BootsnAll Travel Network



The sound of an endangered people

Thurs-Sunday, 14-17 June

The hope of an easy day’s ride to Xiancheng vanished with the end of the paved road, just outside Zhongdian. The lady selling tickets to Xiancheng, under 200km from Zhongdian , informed me it would take 9 hours. I naturally assumed there was a misunderstanding.

But an hour later, sitting at the arse end of the bus, I realised there had been no mistake. My ordeal had just begun. Full of bumps and potholes, the road followed the contours of the land, up and down mountains, scraping around the rock faces and boulders, horn hooting. This route is known as the Sichuan-Tibet Highway (the bus was wider than the road, so “Highway” must be refering to the altitude…). Lonely Planet describes it as “one of the world’s highest, roughest, most dangerous and most beautiful roads”.
Every now and then the driver had to stop to remove a rock from the road. Another time the bus slammed into a ditch and its rear end swung out 45 degrees towards the precipice. I looked out the rear window. The back wheel was 1 inch over the edge of the road, below the sheer drop the river raged like a caged lion. The driver made a joke, some polite passengers giggled nervously. It was bump and grind all the way. At times I levitated so high from my seat, it felt like I was competing in the Calgary Rodeo. All I needed was a wet bikini and a beer in one hand.

That night I slept in a traditional Tibetan guesthouse. Every inch of its wooden interior was decorated in halucigenic-bright patterns and pastoral pictures of deer, mountains, and elephants. My room looked like an elaborate temple or someone’s LSD trip.

The next day I got up at daybreak to make the final haul to Litang, a mere 150km, but half a day’s travel away. It would’ve been easier to break the enigma code than make sense of the bus schedule, so I got together with some other people also going to Litang and piled into a 7 seater minibus taxi, luggage strapped on top.
Since leaving Zhongdian, the scenery was truly spectacular. I could only gawp in open-mouthed awe as the lanscape punched me in the face every time we took a bend, continously climbing higher and higher towards Litang. The snow had taken refuge from summer on top of the peaks, down below the earth was gashed open by deep ravines, gushing out its life force; pine trees piercing the air like spikes. Draped from their branches, strands of filigree moss sighed in the wind like ghosts’ breath.
The supernatural has never had the power to scare me, its the natural that leaves me quaking in my boots. Untamed beauty can be truly intimidating.

As we skidded to a standstill in Litang, my first impression was of a dusty trucker’s town, devoid of character. I checked into the only guesthouse mentioned in the guide. It was a tired, dumpy-looking joint and I glumly observed the suspicious stains on the bedding. There was only one squat toilet to serve all the guests, and for most of the time it didn’t have water. The stench drifted all the way down the corridor and seeped into my room.
Approaching this putrid hole took sheer will power, fueled by a bursting bladder. Armed with deodorent spray, I vainly attempted to subdue the amonia and faecal fumes which threatened to knock me out before I even reached the door. For the first time in my life I was praying to be constipated.

Set in an open grassland, surrounded by snow-caped peaks, Litang is one of the highest towns in China, at over 4000m (even higher than Lhasa). This area is known as the Tibetan province of Kham, which covers the eastern third of the Tibetan plateau, and remains overwhelmingly Tibetan. Of all Tibetans, the Khambas are known as the most religious and war-like (why do the two always go together?). Litang is also famed as the birthplace of the 7th and 10th Dalai Lamas. On one of the hills, glimmering with blinding quantities of gold, is the large Gompa (monastery) ,in stark contrast to the ramshackle town below.
But the real attraction of Litang, in my opinion, is its people.

Khamba men swagger along the street or assault the main drag with their festooned motorbikes, long tassles whipping from the handle bars. Statuesque and broad shouldered, with their long, ponytailed hair and high domed pamplona hats, they seem more South American than Asian. Their look is a strange hybrid of gangster-cowboy, set off with aviator sunglasses, each square rim the size of toast, and at least 2 gold-plated teeth. A knife, the size of a small sword, swings limply from their silver studded belts.
The women roam around in small groups, each displaying a different style from the others. Crude and thick necklaces of bone, coral and turquoise hang from their necks like the candy necklaces I used to wear and eat as a child. Their hair is intertwined with shocking pink or red threads, carefully arranged on top of their heads like sausage rolls. The front braid, framing the forehead is decorated with fist-size silver rings, protruding like the lightbulbs of Mother Mary’s flickering halo. Others wear headdresses a foot high, similar to those worn by the Queen’s guards, except that they’re made from neon-orange fur. These ladies were pure punk and I was completely enamored by them.
I spent 3 days in Litang, sitting in cafe’s, watching the motley parade of people and they watching me, just as freakish to them, as they were to me. Herders and their families, monks, beggars, snot-nosed children, all came in and leaned over my shoulder, curiously fixated on my scriblings.

Very few foreign tourists, and even less Chinese pass this way, and walking down the street, I was showered with hellos like confetti. The fact that this was the only English word they knew seemed to only intensify their pleasure in saying it. Used more like a magic word than a greeting, it had the power to make them feel part of a world beyond the parameters of their isolated existence. Scattered on the wide pavement were clutches of people sitting around baskets, heaped with a type of dried catterpillar, still attached to a little brown root. They were busy brushing off the mud to prepare it for selling as traditional medicine.

The food consisted mostly of Tibetan fare, which at first sounded exotic, but turned out to be one of the most unvaried and unappetising cuisines I’ve ever encountered. The staple diet is tsampa (barley flour), which is often eaten just as is: heaped on the open palm and licked off. Imagine licking the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag, and you get the idea. To make tsampa balls, they add water and eat it uncooked. Or they mix it with their buttered tea to make a type of porridge. Nothing is added to make it more tastebud friendly.
Momo (Tibetan dumplings), is not too bad, if you like your dumpling more dough than filling. It comes in a whopping 3 variations: yak meat, potato, and the ubiquitous tsampa mixed with yak butter.
After 2 days, I still wasn’t feeling any of the much hyped effects of the high altitude, I was more worried about turning into a walking dumpling.

One night, walking back to the guesthouse, I was accompanied by a lonely teenage yak. Way past its bedtime and not at home, he must’ve been the black yak of the family. I watched it aimlessly staggering down the main street with the careless impudence of a drunk. The odd motorbike passed, ignoring it, not even a hoot.
The air was ambushed by a shrill Tibetan voice wailing endlessly from a CD shop. Defiant but insane, it was the sound of a people once dominant, now threatened with extinction. Like the lonely yak, displaced, ignored and forgotten.



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2 responses to “The sound of an endangered people”

  1. Chris Calitz says:

    Litang sounds fantastic. Did you drink any chang? I got legless in Orissa at the Tibetan wedding from friendly ladies offering their potent brew…:-)

  2. John in Chengdu says:

    Heya Michelle,

    Thanks for sharing the writeups, a refreshing look on travels through Sichuan. Also they have allowed me to realize that I’ve been too fluffed up by traditional travelogue writing methods. If the world’s writers were more in tune in writing what they think rather than what they think the reader wants to see we’d live in a more interesting and stimulating place.

    The caterpillar like Chinese traditional medicine you mentioned is picked in the early spring of each year on the Tibetan plains and sold at ridiculous prices in mainland China. Fetching 100 Yuan or more a piece.

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