The bus line gave out in Lhatse. I'd have to find some other way to travel. I thought back in Lhasa that it would be easy enough to catch a ride with some Land Cruiser that was already taking tourists to the border and had an extra seat. That afternoon I saw some Italian tourists and I struck up a conversation, tried to summon up all the charm I am capable of. I won them over, but I had to get the permission of their group leaders. I won them over, but I had to get the permission of the driver. He complained that the shock absorbers were worn, and the Land Cruiser couldn't take that much weight.
That was what I encountered for the rest of my trip out of Tibet. Someone, the guide, the driver, the group leader, someone always had a reason I could not be taken along. Back in my youth when I was hitchhiking around the United States and Europe, I had a philosophy of life that made asking for rides easy. Now I just felt like a beggar. I hated having to plead for a ride, and I hated putting other people in the uncomfortable position of having to turn me down. I hated it that whenever I started up a conversation with someone, I had to calculate the best moment to ask.
So the next morning I went out to the ``Friendship Highway'' and stuck my thumb out. I stood there for about half an hour and two trucks passed. Then a jeep stopped on the other side of the road and the driver and his young helper asked me if I wanted to go back to Shigatse. I said no, but I'd pay them 200 yuan ($24) if they'd take me to Tingri, one day from the Nepalese border. They said yes.
This part of the road was the worst of the entire trip. The driver, just a kid really, was pretty good. He charged through the puddles without stopping. He rode ruts on the rims if they were deeper than his clearance. He easily passed several Land Cruisers that were stuck in the mud. But then he got overconfident, and charged into a long stretch of deep mud on a curve without checking it out beforehand. Halfway along the ruts got very deep and the edges of the ruts were too slippery to hold the car, and he slipped in and ended up propped up on the mound between the ruts with his wheels spinning freely.
We got out and tossed rocks under the wheels and tried pushing, but the car stayed where it was. Soon half a dozen trucks had lined up behind us, unable to get past. Finally, the truck driver just behind us got impatient. He pulled forward, made contact with the jeep's bumper, and pushed it through to dry land, scraping its bottom along the rocky mud.
There is a town called Shekar that is also called New Tingri, for some reason, about 80 kilometers before the real Tingri, nothing more than a hotel and a few roadside restaurants. We stopped there for lunch, and then the driver started to take my suitcase out, saying this was Tingri. I objected and insisted he drive on. Then he turned toward the hotel, and I objected again. Finally he proceeded on in the right direction. But about a kilometer out of town, just before the crest of a hill, he stopped again. His helper got out and walked to the top of the hill to peek over. Then he tried to explain something to me that included the gesture of a salute. I insisted we go on, and with some reservation, he did. Just over the top of the hill, I could see the police post.
We parked behind a row of trucks there and the two boys went to check in. A few minutes later they returned with a Chinese soldier. The soldier managed to explain to me that the boys did not have the passports to travel beyond this post. I told him that then he had to get me a ride in one of those trucks. I was polite but demanding. I figured at this point my leverage was that if he didn't get me a ride, I would be his problem. I followed him into the police post where the truck drivers were sitting around eating and drinking tea. I said I would pay the boys 100 yuan for bringing me this far, and I'd pay a truck driver the other 100 yuan. Then I asked where the toilet was and walked there slowly, giving them time to discuss the offer among themselves. When I got back, the soldier pointed out the truck driver who would take me and said because of the difference in the roads, I should give the boys 150 yuan and the truck driver 50 yuan.
The rest of the way to Tingri was a good smooth gravel road with no mud.
In Tingri it was the same story with the Land Cruisers. None of them had any room, even the retired American man traveling alone. We had a good, bantering conversation before I asked, but when I asked, he closed up and looked away. Every truck driver I asked for a ride to the border town of Zhang Mu just laughed at me; I don't know for sure that any of them understood a word I said, even the name of the town.
But the view of Everest and its neighbors from Tingri was impressive.
The hotels in town were more like caravansarais--a rectangle of mud brick rooms with dirt floors around a central courtyard with a well on one side of the courtyard and a pit toilet in a corner. There were no locks on the doors, so I put an oxygen cannister I was traveling with just inside my door. Sure enough, around one in the morning, someone tried to get into my room, knocked over the cannister, and woke me up. I yelled at him and he quickly withdrew.
The next morning I went out to the road again, with little hope and much desparation. I knew of every vehicle in town and I had already asked their drivers for a ride. After about fifteen minutes a truck with three men in the front seat turned out of one of the hotels. I gave the driver a quick sequence of three gestures--the thumb for hitchhiking, rubbing the tips of the fingers together in the universal gesture for money, and pointing to the back of the truck. He stopped. I offered him 100 yuan ($12) for a ride to the border. He said 150 ($18). I knew that was too much but I didn't feel I was in a position to bargain, so I said yes.
The first thing I had to do was alter my environment. The back of the truck was completely enclosed, so I would have had no view on one of the most spectacular roads in the world. The back of the truck had a wooden panel that came up to about waist level. Two side flaps of canvas were tied together in the middle. A top flap came down to about mid-chest level. I untied the side flaps and pushed them aside and tucked them in. I rolled up the top flap to above head level and pinned it up there with a safety pin I had in my daypack. So now I had a window about two feet wide and three feet high, and I spent the day looking out. Of course, it is always a bit disconcerting when you look out backwards in a vehicle and see not where you are going but where you have been. But I tried to convince myself that I was seeing just as much.
The road was bumpy, so I had to stand for 200 kilometers, looking out my window, my hands grasping the top of the wooden panel, my knees flexed, my feet ready to dance in any direction to keep my balance as we hit the bumps. I soon learned that when the truck slowed down to almost a complete stop, that was no time to relax. The worst of the bumps were imminent. Only once or twice in the whole trip was I thrown against the side panel.
There was a half-inch-deep layer of dry loose dusty dirt covering the floor of the back of the truck, and after a few bumps it covered my suitcase and my daypack and me. By me, I mean my coat, my hair, my face. I took off my glasses when I could no longer see the scenery and they were brown with dirt. I blinked to tear and clear some the dust out of my eyes, and when I wiped the tear away, it was mud. I took a few shakey pictures of the Everest Range at sunrise from my little window, but soon my camera was so covered with dirt I thought I'd better keep it put away to save it from more damage.
There were kilometer markers all along the road, so I could tell how far I had to go, and I charted the kilometers against my physical state. I figured for the first 80 kilometers or so, I was at 100%. In the next 50 or 60 kilometers I dropped down to about 90%. After 150 kilometers, I was down to 80%, and in the last ten kilometers, I plummeted rapidly to 70%.
When I travel I tend get get very goal-driven and assertive, sometimes verging over into aggressiveness. This then becomes anger. Several years ago I noticed that I was often, when traveling, going through the world angry. I figured that didn't make sense, so after that, whenever I caught myself angry, I would take take a deep breath, calm myself down, and start enjoying my life again. I was angry in the back of the truck, but when I tried to calm myself down, I realized I shouldn't. Anger was the only emotion that could provide me with the energy I needed to survive this experience.
When I verbalized the anger to myself, it always seemed to come out, ``I'm too old for this.'' When I tried to calm myself down, my sentence was, ``This is why I'm doing this now and not waiting until I'm seventy.''
Another sentence I often verbalize lately: In March I almost died (well, 50-50) of pneumothorax during an operation on my lungs. Since then, whenever I have an especially beautiful day, and I've had quite a few, I say to myself, ``I might not have had this day.'' Now, bouncing and filthy in the back of the truck, this sentence took on an ironic twist.
My anger was particularly directed against the Land Cruisers that pulled up behind and passed us. The comfortable Land Cruisers that had refused me a ride. And the tourists in them. Here we were passing through some of the world's most beautiful and unique scenery, and the tourists in the Land Cruisers were sleeping!
In the early afternoon the truck stopped for a long time. Since I could not see ahead, I didn't know why, and I didn't want to get out for fear the driver would start up again without seeing me. But finally I did get out. It was the police post at Nyalam, some 30 kilometers before Zhang Mu. We were behind three Land Cruisers. I must have been quite a sight, covered in deep layers of dirt, because the tourists who were standing around had trouble suppressing their laughter. One middle-aged Northern European man didn't even try. I pretended to ignore him, but when I took off my jacket to shake off some of the dirt, I just happened to shake it in his direction. He zipped behind the Land Cruiser.
Another hour downhill through beautiful, green, and very non-Tibetan agricultural country brought us to Zhang Mu. The town is strung along the switchbacks of the road for several kilometers. We wove among long lines of trucks parked on the narrow road. Then we came to a stop. I finally figured out we were not going to be starting again, so I got out. A recent landslide--we were the second vehicle behind it--had blocked the road with large boulders.
I paid the driver, looped my suitcase over my shoulder, scrambled over the boulders, and continued down the road on foot, for three kilometers, until I reached the Chinese border post.
There I got a jeep to take me the ten kilometers to Kodari, the Nepalese border post; a bunch of locals jumped in too as we took off. This was perhaps the worst, muddiest stretch of road on the entire trip, and I wasn't sure my driver would make it as he charged again and again up one muddy slope.
In Kodari I got a taxi to Kathmandu. This part of the trip was long and hard only because I was so exhausted. When I got to a hotel in the Thamel district of Kathmandu, all I cared about was whether they had hot showers and laundry service.