Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  With that last turn, history had conspired with fancy and geography to render Tibet’s seclusion absolute: ever since the Chinese invasion of 1959, the Land of Snows had disappeared entirely. Visitors haunted by images of lamas blowing twelve-foot horns on snow-whitened mountaintops were forced to content themselves with visiting Ladakh, Nepal or even $200-a-day Bhutan. Tibet was glimpsed in dreams alone.

  Just a few months before I arrived in China, however, Beijing suddenly decided to throw open the door to Tibet, for the first time since the invasion. And suddenly, the dreamed-of Forbidden Land, whose mystique had always resided in its invisibility, was placed on full view before the world.

  By the time I got to Lhasa, it was still too early for many people to have registered the area’s awakening; the bright, glassy lobby of the official, 1,000-room Chinese hotel reverberated with nothing but emptiness. But as I made my way across town, I found the narrow labyrinths of the Tibetan quarter jammed with nomads and pilgrims from every corner of the land. And as I wandered through their midst, I found myself standing, as in some Steppenwolf reverie, before a gaily colored board that read “Banak Shol Hotel, Happiness Road.”

  I walked inside. To my left was a tiny reception booth. By its side, scraps of loose paper were fluttering this way and that from an ad hoc bulletin board. Jean-Claude was selling his tent. Larry was offering the best black-market rates for unofficial currency. Inge wanted to get rid of her copy of China: A Survival Kit. Sign up here for a three-day jeep trip around the mountains! Or over here for journeys to Xigatse! Or here for bus rides to Nepal! And as I looked on in bewilderment, gaggles of shaggy foreigners bustled in and out of tiny passageways, while a band of Danes vanished up a wooden ladder. I scrambled after them, and up to the guesthouse terrace, there to be greeted by an even stranger sight: a dozen foreign pilgrims tanning themselves under the brilliant Tibetan sun, the men shirtless and bearded, cooler-than-thou in their cowboy hats and shades, their ladies in baggy pants and bangles, bright scarves wound about their necks.

  Without a warning, like Alice through the rabbit hole, I had tumbled, so it seemed, into the upside-down world of the underground Overlanders, the tribe of countercultural imperialists that wanders the planet in search of cut-rate paradises. A few years ago, the hipster trail had stretched all the way from Amsterdam to Kathmandu, through Istanbul and Isfahan and Kabul; nowadays, however, the professional drifters were beginning to converge on the hidden corners of the Himalayas and the newly opened minority areas of China. And as I settled down inside the Banak Shol, I realized that even this most esoteric of hideaways was fast being turned into the latest way station of the Denim Route. The only true democracy, D. H. Lawrence once wrote, is Whitman’s version, in which “soul meets soul on the open road,” and Lhasa was now being colonized by a free-floating band of Whitmanic democrats.

  Certainly, there was a Whitman’s catalogue of characters in evidence around the guesthouse corridors. There was a shabby scientist who had received a grant from Washington to study cloud formations, and another dubious fellow who had unearthed some ancient maps of the secret monasteries of Lhasa and was now planning a book on them. There was an expert on Chinese music called R.I.P., who dressed from dawn to midnight in a heavy forest-green poncho and a dark brown gaucho hat, and told me, somewhat airily, that he came from nowhere, but commuted between Soho and Beijing—whenever, that is, he wasn’t living in South America and there was a soi-disant free-lance photographer who had been traveling for two years without deadline or destination. There was a Cambodian refugee in a chic Parisian leather jacket and a soft sweater with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and by his side a blowsy American redhead who confessed that eighteen months of budget traveling had cured her for life of a love for vagabondage.

  Just down the corridor was a quiet Chinese girl from Beijing who had been allowed to become a painter because her father was a high-ranking cadre, and a British sailor who had been traveling for four full years with no companion except his shortwave radio (turned on each night at eleven to catch the news on the BBC). There was a teenage historian from Cambridge, and a social worker from Singapore. There was a pair of his-and-hers fitness freaks from Boulder, Colorado—Mr. Good Health a gentle, bearded craftsman, Ms. Good Health a radiant cowgirl—who were bicycling at a leisurely pace across the Himalayas. And, inevitably, there was a whole school of German, Dutch and Danish students who spoke gallingly fluent English and, more gallingly still, enjoyed five-month summer vacations even, so it seemed, into early middle age.

  Next door to me lived a blonde from Hawaii who connected stereo speakers to her Walkman so that she could share the latest Talking Heads tapes with her neighbors while her tanned roommate swerved his skateboard frantically up and down the narrow guesthouse corridors. I took them at first to be an archetypal campus couple. But then one day, the girl referred to Tanzi as her kid brother. And later I gathered that she had only just graduated from high school. And later still, she happened to mention her parents, and I looked with new respect upon the figures beside us on the terrace—“Mom,” I inferred, was the one in wild earrings and flamboyant pantaloons, “Dad” the fellow in ponytail and chest-length beard, puffing serenely on his peace pipe. Astonishing! Here were some genuine Children—and Grandchildren—of the Revolution! Here in fact were two whole generations of freaks, dropping out and hitting the road en famille!

  The following day, on a bus out of town, I found myself next to a wonderfully high-spirited white-haired old lady from Pontiac, Michigan. Had she come here on a tour? I asked routinely. Certainly not, she declared with vigor: she was a card-carrying Communist, a supporter of Gus Hall and a solo traveler on her second inspection of the mainland. Her husband had died six years ago, she went on, watery blue eyes sparkling merrily behind her spectacles, and she had instantly decided that there was no point at all in sitting around and waiting to die while playing canasta with toothless widows in the country club. So, at the age of sixty-five, she had taken to the road in search of the socialist ideal. Since then, she reported cheerily, she had been to fifty-five countries, journeyed from Morocco to India by bus (via Iran, Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass), spent four months bouncing across the subcontinent on third-class trains and gone on four separate occasions to the Soviet Union. (Each of the latter trips had brought her somewhat closer to death, she noted, but the doctors in Estonia were simply wonderful, and the specialists in Siberia had saved her life more than once.) Now she was back in China to see how it measured up to Marx. “My heavens,” she chuckled heartily as the bus lurched around a corner and a passenger in a wooden headdress landed with all his weight on her toes and another, runny-nosed peasant collapsed against her shoulder and a yak serenely ambled past. “Whatever would my friends say if they could see me now?”

  ———

  SUCH WERE THE colorful souls that made up my world in Lhasa. But every morning, they, and all their world, were left far behind as I traveled alone to one of the distant mountain lamaseries, and basked in its spacious silences. All around me on the sunlit terraces was nothing but an elevating stillness, broken only by the distant thunk of a wood chopper, the occasional clang of a gong. Stillness too filled the narrow lanes of the monastery, where little girls sat frowning over serious tasks. Even the shaggy dogs stationed like guardians outside the lamasery gates seemed strangely charmed into quietude. I never once saw any of them beg, or bark, or squabble; they simply lay there, in the sunlight, twenty or thirty or more together, healthy and at peace. And so the days dreamed on: morning bells; murmured chants; blue sky on whitewashed terraces.

  BY THE TIME I arrived in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital was still uncolonized enough to be rich in all the inconveniences that the Overlander needs to remind himself that “travel” is closely related to “travail.” There were two small guesthouses in town, but each had only a few luxury $2 rooms complete with rough mattresses and thick straw pillows; otherwise, they offered nothing but communal dorms filled with tiny beds. Both pl
aces boasted taps in their yards, but that was all; to take a shower, one had to risk almost certain disease by braving the public bathhouse. The Banak Shol had a single toilet on every floor, but it consisted only of a hole in the cement, behind a door so rusty that even to try to lock it was to render one’s hands bloody and gangrenous; besides, only one store in town carried toilet paper, and its supplies were irregular at best. Coffee and soft drinks were completely unknown in Tibet, and the only postcards to be found came in two sets of fifteen, at least twelve of which were close-ups of murals that might as well have been labels attached to cans of soup. To change money involved trekking through labyrinths of nameless alleyways to a desolate construction site, where a minuscule hut advertised the “Bank of China Lhasa” and presented nothing but a locked door (which opened, occasionally, after 3:30 p.m.); to visit the tourist office involved an eight-mile walk. Yet even as Lhasa was forcing the Overlanders to turn themselves into locals—living dirt-cheap, washing in rural streams, eating at streetside stalls and camouflaging themselves in native garb—the Overlanders were quickly forcing Lhasa to turn itself into a rough version of the homes they had quit. Yakburgers had been introduced to local menus, and makeshift English-language schools were cropping up in guesthouse rooms. The tiny dive across from the Banak Shol had been newly fitted with a name—the Tasty Restaurant—and with a giant cassette player that filled the Himalayan night with the strains of Bob Marley. And blurring distinctions still further, a few local kids now sported cowboy jeans and chattered away in English as they bartered over pirated cassettes.

  Yet most of these foreign developments, I had to admit, were really quite pleasant, if only because the secret fraternity that had gathered in Lhasa seemed an unusually directed and discriminating lot. These ragged gypsies had not come to Tibet by mistake, or en route to someplace else; they had come to Tibet. And their commonality of interests made for a special sense of community, even—or especially—in this almost perfectly alien setting. Before long, I had come to know just about all the fifty or so foreigners in town, and begun to feel at home in their homegrown world-within-a-world. One day, when I emerged onto the darkened terrace at dawn, I met Tomas, a soft-spoken engineer from Munich, and he invited me to join him for a quiet day at distant Ganden Monastery; early that evening, as I wandered through the central market, I found myself next to a skinhead Buddhist actor from London, and off we went together for a cup of tea. At dinner one night, Tomas introduced me to his friends from Zurich; at dinner the next night, I joined the skinhead in a debate with a Hollander on the merits of royalty. Sometimes I stopped in Yak Alley to chat with dysentery-stricken Diane, sometimes I listened to Hans as he described why “Communism stifles life, wherever it goes, and capitalism overstimulates it.” The Nicaraguan problem was solved without difficulty at breakfast, and Reagan was summarily deposed. This was where to stay in Kathmandu, said one person, and this was where you could find old swords to buy, and this was when the bus leaves, and this was why Tibetan Buddhists wear yellow hats.

  The climax of all these impromptu seminars, however, came at night, when the members of the Lhasa chapter of the Overland brotherhood gathered, like elders around a campfire, inside the dining room of the Banak Shol, and extended the oral tradition deep into the night. Assembled in the half-light over glasses of tea and bottles of beer, they bandied about strange names (“Gurkha Dave, you know, got busted for smuggling gold out of Nepal”) and chattered away in a language all their own (“I carried a forty-five-pounder up to seventeen point two”; “I hauled a fifty-fiver up to fifteen point five”). Some of them hatched schemes for cross-country skiing in Tibet, others made plans to rendezvous for Christmas on the beach at Goa. One night, they gave critical ratings to the forgotten islands of Indonesia where visitors could sleep for 20 cents a night (fresh fish included three times a day); the next, they shared condolences about such intercontinental flea pits—the landmarks of the Denim Route—as the ill-named Chungqing Mansions of Hong Kong, the Bencoolen Street flophouses of Singapore and the hostels of Jalan Jaksa in much-despised Jakarta. And always, somehow, every one of them managed to affirm the golden commandments of the Overlander (“Thou shalt not plan. Thou shalt not hurry. Thou shalt not travel without backpacks, on anything other than back roads. And thou shalt not, ever, in any circumstance, call thyself a tourist”).

  More than anything, though, the travelers filled the mountain nights with stories, Homeric accounts of epic journeys, rife with monsters and marvels (and, in place of the Homeric formulae, catchphrases taken from the ubiquitous guidebooks of the Lonely Planet Company); accounts of life-and-death struggles with malaria pills or ground-breaking bouts of dysentery, of buses without floors and hotels without roofs. More conventional tourists may justify their travels by acquiring eye-catching knickknacks; the unpackaged tourists of the Overland Trail collect anecdotes instead, stories designed to induce pity and terror. Memento mori are their only curricula vitae. “When I was in Monrovia,” a Frenchwoman began with practiced nonchalance, “the uncle of my driver was eaten, including his eyes and testicles.” It was in Zambia, said a Briton of highly indeterminate means, that I first smelled a lion’s breath. I knew the golfing champion of Zambia, piped up another; he died of Coca-Cola addiction. And I in turn inflicted on the assembled company interminable accounts of sleeping in the jungles of Suriname and being molested in the temples of Upper Egypt.

  It often seemed, in fact, that the principal aim of every Overland journey was nothing, really, but an exhaustive knowledge of suffering (and not, alas, in the Buddhist sense); hard-core Travelers felt “close to the natives” only when they were actually close to death. And so the litanies continued. “It took us thirty hours to get here by truck from Golmud.” “Oh, that’s nothing. It took me thirty-six hours, and the driver only stopped once for food, and we all got food poisoning and for the rest of the trip everyone was vomiting on the bumpy road.” “No sweat, man: it took me seventeen days by road from Chengdu—and that was by post office truck.”

  The horror show to end them all, though, was said to be the bus trip to Nepal; almost none of the foreigners in Lhasa could conceal his excitement about an ordeal that was said to be the last word in discomfort. Three months later, in a temple in Kathmandu, I happened to bump into an Australian whom I had last seen preparing for the ride. How had the trip been? “Oh, n’bad. Took five dies. We niver stopped for food. Hid to find for oursilves, y’know? One night we stopped at this plice to sty, but thy didn’t want us. But thit’s where the droyver stopped, so we slipt outsold. Bloody freezing.” And the scenery? “Yeah. Couldn’t see much, y’know?” (As for his five weeks trekking, his account was even more heroically laconic. “Yeah, it was ixcellent! Freezing cold, couldn’t move for four dies. Wint up to Iverest Bise Cemp, met some Poles. Thy hedn’t seen anyone in forty-five dies, pretty plized to see us. The next die was the worst storm of the winter. Thy lost a man. We thought we’d die.” He grinned. “Yeah, it was ixcellent overall.”)

  TIBET ALSO, HOWEVER, awakened a different, and more unusual, kind of tale. A few months after I returned to New York, I arranged one night to have dinner with a Canadian I had last seen in the Banak Shol. “I ended up taking the bus to Nepal,” he began, as we gathered in pinstripes in a midtown restaurant, “and it was really, really rough—especially after the bus broke down. We had to scrabble for potatoes in the fields, and at night we had to sleep out in the open. To get a ride, we had to lie down on the road in front of oncoming trucks. Yet somehow, you know, it was really worth it.” Now a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, he began to speak more softly. “And one day, in Gyantse, I met a monk by the side of the road. He couldn’t speak English. And I, of course, don’t know any Tibetan. But just the way he looked, something in the way he stood there …” His eyes grew distant as the memory. “People gathered round him, and they began giving him gifts. They just couldn’t help it. And me, I ended up doing the same. In fact, I spent the whole day just following him around. I cou
ldn’t do anything else.” He stopped for a moment, shaking his head. “You know, it was really unreal. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Tibet, in fact, cast a curious spell over just about everyone who came here: even those who arrived as proud models of dispassion left as evangelists of the local cause. One reason for this, no doubt, was that after the bland monumentality and mechanical bustle of the rest of China, Tibet was, in every sense, a breath of fresh air; an antithesis to the communal vacancy of the mainland, and an antidote to it. The cities of China were drab and dusty and dour; Lhasa, by contrast, was a festival, a revelation, an explosion of brilliant flower boxes and golden symbols and gaily painted awnings. The dull-eyed Chinese were generally withdrawn, even sullen toward foreigners; the Tibetans, by contrast, were incorrigibly merry, with quick animation in their faces, ready at any moment to break into ruddy smiles that felt like benedictions. China, it was, ironically, that felt closed and remote; Tibet was jolly and rainbowed and welcoming.