I just got back from a 5 day trip to Tibet and it was both beautiful and fascinating. The Tibetans still live a very simple and spiritual life and there were moments on the trip where I truly did feel like I‘d gone back in time. The Tibetans live in small towns (Lhasa, the capital city, only has 45,000 people) or in the countryside earning their living as farmers or nomad herders.
The first thing you notice (apart from the obvious mountains) are the prayer flags everywhere - you may have seen them in pictures from the top of Mt. Everest, those colorful squares of fabric strung together. The very next thing I noticed was the lack of oxygen. Lhasa sits at an elevation of 3,500 meters (11,500 feet). I had heard that altitude sickness can be a problem for some people, especially when you fly in directly and your body doesn’t have time to adjust. I didn’t worry too much about it, though, and didn’t even bother to get a prescription for the medication you can take to avoid it.
Well, on my first flight from Shanghai to Chengdu, I was sitting next to a Chinese university student and when she found out I was continuing on to Tibet, she asked me if I did any sports. I was a bit surprised by the question, but I said yes, I was a runner. She got a chagrined look on her face and said that athletes actually have a harder time with the altitude because of their lower heart rate. Fantastic. I was horribly ill the first night there - up half the night with a splitting headache and nausea. But after several doses of Advil (still my favorite product of all time!), I was feeling better by morning - though I did have to walk very slowly and was sucking wind every time I climbed any stairs.
We spent some time in Lhasa exploring the old town, Potala Palace, Jokhang Temple, and a local nunnery. We also spent a couple days exploring the surrounding countryside which was absolutely stunning. Snow-covered mountains, beautiful lakes, rivers, and yaks everywhere (which were delicious, by the way). You can see pictures and more descriptions on my website: www.porterfamilyinchina.com.
Never have I been to a place where religious devotion is so evident and so deeply ingrained in the culture. There are prayer flags draped everywhere, religious symbols on every house and building and painted on the mountainsides, people walking about with their spinning prayer wheels and prostrating themselves in front of the temples.
The prostrating was particularly interesting. Our first day in Lhasa, we saw groups of people in front of the temple performing this ritual. Our guide said they will continue for 2 or 3 hours at a time, which I thought was pretty impressive. Then I noticed that some people were doing it on their way to the temple - you are supposed to walk to the town square, walk clockwise around it, and then go to the temple. Most people just walked normally, sometimes with their prayer wheel, and some liked to chant quietly. But some people would do their prostrating on the way: they would take three steps then kneel, then lay down, then get up again, take three more steps, and so on.
I thought that was just amazing - what devotion! Then a couple days later when we were traveling several hours outside of Lhasa, I saw people doing this along the highway. I asked the guide what they were doing. “Those are pilgrims,” he said. Okay. Then I saw more of them. Still not getting it, I asked the guide, “How far do they go like that?’ He said very simply, “They are going to Lhasa.” I was stunned. He said maybe three or four times in a person’s life they will make the pilgrimage from their home to Lhasa in this fashion. It takes them about 2 or 3 months. You usually see about two or three pilgrims together and then behind them is another person pushing a cart loaded with supplies to make meals for the pilgrims along the way.
It really is incredible and after seeing these people and their way of life, I now have a better understanding of the conflict and the outrage over the Chinese take over of Tibet. Here is a people so religious, so peaceful, and so protective of its way of life and uncorrupted culture being stomped on by the Chinese. Since the communists took over China and built the railway to Tibet, the Chinese have been streaming in and now make up half the population of Lhasa.
There is a huge military presence here - more so than anywhere else I have been in China, and it is a constant reminder of who is in charge and that the people here are not free. When we were in the Potala Palace we saw the prayer room with the empty golden throne that was meant to be for the Dalai Lama. Maybe someday.
