as an individual tourist. You needed a group visa, entrusting your life and luggage to a party or parties unknown. You might have to share a bedroom with a grotesquely tattooed and pierced Eastern European child of nature, a trio of excitable anthropologists with Inspector Clouseau accents and the habit of delivering off-key versions of 60s love-songs during those long boring intervals between sleep, chummy Australian New Agers with pencil and paper games, home-videos and photographs (‘See that?’—passing over a picture of kangaroos feeding in front of ghostly gum trees—‘That’s our garden’), German corporate lawyers dropping out to travel round the world on pogo-sticks, a Portuguese-Canadian-Scottish freelance journalist with improbable stories about former wives (‘chased me down the street, brandishing a cleaver’), Italian sweethearts, Egyptian spiritual voyagers, piratically scarfed Korean hippies (‘Where do you come from?’ ‘Here and there, dude… Korea at the moment’), Aid workers from Arizona and Sri Lanka, a recently unbuttoned Something-in-the-City busily acquiring a conscience, an ethically promising future and a Asian girlfriend, a mild-mannered teacher from Hyderabad, or a rude and intolerant one from Kuwait.
But this was where globalization, in its hyperreal incarnation, really did swing. We’d all used the Internet and its myriad sites to get here; we’d been brought together in ways unthinkable 20 years earlier. Instead of being packaged and wrapped by Thompsons or TibetTours dot com, we were long-tail speculators, micro trend-makers, niche-venturers, forming our own high altitude tribe, based on little more than an affinity for momos and prayer wheels. We hadn’t known each other beforehand, we all had different origins and accents, yet we were happy to be propelled along at nightfall, 2 or more miles above the earth, holding hands and making bad jokes in worse English, falling out and making up, skimming flash-floods and scree, gulping oxygen-depleted air and garlic soup, being whisked past monasteries and mountains, rivers and rimpoches, till we reached Lhasa and the massive sunlit embodiment of a 200 year-old collective fantasy. We might tell each other about those who’d been there before us, braving blizzards and bandits, butter candles and butter tea, high altitude sickness and hyperthermia. They were part of our tribe, the ancestors. Those that we could name, Henry Savage Landor, Alexandra David-Neel, Captain Francis Younghusband or Brad Pitt (posing as Heinrich Harrer), had had a thrillingly rough time at the hands of the affronted inhabitants. It wouldn’t be so different for us. This was still the Forbidden Land.
Tibet was part of China, and had been since 1950 when Mao sent in his armies to liberate the people from feudal oppression, Buddhist superstition and Western imperialism. According to Mary Craig’s Tears of Blood, liberation involved the public shaming of monks (‘thamzing’), forced sterilisations of women and girls and forced abortions, torture and confinement in prison camps of those who didn’t want to be liberated, the coercion, beating and incarceration of the old Panchen Lama, the kidnapping and subsequent re-incarceration of the new one somewhere inside Beijing, the flight into exile of thousands to Nepal and India, including the Dalai Lama, the re-distribution of Tibetan children into torrid industrial zones in Hubei province for educational purposes, and the settlement of vast populations of Han Chinese in the central valleys of Tibet. Between 1950 and 1970, 1.2 million Tibetans—or one fifth of the total population—died as a result of murder, starvation, torture, disease, or imprisonment; between 1950 and 1970, 1.2 million Han immigrants settled in the towns of eastern and southern Tibet. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), hundreds of monasteries were destroyed, and of those that survived, their images and paintings were defaced or tossed into rivers or melted down for their gold. It was perhaps unsurprising that Mosca should try to extort money from us. He was only adapting to his paymasters’ techniques; he was trying to survive. I was inclined to pay up. But things are never quite as simple or clear-cut as we would like them to be. One of our party, Robin, later told me that the whole 10 dollars business was a set up, involving Mosca and the Nepali brothers, no one else. ‘Really?’ ‘Of course it was.’ Robin was a chartered accountant. He must know about such things. I thought of Mosca’s expensive trekking gear and flash ponytail. ‘Oh,’ I said.
It was pitch black. We were now about 2500 metres, or 1.5 miles, above sea-level. Our convoy of jeeps was parked somewhere just below the Himalayan peaks amidst wet opaque clouds. There really was, it turned out, something wrong with the road, but it wasn’t a romantic landslide, product of the monsoon and steep slopes; the road didn’t exist, or rather was still being built. Only one-way traffic was allowed along what passed for a track for 12 hours at a time. Sometimes we got out of the jeeps to smoke or urinate or just stretch our legs. Robin got out to feud with Mavis, in clattering thin-lipped whispers. Armande hung around the American aid workers, serenading them with ‘Twenty-four hours from Tulsa,’ in a full-lipped screeching falsetto. Troy carried a tripod and a selection of Leicas, stopping every now and then to photograph the drizzle. There was something both heroic and sinister about Troy. He could turn the most boring activity into a thing of utmost fascination. He had gaunt features and a hoodie, like a Grey Rider or the killer in Scream. He showed me a dull smudge in his viewfinder. ‘If you lengthen the exposure,’ he murmured darkly and left the sentence hanging. In the jeep, they were watching a movie on the inboard DVD player. Brunhilde and Stig craned over the head-rests, eyes popping with excitement. ‘Terminator in Tibet,’ Stig said (he pronounced Tibet ‘Tee-bet’). ‘Who would believe it?’ ‘Oh wow,’ Brunhilde said. ‘Awesome!’ Brunhilde had been travelling in India and Nepal. She had a rope of hair coiled round the back of her head like a character in a tale by the Brothers Grimm, and a jumble of pins stuck through her lower lip. I asked her if she was making up for months of sensory deprivation.
The journey to Nyalam was made more spectacular by the fact that we couldn’t see any of it. We couldn’t see the wall-like mountain, on the right, or the sheer vertical drop to the left. We could see, in the headlights, the gouged plunging track and the sudden spray on the windscreen, and we could hear and feel the waterfalls as they bounced off the roof. Haphazardly parked bulldozers loomed out of the night, along with the odd infernal campsite—blue tarpaulin drawn over lanterns and flickering fires around which demonic figures seemed to prance and gesture with pitchforks—where, presumably, the road-workers had retired to sleep. I noticed a pair of naked legs stretched out into the road. They didn’t even twitch as we careered by. On one bend, in the sweep of the lights, we saw a group of men in black suits standing together, shoulders hunched in the rain. They were all smoking, with the conformity and disinterest of the clerks and archivists Yiyun Li describes in A Thousand Years of Prayers. They looked as if they were waiting for something normal to come along like a bus or a train. Perhaps there was a block of offices nearby. Perhaps they’d just been returned by satisfied aliens.
I felt ill with lack of sleep and the strain of sitting bolt upright. Or was it the beginnings of altitude sickness? We had climbed to more than 2 miles above London and New York. Another guide called Goli had joined us and now frolicked amongst the bags in the back. He was babbling something lewd about yaks and yonis. When I lost interest, he told me what I was missing outside—Chomolongma, or the Princess Cow, also known as Everest (‘most picturesque at this elevation’), Gauri Shankar, Cho Oyu, Milarepa’s Cave—the cave where the minstrel monk had sojourned 900 years ago, subsisting on nothing but weeds till he’d turned a vivid chlorophyl green—and the terrifying gorges where so many vehicles (‘including Land Cruisers, Purse, hee-hee’) had come to grief. When we got to Nyalam, we had to wait around while Mosca went to inspect the hotel we were supposed to be staying in. When he finally reappeared, an hour later, it was only to tell us that we wouldn’t be staying there after all. We would have to go on to Tingri, 3 hours distant. We would sleep in a guest house there. ‘What? But we need to sleep now! It’s 3 a.m.!’ ‘No rooms! You are too many!’ Mosca stared at us in outrage for being too many. Goli stood beside me banging his arms against his sides possibly to beat off the cold, possibly in voiceless mirth. Just before he vanished forever, leaving me with the uncomfortable feeling that I’d imagined him, he said, ‘Nyalam means “Gateway to Hell”.’ His titter seemed to follow me down the road.
Tingri was a jerry-built hamlet, held together by breezeblocks, cement and corrugated iron, not quite the ‘photogenic huddle of Tibetan homes’ the guidebook spoke of. (Lonely Planet really screwed up on Tibet.) The guest house seemed modelled on some poorly drawn story-book picture of a khan or caravanserai—a common room and kitchen, a row of bedrooms, a squat-toilet and a few storerooms hypotenused around a heap of bricks and churned up earth—rather than folk-memory. Most of the party passed out around a stove fed by yak dung and goat droppings. The rest of us crept into freezing little rooms with rudimentary doors, keeping our clothes on, and trembled on the verge of sleep for a few hours, wallets under our pillows, dagger at our sides. Ahab, the Portuguese-Canadian Scotsman, had eloquent dreams. He got up and reeled about the room, groping at the curtains. ‘Santa Maria, Agnes!’ he cried, ‘I only went round to borrow her murthering kettle!’ When he realised he was awake, and that I was too, he said he felt out of sorts because of the altitude sickness pills he’d been taking. His hands had taken on a life of their own. They flew up in front of his face and seemed to claw the air. ‘See? Bloody things.’ Swallowing three Immodium capsules so I wouldn’t have to use the toilet, I climbed out of my own sack. T woke up, her eyes wild as a hare’s.
In the common room, people were buying bottles of water to counter dehydration. ‘Five litres already I have drunk,’ Brunhilde told me. ‘Really? And how many litres in the toilet you have left?’ Her piercings seemed to have linked together during this pit-stop, causing her lower lip to bulge oddly. ‘Is that Tiger Balm?’ one of the Germans asked. ‘Boots lip balm,’ I said, and watched as the huge man smeared his chest with it. Ah, the shared cigarette, the cards in the candle-lit barn. Someone took a picture—rows of eyes, red-eyed from the flash, dissheveled faces peeping out of sleeping bags, Tristram, the man with the kangaroo garden, helping his mistress to her feet, the operatic Castilian gobbling soup, Alphonse, a monolingual Frenchman, performing the necessary grin.
One of the Poles staggered to the door, gripping his temples and moaning softly. Robin, gingery features quivering with perception and poetry, told me later that Tingri was the best place we’d stayed in. The Tibetans had round wind-blackened cheeks. The dress of the woman who fed dung into the stove was patterned with roses. The man who sold soup and water looked like Graham Greene. I caught a glimpse of Mosca lounging in a private room, hair unbound. A girl was trimming his toe-nails. Outside, the light hurt my eyes. Henk, a shaven-headed Dutchman, had put on John Lennon shades and a yellow plastic mac. He stood framed against the knife-edge of the hills to the west, large Beano-comic ears tuned to the field mice. A boy wobbled by on a chunky iron bike. His cheeks were red with ochre (ochre in Tibet, thanakha in Burma: mental note). A yak in the fields looked like a pony with a number of old carpets thrown over it. There was a stony plain to the south. A lean black dog was running across it. Greta, from Switzerland, sat alone on a rock, Garboesque, one knee held in her hands, the corner of her mouth turned up in an enigmatic smile. She had cherry-red hair, startling in the strange light. This place was all sky, white and depthless. It shrunk everything below it, and expanded correspondingly. To the east, I could see the Himalaya, two or three insignificant triangles tipped with snow, about to submerge below the strange whiter-than-blue welkin.
The road had become a proper road. It was called the Friendship Highway, built to facilitate the transportation of goods from Nepal to Lhasa and Sichuan and back. The Chinese had not only provided Tibetans with roads and track; they had also brought electricity, plumbing, hospitals, schools, and vast smoking factories. Tibet had been yanked out of the Middle Ages, carried at a brisk pace through the colonial and atomic periods and set down, rubbing its eyes, in modern free market economy post-Mao industrial China. The Chinese had just opened the door to tourism, mainly via the Sichuan-Tibet highways, Qinghai-Tibet railroad and China Airways. Peter Hopkirk, in his Trespassers on the Roof of the World says that it is now package tourism that disturbs the equanimity of the Tibetans. He adds: ‘Just how they feel when they see coach-loads of inquisitive foreigners peering into the Dalai Lama’s private quarters in the Potala it is impossible to say.’ But just who is Hopkirk talking about? Who are these impenetrable Tibetans of his? Most of the people we would meet after Tingri were Han Chinese. There would be no Tibetans in the Potala, only Chinese, swarming and bumptious. The Tibetans on the Barkhor square were sellers of trinkets and fake gems,
only too happy to see us sweep down upon them behind the waving guidons of our Moscas and Golis.At some point in the early hours, cold stratospheric light subjecting the landscape to its rippling swimming-pool gleams, we stopped to view the highest point we would reach. We were some 5 miles above sea-level. It was extremely unpleasant. The wind tore at the prayer flags that marked the spot, making an ugly cracking sound. That comment of Hui-Neng, sixth patriarch of Ch’an Buddhism, beloved by Zen anthologists (‘Is it the flag that moves? Is it the wind? Neither. It is your mind’), recurred to me. I tottered about, trying to photograph my mind moving the flags.
I felt nauseous from exhaustion and headache. My pee came out in an octogenarian trickle. A snow-capped peak off to the right belonged to the Princess Cow. One of the French troubadors cut an ungainly caper, crashing into a line of flags. I saw his boots, their concentric patterned soles, as he dove over the edge of the world, trailing blue and white triangles. One of the circumnavigators threw up in a ditch, his hands planted on his knees. He worked hard, like a pump, squirting regular jets. Troy took the pictures. We passed fields of what looked like rape in flower, though Mavis thought they might be chick-peas. Mavis was travelling with Robin. They hadn’t spoken since Zhangmu. Mavis wanted to get into touch with her spirituality, and had come to Tibet to draw energy from its power-points (I resisted the temptation to ask her whether she’d brought an adaptor); Robin, as far as I could tell, just wanted a shag. Mavis hoped to go on to Kalaish, after Lhasa, in order to circumambulate the holy mountain with the pilgrims. ‘What, on your belly?’ We saw no sign of barley, source of the tsampa porridge Mavis liked to order for breakfast, but perhaps the barley season had ended. In the early years of the liberation, I had read, the Chinese had caused a famine by making the farmers substitute wheat for barley, wheat being more suited to the palates of the immigrant workers. Nowadays, Tibetans were also growing sorghum, mustard and millet. But we saw none of these crops either. We only saw fields of yellow flowers, above which plastic bags flocked, like a BritArt update of a Van Gogh painting. Mavis pointed out the brown blocks the Tibetans piled on the tops of walls. She wondered what they were. ‘What do you think they are?’ She had a faraway tranced voice. That, Mavis? That is yak shit, left there to dry. It is the only fuel available at these altitudes. Our agronomy-for-tourists lesson over, we arrived at another checkpoint. A gale was blowing. The rain was horizontal. The soldiers (and Mavis, too, I suspect) enjoyed watching me sprint through the puddles as my umbrella turned inside out and took wing.
There was one more ‘guest house,’ in a place called Lhatse, where some of us managed to sleep properly and even enjoy a large unhampered dump. There were no lights though, and most of us appeared to have missed the hole in the floor. This made for a slippery night for those, like Brunhilde, who had imbibed their recommended 5 litres of water. I was awoken more than once by heavy crashes and anguished cries. The owner of the guest house had a turquoise stone plugging the lobe of one ear and the filthiest shirt I had ever seen. He delivered Mavis’ tsampa and butter tea with a high-pitched yodel and a sort of flamenco twirl. Bits seemed to fly off him. Brunhilde and some of the women washed themselves at a stoup before we set off. Witold, the sick Pole, stared across the breakfast table like a man about to be executed. I munched my bun with considerable care. At the other table some baby-faced English mountaineers were practising that plummy stentorian ragging of the meek and mild that Tory MPs take for confidence and a sign of leadership qualities. Mosca didn’t take us to see Phuntsoling monastery, where the heretical scholar Dolpopa had explored the notion of emptiness, or the red fortifications above it with their views of a ruined dzong (fort) and the Yarlung Tsangpo river (Brahmaputra), or to Jonang kumbun (kumbum=chorten filled with statuary and paintings), just a bit farther on, prototype for the famous one at Gyantse. Perhaps these were unsuitable for viewing.
Things got better after Lhatse though, accommodation-wise at any rate. In Shigatse and Gyantse, we slept in real hotels and were able to see the sites in broad daylight.
But the monasteries—Tashilhunpo and Pelkor Chode—and the dzong at Gyantse which Francis Younghusband and troop had stormed and overcome on their way to Lhasa—had been converted into picture postcard settings for the chattering classes; these had come in coachloads from Lhasa. 
The locals looked as if they were wearing costumes. There were ranks of souvenir stalls outside; Chinese in RayBans and Gucci shades posed beside elderly girning monks or my blonde daughter; nobody took their shoes off. The monks quickly gathered in the assembly hall to chant amidst floating incense smoke. It was performance, not prayer. Shaven-headed bouncers prowled the edges shaking piggy banks, pointing at the signs urging visitors to pay 10 or 15 yuan for a snapshot. Mosca kept up a steady bleat as we trudged around each temple, the thirteenth dalai lama, the fourteenth dalai lama, the panchen lama, the once, now and future Buddha, the gold leaf on the statues, the hand-woven books etc. One of the Poles made a tactless remark to the giants about the swastikas. Ludwig, a big swaggering youth with too many teeth in his mouth, said the arms were bent the wrong way. We passed on. At one point T and I and Ahab and Fang (another mysterious guide who had joined us at Tingri) split off from the rest to go across country back to the Friendship Highway, rather than follow the road. We passed through crumbling mud-brick villages, and were chased by packs of slavering dogs. The track vanished altogether in the hinterland, and we bucked and slid past elegant black sand dunes. Goats and ragged men with staves watched us go by, sharing the same expressions of wonderment or derision. When we finally reached the Friendship Highway, and Ahab had accepted that we weren’t being diverted to a camp of bandits or hostage-takers (Fang and the driver could not speak English), we stopped to urinate. On the way back to the jeep I saw a girl in quilted leggings run across the road towards us. She stood some way off, clutching an exercise book, pretending to be interested in a section of ditch. I went over and said hello (‘tashi dele’). She looked up after much cajoling, squinting above apple-red cheeks, and showed me her book. It was filled with lines of beautifully drawn Tibetan script. After I had finished admiring her art and industry, calling over T to bear witness, she took the book and sped back across the road. It was a kind of visitation. Only Mandarin was taught in the schools. Tibetan was forbidden. (The standard tactic of those wishing to impose one culture, one nation, one motherland, on recalcitrant minorities is to deprive them of their tongues.) This was a small moment of resistance; it is recorded here, not without applause and sorrow.
And so finally we came to Lhasa. It lay at the end of a vast U-shaped valley, through which the Yarlung Tsangpo flowed before making an abrupt turn and flowing back the way it had come. The water was scummy at the edges, dense with soft drinks cans, cigarette packs and plastic bags. No fish jumped. Wild life, I suddenly thought, was rather thin on the ground in Tibet. Lhasa was a city modelled on the broad clean grid systems of communist countries and the USA. It even had the same concrete blocks, telecommunications towers, cars, tourist rickshaws, ‘Walk Now’ signs and whistle-blowing traffic cops. An eye-watering smog hung over the city. There were sex shops (selling a range of inflatable dolls and penis substitutes for the adventurous), standardised postcards (those rich velvet blue skies and glaring white buildings, those walnut-brown and -creased faces), rows of souvenir stalls in the Barkhor square, men prostrating themselves as they circumambulated the Jokhang and environs, taxi ranks, banks, money-changers, Internet shops, international restaurants (Cantonese, Sichuanese, Pekinese, Tibetan, Thai, Nepalese, French, American) hawkers of gems and tantric scrolls, and extraordinary notices in English. It was like downtown London or New York. At least the breakfast was authentic. It was that white bun and sloppy omelet again. All the other tour groups could choose from a buffet. Mosca returned my gaze innocently.
Robin thought the Jokhang was the best monastery we’d visited. ‘I like it too,’ T said unwisely. ‘Why?’ Robin struck a politically correct pose, eyebrow cocked. ‘Um, it’s actually used by the locals?’ ‘Right, good, cool.’ When he was sharing a lonely meal with us, revealing all about Mavis and the trials he’d been through, Robin began using a self-consciously ‘youthful’ argot. ‘Wicked! Well fit!’ he shrieked insanely, whenever he saw an opening in T’s conversation. Ahab would like to have gone on to Sikkim to interview the nationalists—he’d once done a one-on-one with the president of Azerbaijan—but he was feeling too woozy and frail. Ahab looked like Del Boy in Only fools and Horses, gone to seed. He was also a bit of a card, chatting up monolingual local women and causing extraordinary offence. He called Fang and the driver ‘bloody fools’ for not being able to tell him the name of a river. When I laughed at his mugging, he joined in. So did Fang and the driver. Witold was short-sighted. When he looked at the others, which he did rather too closely for comfort, he stared as if examining something strange in a jar or an anus. He was ill most of the time, spending nights hunched over a squat toilet. He sent me an email afterwards claiming that this had been ‘my best trip in my life.’ Tristram worked as games show host for charitable institutions. He had the patter and what the Tory MPs would identify as leadership potential. He kept everyone on the coach entertained, following up Mosca’s announcements with several of his own. His wife affected ethnic dress and broke down in floods of tears in the Potala palace when she entered the Dalai Lama’s rooms. Armande was good looking. He liked girls, and thought girls must like him. I remember a scream in one of the palace rooms, and a Chinese girl come running out.
The Potala was the end of the journey. When we came down, we came across a befuddled wild goat on the path. It sprang, Ibex-like, up the slope. ‘Look at that’ I said. ‘Wild life!’ A Chinese tourist coming down behind me overheard and said, ‘There are two more. Can you see? Up there.’ ‘What is it called? Do you know?’ ‘Tibetan goat? I don’t know the name in English.’ He was with his girlfriend. They’d come from Beijing by plane. He’d picked up his English in America. How did he like Lhasa? ‘Beautiful. I hope it retains its character.’ He looked well-fed. His girlfriend clung to him, smiling. We smiled back, global suburbanites sharing a moment.
