Let's Go Mad

by Rob Binkley

  Even though we followed protocol, a Chinese border official took one look at our papers and refused to let us in. It took us a few minutes to realize he wanted us to pay a bribe. Every time we told him, “but we already paid for a tour guide,” he suddenly stopped understanding English. I have no idea how our Chinese-speaking driver did it, but he somehow argued our way across the border without paying anything—but the Chinese border police didn’t just let us go. No, they gave us a quiet, suppressive-looking “guide” (for free) to keep an eye on us.

  “They’ll only let us in if we have a guide,” I whispered.

  Brian’s eyes narrowed. “It’s our duty to make his life a living hell.”

  Our unwanted guide got onboard. We hoped he wouldn’t sit next to us and he didn’t; he sat by himself in front, never looking back. Brian got a look at him from the back of the bus and whispered, “We’re totally ditching that little tyrant … just you wait.”

  That night, we stayed in a small guestroom with the other travelers on the bus; we had no choice, they were herding us into the country in a pack. Our Chinese guide had his own room. We went to the only restaurant in town to eat dinner, which had two dishes on the menu: noodle soup or fried rice. I chose fried rice for eighty cents. Our Chinese guide had noodle soup.

  We rose the next morning and had omelets, bread, and milk tea for breakfast, then got back on the bus for the long haul across the Tibetan plateau on a series of sketchy cliff roads. I noticed clusters of tents dotting the landscape. “What are those?” I asked the other travelers. Our Chinese guide said nothing, then a British lady on the bus piped up: “They’re nomadic Tibetans, sweetie.”

  While we stopped to stretch our legs, a few nomads came down from their camps to stare at us. They were rugged-looking people with flat faces; many wore red headbands, which distinguished them from the Chinese. They were very warm and inquisitive.

  During one pit stop, an old nomadic man came up to me and gently touched my face. I smiled and let him feel my features. “Is he blind?” I asked Brian.

  “Just go with it,” Brian said out of the corner of his mouth. So I touched the old man’s face back and he gave me a big toothless grin.

  Before I got back on the bus, I gave a pretty nomad girl a quarter and her eyes got wide with excitement.

  The bus kept driving into the night; the muddy mountain passes were slick with rain. We came across three landslides, which we crossed slowly. Then we ran into a bigger one that stopped us cold. “Wake up. This does not look good.” Brian nudged me and said he had a premonition we were going to die out here.

  “Relax,” I said, “this is just a minor setback. C’mon, let’s go stretch our legs.”

  Brian and I got off the bus and started throwing our 49ers football around while the rest of the passengers stayed warm inside the bus. After a few minutes, the door opened and the British lady staggered off the bus moaning. She threw up a few feet from Brian’s shoes. Then another passenger got off the bus to do the same … then another … then another.

  “Altitude sickness,” I said to Brian.

  “It’s gonna be a puke-athon,” Brian yelled. We kept tossing the ball around.

  We had climbed thousands of feet in a few hours, but we foolishly thought the thin air wouldn’t affect us. It didn’t take long until we started feeling it, and it wasn’t pleasant. Our football tossing slowly stopped, and we both doubled over and started throwing up just like everyone else.

  “Okay, I’m done!” I groaned.

  “This isn’t heaven; this—,” Brian started, wiping frozen vomit from his lips.

  “Stop saying that!”

  We got back on the bus and tried to keep from using too much precious oxygen. “Baby breaths … baby breaths,” Brian kept repeating.

  Our Chinese guide had a long discussion with our driver, then they told us the landslide was too dangerous to cross and we were going to have to spend the night in the bus. Everyone groaned. “This was not in the brochure!” Brian said while putting on every layer of clothes he had in his pack. “Somebody’s getting sued if we die on this freaking mountain.”

  “When did you get so litigious?” I asked.

  We’d packed exclusively for tropical weather and didn’t have winter jackets, gloves, hats, or shoes, which was obviously a huge oversight. Brian layered on every T-shirt and tank top he had, which did nothing. We asked the others if we could borrow some warmer sweaters (there were four other Americans [all men], one Norwegian, and the British lady onboard). Two of the Americans turned over some clothes begrudgingly. “What kind of moron comes to Tibet without warm clothes?”

  Brian said, “Dude, we’re from California. We don’t even own winter jackets. Here.” He pulled out something from his pack. “Have some chocolate as payment.”

  We fought over two sweaters, one scarf and some gloves. I told our donors, “I promise to give this back louse-free when we get off this mountain … I can’t speak for him though.”

  “Don’t worry, the crabs froze off a long time ago,” Brian said.

  We layered up and heard a loud rapping on the bus door. “Could it be? Saved by the commie police?” Brian asked sarcastically.

  Our driver opened the door and in stepped three Tibetan nomads from a nearby encampment. They saw we were not moving and wanted to bring us blankets, dry noodles, and a thermos of hot water to help us survive the frigid night. Everyone on the bus thanked them profusely, then they disappeared back into the dark.

  “That was some Three Wise Men shit, right there,” Cameron, the American who lent me a sweater, said.

  “The kindness of strangers,” I said to Brian, who went for the thermos of hot water like an Arctic refugee.

  We all warmed up a bit after we ate our noodles, then we huddled in our blankets and spent the rest of the night hoping our bus wouldn’t slide off the mountain. We watched a candle on the front dashboard burn down for entertainment. We couldn’t fall asleep so we filled the silence by talking.

  We found out the British lady (Laurie) had led sixteen excursions into Tibet. What was interesting was her other occupation was “past-life regression therapy.” She told us she could levitate. Brian asked, “Can you levitate this bus out of here?”

  “To do that, I reckon you’d have to believe the way I do, son,” she said.

  “I guess that’s out then … Can you tell who I was in a past life?” Brian was baiting her.

  “I’d have to regress you, but you look, and frankly sound a bit like a petite Neanderthal in this light,” then she cackled like a British hen. The rest of the bus laughed. Brian was not amused, but he did kinda look like a Neanderthal with his scruffy beard and wild hair.

  Once our only light source burned down, we were in the pitch black. The wind was howling. It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I spread out across two seats with a couple of packs as my pillow. Brian sprawled out in the back row right behind me.

  Everyone tried to sleep while Brian and I talked like kids who were camping in the dark. “Think we’re gonna die here?” Brian asked.

  “Only if there’s another landslide. Or we freeze to death … You got enough blankets?”

  “No … we need to huddle for warmth.”

  “Don’t—”

  “Dude, we have to.”

  Brian got up and moved up to my row and cuddled up behind me. We spooned for dear life. I said, “This isn’t weird or anything … Just don’t spork me in the middle of the night.”

  “I can’t make any promises.”

  I quoted Steve Martin from Planes, Trains and Automobiles: “Those aren’t pillows!” We both laughed to cut the awkwardness.

  We lay there like two frozen sardines awaiting certain death. I could feel Brian’s breath on my neck and it was making me slightly uncomfortable, but I welcomed his additional body heat. After a long bout of quiet, Brian whispered, “If we die … think you’ll go to heaven?”

  “I don’t know what heaven is. One thing
I know is, we’re not getting out of this life that easy,” I said. “This is just another test.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t know what I believe.”

  “You believe in anything?”

  “I believe in some kind of higher power, whatever you want to call it … and I believe in me … and you.”

  “I believe in us too.”

  “That night I crawled down the stairs on bhang lassis, you looked just like a Neanderthal.”

  Brian yawned. “Your judgment was skewed … let’s stop talking.”

  We drifted off to sleep with the rain tinkling lightly against the window.

  I awoke to the bus engine revving the next morning. We were still hanging off the side of the cliff in our frozen jalopy. I was thrilled to still be alive.

  I sat up and noticed we were not alone. The nomadic Tibetans had come to see us off. “Look … they all got up at the crack of dawn to make sure we’re okay.” I roused Brian, who got up and rubbed his eyes.

  Two nomad kids who came down put their gloved hands on our window. We put our hands up to theirs. The kids held onto the bus until we pulled away. Brian stuck his head out of the window and yelled goodbye to them as we drove off.

  He pulled his head back inside, “That was beautiful, man…. Life is beautiful.”

  We weren’t sure how long our bus would hold out but it got up enough gumption to cross the landslide easily. Brian smiled, saying “Thank you, Buddha” as we crossed over. The British lady was incensed, “Why didn’t we do this last night? What changed in a few hours??”

  “Perhaps they were afraid to try at night,” I said calmly, as I played cards with Cameron (we were betting peanuts and squares of frozen chocolate).

  We puttered the jalopy over Lhotse, the fourth tallest mountain in the world. We stopped at a small strip of buildings where we ravenously ate breakfast. When the lady rang up our bill, she used a black abacus.

  Our bus slogged onward to Shigatse on the Friendship Highway, a name given by the Chinese government. Brian was getting stir crazy. He kept asking Dawa, our Chinese guide, why it was taking us three days to get to our destination.

  “No one ever said three days.”

  Brian got no reply, just a shrug. He got in close to Dawa’s ear and said, “If this was New York, you would be fired.”

  We finally stopped at a guesthouse in Shigatse, the second biggest town in Tibet, where we took our first shower in three days. We had observed Tibetans don’t customarily wash; this was seen as a foolish waste of resources, so we hadn’t either.

  After a dinner of noodles and milk tea, we headed back to the guesthouse to relax. There was a small television in our room. “A TV? Sweet!” Brian said and started flipping channels. “One show playing on every channel? All propaganda, all the time?” We dozed off to the Chinese propaganda with the sound turned down.

  Lying in my tiny bed, I thought about how the Dalai Lama had been living in exile all these years. It was surreal to be in the same room as the “conqueror television” when all we were here to do was study Buddhism. That black and white TV made me appreciate the freedom we have in the United States. It may be a corrupt oligarchy of consumerism—but it’s not an oppressive fascist regime. (Not yet, at least.)

  I fell asleep feeling homesick, dreaming of American women. It had been far too long since I had seen one….

  The next morning, our bus tour took us to the Tashihunpo Monastery, one of the largest monasteries in Tibet and home of the Panchen Lamas. Brian meditated while I went into deep personal reflection. We learned the Panchen Lama had been “relocated” to Beijing—unfortunately for him. We spent the day praying on top of the world; it was magical.

  “I’m finally getting that Buddhism is not just a religion; it’s a way of thinking,” I said, interrupting Brian’s meditation like it was some kind of revelation.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Brian said. “Maybe you’ll get into it now.”

  We spent the day at the monastery, then started our descent into Lhasa on the usual muddy tracks. We kept asking Dawa when they were going to build more Friendship Highways for these poor people.

  We got no answer.

  A few hours after nightfall, our bus decided to finally commit suicide and ran off the road, crashing near the edge of a cliff. “It was just a matter of time!” I yelled. Brian looked out the window. All we saw was darkness. We got off the bus; we were stranded in the middle of nowhere, again. There were no nomads around this time.

  Standing on the side of the road, we saw some headlights coming our way. We tried to flag them down, but it was a Chinese Land Cruiser that wouldn’t stop. We walked for half a mile to a light we saw in the distance, it was a midway station where a Chinese police officer in another Land Cruiser finally stopped for us.

  “Let me take care of this,” Brian said then tried to bribe us a ride by offering the dude chocolate. The guy just stared at the Milky Way bar with a communist frown. “Bad for health,” he said, which made us laugh.

  Our laughter held him up long enough for Dawa to come barreling down the mountain to the midway station. Dawa eventually bribed the guy to give us a ride. Or threatened him. I have no idea how the Chinese negotiate, but it worked.

  Late that night, all ten of us (eight travelers, one bus driver, and one guide) finally made it into Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, in the back of a Chinese police Land Cruiser. Don’t ask how we all squeezed in there, but when you’re desperate, you’ll make anything work.

  “I’ve never been happier to be in a patrol vehicle,” I said while jammed into the cruiser like a frozen sardine.

  Brian replied, “Thought we’d be leaving town in one of these, not entering.”

  “It’s a strange world.”

  The police cruiser dropped us off at a place called the Snowland Hotel, where we all checked in and collapsed into our beds from exhaustion.

  Twelve hours of sleep later, I awoke to Lhasa sunshine. It was a beautiful, clear, and cold day. We walked outside and saw that the famed Potala Palace, which was the old home of the Dalai Lama, was perched right above our hotel, hanging off a mountain.

  “Think we came to the right place … That’s God’s old casa,” Brian said.

  We were about to take a bus up to the monastery but then we heard the annual horse races at the “fairgrounds” in Gyantse were happening that day. This was a huge event. Tibetans from all over the country were coming to enjoy one crazy weekend at the races.

  Should we join the festivities, or get enlightened? “Enlightenment can wait, right?” I convinced Brian to put off the monastery for another day. “But, no tourists are allowed. What about Dawa?”

  Brian said he’d take care of it. Ten minutes later he came back and said, “C’mon let’s go!” He had somehow convinced Dawa to let us have a day at the races even though the Chinese don’t allow foreigners to see Tibetans in celebration of anything.

  We walked over to the fairgrounds, and Dawa didn’t stop us but he was following close behind. “How did you get Dawa’s approval??”

  “I gave him some hash chocolate and ten minutes later, he was agreeing to anything,” he laughed.

  “You just dosed and bribed a Chinese official at the same time!?”

  “That one’s for the Lama,” Brian said.

  We led our drugged-out Chinese guide down to the entrance of the festivities, then we patted him on the back and told him to go take a nap while we dove into the madness with ten thousand Tibetan villagers who were all drinking homemade barley beer called Chang. Dawa just smiled like Buddha and let us go on in.

  “Those chocolates should be called Jedi mind trick,” I said.

  Brian and I were taking another big risk. We were the only foreigners at the party and couldn’t exactly blend in. If the Chinese caught us breaking the law, we knew we could get locked up so we tried to lay as low as possible.

  “They may send Dawa to Siberia for letting us come here!
” I shouted over the mass of Tibetan humanity.

  “Just don’t commandeer a horse and we should be okay!” Brian yelled back.

  Dawa tried to keep an eye on us, but once we entered the throng of thousands there was no way he could keep up. We wandered through the crowd, playing keep away from the only sober people in sight, the ever-present Communist police.

  Our attention turned to the crazy horse race. I’d never seen anything like it. There was no track, the horses would just blow by you a few feet away and the people would cheer. I got so caught up in the race I lost Brian in the crowd.

  I had a few beers and befriended a group of Tibetans who invited me to sit with them. We just sat there and stared at each other, then they put a giant vat of beer in front of me and insisted that I drink it. Every time a sip was offered I had to drink or it would be an insult. So I drank and drank and cheered with everyone else when the horses whizzed by. I had no idea what was going on but I didn’t care.

  Communication with them was nil, but somehow it was working. I became a fast expert at sign language. I spent the next two hours talking subversive shit about the Chinese using facial expressions and makeshift hand gestures with all my new Tibetan friends. My presence was a novelty to them and they treated me extremely well. It was another one of those moments where I felt like a celebrity just for being the only American at the party. They were so embracing and I was so drunk drinking their milky beer, it was a wonderful bonding experience. To thank them, I bought the group some peanuts and cigarettes, which were delicacies around here. This led my group to roar in happiness. Every time they roared, I looked around to make sure the Chinese cops weren’t coming for me.

  Maybe they had already nabbed Brian, who was officially missing. I didn’t care. After five hours of non-stop drinking, I was completely inebriated and had to pee, so some Tibetans walked me to the bathroom, which was a giant open field. I took a piss watching two hundred drunk Tibetans peeing and shitting on top of the world. It was surreal and amazing.

  “The biggest port-a-potty on earth,” I mumbled to no one. “Brian’s gotta see this.”