Alex's Asian Adventure

This morning Julien & I boarded a bus to Samye Monastery, the oldest monastery in Tibet and really a very nice place to visit. It was highly recommended by one Katie Millier and I decided that I'll listen to good advice.

There are three stories here: one of the bus ride there, one of the monastery itself, and another of the return journey.

The trip there was punctuated by an unlikely passenger on our minibus. A cat. In a box. Meowing loudly. A meter from my head. Now, cats are hardy creatures and if they are trapped in a box they won't like it very much. This one managed to force a hole in the (taped up) box with its head, crawled out, and proceeded to crawl around the bus. 30-odd Tibetans (overcapacity, sitting in the aisle, etc), two white guys, and an orange cat. On the way to a monastery. Who'd have guessed?

Samye is about 180 km away, but because of the geography here we had to make a long-ish detour through Tsetang, a "city" the size of, say, Stayner. Plus, the roads here suck. Oh yes, and for about 2 hours of the trip the bus driver was playing a tape of mantras. Loudly. Tibetans were mantra-ing along. I was trying to sleep. The trip there took 4.5 hours.

Samye is simply gorgeous. The compound is walled in, and shaped like an Indian mandala. The central building, the Utse, is a three-story affair with each floor carrying its own style (Tibetan, Han Chinese and Indian, respectively). The story goes that King Trisong Detsen (Tibet's greatest king, who brought Buddhism here) invited Indian masters Padmasambhava and Shantarakshita to promote buddhism, and they set up the monastery at Samye. Anyway, i's very important, very scenic, and quite remote.

After touring the monastery for a while, Julien & I went up Hipo Ri, a nearby hill (vertical of maybe 200-300m, no more) that has religious significance in that it is said that this is where Padmasambhava defeated the local spirits and won them over to Buddhism. On the top of the hill is a small building, and inside I found a chanting, mantra-reciting Lama minding his own business. Very cool.

While we were in the Utse a very friendly PSB officer (a Tibetan guy, maybe 20 years old) politely asked to see our permits. We apparently needed permits for this area. I knew about this, and I also knew that they often don't check, nor do they issue permits unless you're part of a tour group (we weren't). I played stupid and he more or less left us alone, no fine, nothing. I think he knew what the story was and was happy to discharge his duty by looking at our passports. No problem.

The trip back is where the plot thickens, really. We left at around 2:30 (after arguing with some opportunistic ticket collector who wanted 200 kwai per ticket, instead of the 40 kwai it should cost). I thought it'd be another 4-4.5 hour trip back to Lhasa, direct. Nope. We stopped at two monateries on the way, each time for "10 minutes" that somehow ended up being 30 minutes. The first one looked like nothing special. The second, Yumbu Lakhang, is a reconstruction of a 2000-year "palace" built by the first king of Tibet, Nyatri Tsenpo. The original was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (thanks, Mao!). The monatery itself is perched on a rock spur high above the local valley. The view is spectacular.

The trip to Tsetang, and the visit to the two monasteries (just outside Tsetang), took us until 5:30 PM. That's three hours! Of the original estimate of 4.5 hours to return to Lhasa!

The trip from Tsetang to Lhasa took another 3 hours. Important observations about this trip:

• Whereas some Tibetan music is nice, what our driver was playing (loudly) sounded like a mixture of a cat in heat, Bjork, a fax machine, and a bad opera singer.
• While drivers here are aggressive (they cut people off at will and use pedestrians as target practice) they'll drive SUPER SLOWLY on empty, rural well-paved roads. Roads I would drive at 120km/h in Canada get covered at 60km/h here. (@%#*%()@!#*&%!)(*%!!!
• The guy who sold me the tickets to Samye the day before told me we'd be back in Lhasa at 6-ish. We got back at 8:41. I was a little pissed off because I expected to have some time to figure out my Everest trip in the evening. We ended up eating a very late dinner.

Also, whoever claimed that Tibet is a plateau wasn't looking at Lhasa. It might be a plateau in the sense that there are lots of flat valleys. There might be flat platueau-like areas elsewhere. However, Lhasa is surrounded by mountains on every side. The airport is an hour's drive by bus, through a tunnel under a mountain. The tunnel opened last year and cut the trip to the airport by half. The geography is not very conducive to travel at all. It's not the prairies. It's not the Golan Heights. It's a bunch of mountains!

Anyway, I'm going to try to figure out my trip to Everest now. Time to see some travel agents.