7 Days in Tibet

I've wrapped up another leg of travels having done 6 weeks around Nepal, and am now on to the 2nd last leg before home: Tibet. This will be a significantly shorter trip as it is very difficult to get into the country muchless travel around it for any amount of time. I'm leaving Crapmandu bound for Lhasa via bus, taking the Friendship Highway that links the two countries over five days and several 5000m passes.
 
Customs into Tibet is a hell of a process, and this is even after the 3 weeks I spent waiting as my passport swirled around Nepali and Chinese hands trying to secure a visa.
First of all I forgot that I had overstayed my visa by a little...like 13days...in Crapmandu you can just go to the Nepali consulate and pay a daily rate, which is about $3US per day. At the border however, the customs officers sieze a very lucrative business opportunity. Basically they charge whatever the hell they want. This was a dumb mistake on my part as I knew I was going to be overstaying my 30day visa when I got it upon arrival, but I cheaped out and didn't want to pay for the longer one. I then shelved the issue in the archives of my brain which naturally solved the problem for long enough to forget about it.
There is an incredably stark difference between Nepal and Tibet (China).  As soon as you cross the boarder the quality of life appears to jump significantly, the road immediately became far better, largely made of concrete slabs with steel guard rails along the verticle drops and road signs. The small towns clinging to the mountain sides consisted of 4-5 story buildings, with sidewalks, street lights, and infrastructure normally associated with developed living.  
Chinese customs is more what you would expect from a border crossing, and a commy one at that. Passports were checked by army personel in the middle of the very unfriendly, concrete Bridge of Friendship (absolutely no pictures aloud) which uncerimoniously connects the two countries. We then enter a well lit plain white room with flashing electric signs, and established lines and order. After putting our bags through an xray machine that a serious looking officer wasn't paying attention to, they then go through a manual check to confiscate anything considered anti-China or pro-Tibet at which point (to my astonishment) they zip and buckle everything back up to the way they found it.  Next along the line are the typically unfriendly, unsmiling but pristinely dressed customs officers ordering people to stay behind the yellow line as they check your face, scan your passport, stamp your visa, stamp your other visa, and check your face again before returning your documents and waving you through to the baggage xray machine...again, just incase you picked up a gun or snapped a picture of the Dali Lamma since entering the white room.    
Nepali customs in contrast, is a little rundown room with counter, where people elbow their way to the front of the line on a first come first serve basis. A few 'officers' in there street clothes and no government IDs stamp passports and accept bribes...namely my bribe.
Because I had overstayed my visa I was going to have to pay for the extra days and just hope they went easy.  Our guide acted as middle man telling me they wanted US$100, I said that was rediculous and he should be ashamed to call himself buddist while he ripped off a poor tourist like that (maybe not quite like that, but I was thinking it). The guide ran off and came back saying they wanted US$70, still double the going rate. I only had Chinese money at that point so I did the conversion which came to ¥468 and would have left me with ¥32 for the rest of the trip. I told him that I'd pay ¥400 (US$59).  When he countered with ¥450 I gave our guide the ¥400 and told him to wave it in the officers face and tell him not to spend it all in one place. Over the weeks of haggling in turkey, but more so in Nepal I have found the single most effective bargining tool is the 'show or go'. If you take out the amount you want to pay and put it in front of them, their eyes immediately roll over to dollar signs and they just can't refuse. And if they are stubborn then you sigh and say 'dammit! I really wanted that too' and start walking away, they will cave 99% of the time. They just love your money too much. So sure enough, after the money wave I was relieved to be given my passport back rather than a ticket back to Crapmandu!
I assumed that i was paying for a visa extension that would bring me cleanly and legitimately up to the present day of October 9th.  Upon closer inspection however, this was not the case. What I had paid for was for them to honour my visa and wind back the date stamped for departure, so according to my passport I departed Nepal ontime on September 26th, 13 days previous.   So why you ask is corruption so widespread and difficult to eradicate? Because it works too damn well; I get what I want and they get what they want minus all the time, effort and paper work. Corruption 1, government 0.

Decpite the relatively large size of Tibet, the population is quite small. Aside from the unbelievably harsh conditions, this is in large part due to the high number of monks. There are somewhere around 200 rules that monks must abide by at all times in order to truely be a monk in the traditional sense of the faith.  This however is very difficult and the majority do not follow all these rules. There are however, four core rules that essentially form the basis of a monk's faith: do not steal, do not take life, do not tell lies, do not steal, and do not engage in sexual misconducts.  This last rule has a great influence on the population, by taking tens of thousands of eligable bachlours out of the gene pool.  So, dudes if your into the hard working leathery faced types then Tibet is calling.  
The second rule: not to take life, means  any life whatsoever. That includes plants and micro organisms as well as invisible creatures that they believe live everywhere around us.  Therefore they must walk a certain way in order to reduce body movement which kills these creatures. This rule seems to be all but impossible to live by when you think of all the living things that surround us and end up under our feet accidentally. But after visiting Tibet, it became clear that it isn't so difficult. Nothing grows here at all, we may as well be on the moon.

High point of a 5000m pass, there is a constant bitter cold wind blowing through...

...and this monk lives here collecting donations and selling prayer flags

The moon?

The Tibetan plateau sits around 4000m on average and in a rain shadow of the Himalayas so gets very little precipitation throughout the year then ontop of that it is blasted by very cold tempurtures, high winds, and intense sun unobstructed by the thinner atmosphere. Growing anything under these conditions is next to impossible, so accidentally killing things is not such a large concern when there isnt anything around to kill.  The thought of living here is beyond me and the fact that these people have done so for hundreds of years is unbelievable. But you must look at it from their eyes; eyes that have seen nothing else and know nothing else. When you are born into this life and spend it's entirety here, this stark landscape is home, your herd -be it cows, sheep, yaks, or goats- is your survival and the difficult semi nomadic lifestyle is your way of life.  The bleak expanse of nothingness that these people endure gives what they need for survival, and that's about it.  But it is a life nonetheless, and one they have adapted to and live quite well.

Potala Palace

Lhasa is actually a surprisingly nice and lush (relativley speaking) city. It's very clean, and well organized with things like street lights...and rules, unlike Nepal and a lot of the small Tibetan towns we past through.  The other thing Lhasa has is the Jokhang Temple, the most holy place in Tibetean buddism. A sacred buddist statue brought as dowry by the bride of the king responsible for bringing buddism to Tibet is housed here and is the holiest object in Tibet. It draws people from all over the country for prayer and donation.  Buddists can be found outside the monestary giving prostration which is a four step prayer. Palms are pressed together and placed on the head to cleanse the mind of any bad thoughts, on the mouth to cleanse any bad speach, and on the chest to cleanse the body of any bad acts, they then sprawl out into their stomachs and place their forehead on the ground, and repeat thousands upon thousands of times. Some people spend months in front of the monestary doing this up to 100,000 times.

Prostrators in front of Jokhang Temple

Shes a hardcore

In addition, every morning and evening, thousands of people walk a clockwise circle around the monestary murmering prayers and twirling prayerwheels.  Some of the more hardcore will inchworm their way around the monastary through prostration, hurling themselves on the ground, taking a few steps in prayer, then hurling themselves on the ground again. This monastary may be the holiest place but the centre piece of Lhasa, and all of Tibet for that matter is the Potala Palace. It is a truely spectacular sight perched on a section of rock jutting out of the flat valley floor. Potala is huge, we spent an hour there and only saw a fraction of it. Every room is incredably intricately carved and coloured with small stupas, hundreds of thousands of statues and the tomb stupas of a number of past lamas. The biggest of these tombs is 15m high and covered in over 3000kg of gold and hundreds of precious stones, gems, and diamonds. The scale of it all was amazing and incredably confusing. The complexity goes far beyond anything I will ever understand and unfortunately our guide spoke a version of Chinglish that I have never heard before so I barely understood a thing she was saying. I wasn't too worried though because walking through the rooms was basically an all inclusive picture book complete with pop-ups into the buddist culture and religion, I think I'm a visual learner anyway.
Tibet is an amazing country (don't tell the Chinese I said that) and the culture is even more so. The unforgiving landscape and weather have shaped the people and the culture into an amazing blend of unique customs and values that separate them drastically from their Nepalese and Chinese neighbours. But above all else, they have developed a resilience necessary to survive year after year.

Tibet was quick but incredably beautiful in it's own stark way and very interesting. But that's now done, the intense culture thing is done for now. On to Singapore, and Southeast Asia, I need to relax for a bit, so bring on the beach parties, cheap beer, and deepfried insects! If you don't hear from me for a while it probably means I'm still on the beach...

Take care everyone and chat soon!