 |
| Xinjiang 1995 |
At the time there were only two flights a day to Lhasa, only 400 passengers a day. You had to be in a group, and if you ended up there alone, the hotel would call the Public Security Bureau. They would assign you to a group and you would be assessed a special group tour fee. So I booked the trip through a travel agency. They arranged our permit, a guide and our reservation at the Sunlight hotel.
Xinjiang --where I'd been living for a year--and Tibet are the two largest minority regions of China. Xinjiang has 16 minority groups and Tibet has 5 groups. Xinjiang is half the altitude of Tibet, and has more water, mineral, and cultural resources than Tibet. In 1995, there were Uighur, Kazah, and Han radio stations, and a Uighur-language TV channel and production station. Tibet only had a Han TV station, with minimal programming in the Tibetan language.
Tibetans are more dispersed than the people of Xinjiang, occupying Tibet, and the historical greater Tibet, which is the Qinghai basin and parts of the mountain regions of Sichuan and Yunnan. The Qinghai, basin is also the home of the Panchen Lama. He represents the historical division of Tibetan Buddhism into two sects. At one point in history these were two separate rival kingdoms.
I was excited to be going into the kingdoms. I had spoken with others who had traveled to Lhasa. They advised that on that first day, because of the altitude adjustment, I should head straight to my hotel. Nothing more. That seemed a tall order. Here we were landing in this mysterious land, and "do nothing" was not at the top of my list.
We climbed down the steps from the airplane to the ground, and I was thinking, “This is not so bad.” Then we walked over to an area to wait for a bus, and I was starting to feel the altitude a bit more. By the time we drove the 50 miles from the airport into the city, I felt winded. So when we reached our destination, it required supreme effort to climb the steps to our second-floor hotel rooms.
I was ready to do nothing.
However, my guide called me to come talk to him. He said that our permit was illegal, and that we would need to pay his company a group fee of 3000 rmb. He said that if we did not pay, he would turn us into the Public Security Bureau, they would confine us to the hotel, and they would put us on the first flight out on Tuesday. (It was Saturday.) While we all understood it as extortion, we also realized that it was only an extra 40 dollars a person. While we were thinking about this, we went down for dinner to the hotel dining room. We were the only ones in the hotel. Our waitresses were Tibetan, but our group spoke only a bit of Mandarin, and these women didn’t speak English. I ordered what I thought would be tomato soup. (Xi hong shir tang.) Unfortunately, “tang” can be either ‘soup’ or ‘sugar,’ depending on the understanding of the tones. We got sliced tomatoes with sugar.At that point we decided we needed our guide--extortion or no-- and agreed to pay him. (After that, he did all the food ordering for us.)
After all of that was settled, he sent us off to our rooms to sleep. Fat chance. My heart was thumping so loud, there was no way I could close my eyes. Later I discovered that, for emergencies, you could rent a rubber bag about the size of a pillow filled with compressed air. The air would last about five minutes but you would feel better for about an hour or so, enough time to fall asleep.
(...to be continued. Next: John Makes the Pilgrimage to Jokkang Temple.)
Xinjiang --where I'd been living for a year--and Tibet are the two largest minority regions of China. Xinjiang has 16 minority groups and Tibet has 5 groups. Xinjiang is half the altitude of Tibet, and has more water, mineral, and cultural resources than Tibet. In 1995, there were Uighur, Kazah, and Han radio stations, and a Uighur-language TV channel and production station. Tibet only had a Han TV station, with minimal programming in the Tibetan language.
Tibetans are more dispersed than the people of Xinjiang, occupying Tibet, and the historical greater Tibet, which is the Qinghai basin and parts of the mountain regions of Sichuan and Yunnan. The Qinghai, basin is also the home of the Panchen Lama. He represents the historical division of Tibetan Buddhism into two sects. At one point in history these were two separate rival kingdoms.
I was excited to be going into the kingdoms. I had spoken with others who had traveled to Lhasa. They advised that on that first day, because of the altitude adjustment, I should head straight to my hotel. Nothing more. That seemed a tall order. Here we were landing in this mysterious land, and "do nothing" was not at the top of my list.
We climbed down the steps from the airplane to the ground, and I was thinking, “This is not so bad.” Then we walked over to an area to wait for a bus, and I was starting to feel the altitude a bit more. By the time we drove the 50 miles from the airport into the city, I felt winded. So when we reached our destination, it required supreme effort to climb the steps to our second-floor hotel rooms.
I was ready to do nothing.
However, my guide called me to come talk to him. He said that our permit was illegal, and that we would need to pay his company a group fee of 3000 rmb. He said that if we did not pay, he would turn us into the Public Security Bureau, they would confine us to the hotel, and they would put us on the first flight out on Tuesday. (It was Saturday.) While we all understood it as extortion, we also realized that it was only an extra 40 dollars a person. While we were thinking about this, we went down for dinner to the hotel dining room. We were the only ones in the hotel. Our waitresses were Tibetan, but our group spoke only a bit of Mandarin, and these women didn’t speak English. I ordered what I thought would be tomato soup. (Xi hong shir tang.) Unfortunately, “tang” can be either ‘soup’ or ‘sugar,’ depending on the understanding of the tones. We got sliced tomatoes with sugar.At that point we decided we needed our guide--extortion or no-- and agreed to pay him. (After that, he did all the food ordering for us.)
After all of that was settled, he sent us off to our rooms to sleep. Fat chance. My heart was thumping so loud, there was no way I could close my eyes. Later I discovered that, for emergencies, you could rent a rubber bag about the size of a pillow filled with compressed air. The air would last about five minutes but you would feel better for about an hour or so, enough time to fall asleep.
(...to be continued. Next: John Makes the Pilgrimage to Jokkang Temple.)
No comments:
Post a Comment