a tour? I asked routinely. Certainly not, she declared with vigor: she was a card-carrying Communist, a supporter of Gus Hall and a solo traveler on her second inspection of the mainland. Her husband had died six years ago, she went on, watery blue eyes sparkling merrily behind her spectacles, and she had instantly decided that there was no point at all in sitting around and waiting to die while playing canasta with toothless widows in the country club. So, at the age of sixty-five, she had taken to the road in search of the socialist ideal. Since then, she reported cheerily, she had been to fifty-five countries, journeyed from Morocco to India by bus (via Iran, Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass), spent four months bouncing across the subcontinent on third-class trains and gone on four separate occasions to the Soviet Union. (Each of the latter trips had brought her somewhat closer to death, she noted, but the doctors in Estonia were simply wonderful, and the specialists in Siberia had saved her life more than once.) Now she was back in China to see how it measured up to Marx. “My heavens,” she chuckled heartily as the bus lurched around a corner and a passenger in a wooden headdress landed with all his weight on her toes and another, runny-nosed peasant collapsed against her shoulder and a yak serenely ambled past. “Whatever would my friends say if they could see me now?”
———
SUCH WERE THE colorful souls that made up my world in Lhasa. But every morning, they, and all their world, were left far behind as I traveled alone to one of the distant mountain lamaseries, and basked in its spacious silences. All around me on the sunlit terraces was nothing but an elevating stillness, broken only by the distant thunk of a wood chopper, the occasional clang of a gong. Stillness too filled the narrow lanes of the monastery, where little girls sat frowning over serious tasks. Even the shaggy dogs stationed like guardians outside the lamasery gates seemed strangely charmed into quietude. I never once saw any of them beg, or bark, or squabble; they simply lay there, in the sunlight, twenty or thirty or more together, healthy and at peace. And so the days dreamed on: morning bells; murmured chants; blue sky on whitewashed terraces.
BY THE TIME I arrived in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital was still uncolonized enough to be rich in all the inconveniences that the Overlander needs to remind himself that “travel” is closely related to “travail.” There were two small guesthouses in town, but each had only a few luxury $2 rooms complete with rough mattresses and thick straw pillows; otherwise, they offered nothing but communal dorms filled with tiny beds. Both places boasted taps in their yards, but that was all; to take a shower, one had to risk almost certain disease by braving the public bathhouse. The Banak Shol had a single toilet on every floor, but it consisted only of a hole in the cement, behind a door so rusty that even to try to lock it was to render one’s hands bloody and gangrenous; besides, only one store in town carried toilet paper, and its supplies were irregular at best. Coffee and soft drinks were completely unknown in Tibet, and the only postcards to be found came in two sets of fifteen, at least twelve of which were close-ups of murals that might as well have been labels attached to cans of soup. To change money involved trekking through labyrinths of nameless alleyways to a desolate construction site, where a minuscule hut advertised the “Bank of China Lhasa” and presented nothing but a locked door (which opened, occasionally, after 3:30 p.m.); to visit the tourist office involved an eight-mile walk. Yet even as Lhasa was forcing the Overlanders to turn themselvesinto locals—living dirt-cheap, washing in rural streams, eating at streetside stalls and camouflaging themselves in native garb—the Overlanders were quickly forcing Lhasa to turn itself into a rough version of the homes they had quit.
———
SUCH WERE THE colorful souls that made up my world in Lhasa. But every morning, they, and all their world, were left far behind as I traveled alone to one of the distant mountain lamaseries, and basked in its spacious silences. All around me on the sunlit terraces was nothing but an elevating stillness, broken only by the distant thunk of a wood chopper, the occasional clang of a gong. Stillness too filled the narrow lanes of the monastery, where little girls sat frowning over serious tasks. Even the shaggy dogs stationed like guardians outside the lamasery gates seemed strangely charmed into quietude. I never once saw any of them beg, or bark, or squabble; they simply lay there, in the sunlight, twenty or thirty or more together, healthy and at peace. And so the days dreamed on: morning bells; murmured chants; blue sky on whitewashed terraces.
BY THE TIME I arrived in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital was still uncolonized enough to be rich in all the inconveniences that the Overlander needs to remind himself that “travel” is closely related to “travail.” There were two small guesthouses in town, but each had only a few luxury $2 rooms complete with rough mattresses and thick straw pillows; otherwise, they offered nothing but communal dorms filled with tiny beds. Both places boasted taps in their yards, but that was all; to take a shower, one had to risk almost certain disease by braving the public bathhouse. The Banak Shol had a single toilet on every floor, but it consisted only of a hole in the cement, behind a door so rusty that even to try to lock it was to render one’s hands bloody and gangrenous; besides, only one store in town carried toilet paper, and its supplies were irregular at best. Coffee and soft drinks were completely unknown in Tibet, and the only postcards to be found came in two sets of fifteen, at least twelve of which were close-ups of murals that might as well have been labels attached to cans of soup. To change money involved trekking through labyrinths of nameless alleyways to a desolate construction site, where a minuscule hut advertised the “Bank of China Lhasa” and presented nothing but a locked door (which opened, occasionally, after 3:30 p.m.); to visit the tourist office involved an eight-mile walk. Yet even as Lhasa was forcing the Overlanders to turn themselvesinto locals—living dirt-cheap, washing in rural streams, eating at streetside stalls and camouflaging themselves in native garb—the Overlanders were quickly forcing Lhasa to turn itself into a rough version of the homes they had quit.
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