The Potala does not disappoint. It is truly the wonder of the world you hope it will be. I spent a morning going through it and then an afternoon circling it.
The next morning I took a three-hour, 45-kilometer, bone-jarring journey in a broken-down old bus on roads of potholed dirt or under construction. The bus crossed the bridge in Lhasa to the south bank of the river and then went upstream along beautiful wheat and barley country at harvest time, bounded by bare, eroded mountains. Itturned off the main road to a village and then up a steep hillside on a slow series of switchbacks. Ganden Monastery came into view, nestled in a bowl-like hollow at the top of the mountain--five or six major temples. I spent the day exploring it.
The next morning I began to feel my time was running short, and I had to figure out how I was going to get out of Tibet to Kathmandu. It might take several days to arrange. I wanted to split the cost of a Land Cruiser with some other travellers. The bulletin board at the Yak Hotel had notes from several people at other hotels looking to hook up with others for the trip out. I took their names down, and went off to their hotels. But they had already checked out.
I spent the day seeing Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's old summer palace, and Sera Monastery, on the outskirts of Lhasa. More about the latter below.
By that evening I had decided not to spend days arranging a way out. I would just leave, take the public buses as far as they went, and then trust that something would appear.
Early in the next morning, I left Lhasa on the bus for Shigatse, Tibet's second largest town. Once there, I took a tractor-taxi to the other side of town and immediately boarded a bus for Gyantse. Gyantse was wonderful--a very Tibetan town of about 20,000, and not very Chinese off the one main street.
I spent a day wandering around the fortress and the monastery, dodging the dogs in the Tibetan neighborhoods, and walking out into the country where Tibetans were picnicking and harvesting crops. It was all quite beautiful.
I had a nice experience that evening. I went to a restaurant where I was the only customer. First a Tibetan young man who was raised in India talked to me, complaining bitterly about the poverty of the Tibetans in comparison to the Chinese, about what the Chinese were doing to Tibet, and about all the Chinese ``naughty girls'' in the ``red houses'' who ``have sex for money'', not a block from the elementary school. He showed me a post card propped on a high shelf that was turned toward the wall; it was a picture of the Dalai Lama. There was a round mirror on the wall with a circular neon light around its perimeter. He pulled its string, the light in front turned off, a light in back came on, and a picture of the Dalai Lama shone through. I asked what the Chinese would do if they discovered that. He said he would be arrested and beaten up and given electric shocks.
He left, and a 15-year-old Tibetan girl who worked there as a sort of waitress came in. She said she was too poor to go to school, so she would never get a good job, but she was trying to learn English. I told her she could learn English pretty well by practicing with tourists, as she was doing with me, and that could well lead to a good job in the growing tourist industry. She said she had two English books. I asked to see them. One was pretty bad--a bizarre phrase book of Buddhist mystical terminology. The other one was okay--a phrase book for people in the tourist industry. We spent about 45 minutes going through about 30 pages of it, her reading me the English and me correcting her pronunciation. Afterwards, I wrote down the ten or twelve words she had the most trouble with and had her practice each of them a dozen times or so. When I was explaining the difference between ``who'' and ``how'' to her, I wrote down in pinyin the way they are pronounced--``hu'' and ``hao''. I think that was a revelation to her. It had never occurred to her that she could write down the pronunciation of English words in a system she could understand. So she immediately took my pen, had me pronounce all the words again, and wrote down in pinyin what she heard.
I thought it was appalling that she only had two English books, so I told her I would buy another one when I got to Shigatse. What I had in mind was an elementary textbook in English for Chinese speakers. But when I got to Shigatse, it turned out that the bookstore had no such book. All their English books were far too advanced, and the clerk was surly and reluctant to help me look. I did manage to find a fairly elementary dictionary of the most common words, however, and bought that. I gave it to a German tourist on her way to Gyantse to give to the girl.