Up Up and Away!

Forty-five hours on a train, and I'm in Lhasa. There's no question that this is a city under military occupation. Chinese soldiers guard most intersections, perch on rooftops (including that of the city's mosque), and parade around the plazas in front of the Potala Palace and Jokhang Temple. Photographing them is strictly forbidden, and since they're hiding all over the place, taking snapshots can be a little stressful. This morning I saw a Chinese tourist being escorted away under vocal protest after catching some soldiers in her frame. Presumably they'll just confiscate her camera's memory card, but she may be in for some serious questioning. And the occupation goes beyond the military, into the religious. Photos of the Dalai Lama that used to lay cradled in the arms of the Buddhas in the Jokhang have been replaced by images of the Panchen Lama, hand picked by the Chinese government.

Putting politics aside, Lhasa charmed my heart from the start. Sharp mountain peaks tinged green with vegetation ring the town, and in the meandering streets of the old quarter around the Jokhang, Tibetan pilgrims outnumber foreign tourists many times over. Stooped old women do the Kora around the Temple spinning prayer wheels. Others exercise their devotion by chanting and prostrating themselves every two steps all the way around. Inside the Temple, grease from the ghee lamps slicks the floors and makes the wall sticky. The air is close, the passageways crowded. I spotted fewer than twenty monks inside, some praying, some eating lunch, and some chanting and beating a giant drum hanging from the ceiling (one while sorting the money left by pilgrims). Worshippers stuff small bills through the glass cases in front of sacred images of Buddhas and historical leaders. They touch their foreheads to the cases, and many carry thermoses of molten ghee to add to the amber pools fueling the devotional flames.  At the heart of the temple lies a seventh century Buddha brought by the Chinese wife of Tibet's first king (he also had a Nepalese and a Tibetan wife). Dressed in robes and crowned with jewels, this image is the only one still to be illuminated by authentic yak butter. A monk was giving him a touch-up paint job as we walked by. The Jokhang feels deeply rooted in the past, the physical site of so many generations of worship, and at the same time, it's unmistakably alive, vibrant with current prayers, ringing with the sound of two dozen workers singing and pounding on the roof as they repair it.

The train ride here was spectacular. On day one, we went through hundreds of miles of "small" cities, each with multiple clusters of thirty story condo towers sprouting from the fields and low buildings below. I realized that what had struck me as big on the outskirts of Beijing the day before was actually a sleepy neighborhood, for in these outlying areas, whole cities are being grown from scratch. On day two, the natural beauty kicked in. Sharp snowcapped peaks, vast expanses of scrubby plains, full of tiny antelope, sheep, yak, and the occasional tent city or tiny village. The muddy rivers flowing by dozens of quarries that we'd seen on day one were now icy gray glacial runoff, bounding quickly over rocks between heathery green banks. We hit altitudes of nearly 17,000 feet.

Inside the train, the passengers were uniformly friendly and quite boisterous -- almost everyone headed to Tibet on holiday, most with digital cameras much fancier than mine. An 18 year old student about to embark on his freshman year in a dance program at university talked to us about love, life, dreams. He'd just seen a play in Beijing that made him cry till he had no more tears. He was headed to Tibet out of respect for life's journey and in the hope of advancing along it. 18 year olds are 18 everywhere.

Tomorrow we visit Potala Palace, the only building Frank Lloyd Wright had on his wall that he did not design, and hit some more monasteries.  In a week or so, Everest Base Camp. I'm savoring the present, and eagerly anticipating what's to come.

Size Matters

Forty-eight hours in China, and I've learned one thing for sure: China likes to build things, and to build them big. The new Beijing Aiport Terminal 3 dwarfs you with a half-mile long wing-shaped terminal, with an up-swept metal roof supported by insistent columns overhead and a seemingly endless stretch of moving walkways to take you to the immigration check.

After traversing the airport, express train to the city (and getting past the airport train station, which was an unfortunate greenhouse of a place at 32C, though the air conditioned benches helped a little), and shiny new subway, we arrived at our hotel. Grand when it was built, with marble floors, monogrammed towels, and the AC set to frigid, the Harmony Hotel still feels slightly threadbare and forgotten on a side alley near the Beijing Railway Station. Still, it's been a chilly and welcoming spot to call home for the past two days.

Yesterday was a morning trip to the Great Wall -- a section two hours outside of town that was mercifully minimalist in its hawkers and souvenir shops. The climb up to the wall was steep, and at 9 am it was already pushing 90F. I was soaked through within minutes. The climb up was well worth it, though, with each gatehouse on the wall a charming variation on the one before. Between the humidity and smog, the snaking views will never reproduce in photos, but peering into the mist to make out the tan line of wall creeping across the wooded hills had a romanticism to it.

And why the title, you ask? Not really
for the Airport, or for the Great Wall, but for the roadways. Driving out to the Wall, we left the heart of the city behyind for a strange no-man's land, the Brentwood of Beijing. A mix of corn plantations, fields with drying bricks, the odd strip of rund down single story apartments mixed with an auto repair shop. Road repair crews had a paving machine or two, along with a handful of men and women weilding twig brooms to clear the area of pebbles before the pavers came through. And, of course, you-pick-it resorts, though in China you can go you-catch-it fishing in concrete pools as well as plucking peaches from the trees. Through this uncomfortable mixed-use landscape, massive clusters of tracked homes are sprouting up, with no apparent rhyme or reason. These are not your Central Valley single families, though. Styted to look like the stucco homes you can find from Brentwood to Windhoek, these are actually 6 story mega-homes, with room for ten or twenty apartments each. Clearly in 5 years the area will be home to tens of thousands of new families, and they're building the roads for that influx now. On the way to the Wall, we passed a pristine expanse of black asphalt off to the left, stretching into the fields and shrubby trees as far as the smog would let us see. With room for eight or ten lanes, it looked more runway than roadway. On the return journey, they'd already begun painting in lane lines and turn arrows. When you know millions of people are on their way in, I guess it's best to set enough spots at the table for them at the outset.

Eager Anticipation

Pacing. Packing. Racking my brain for anything I might want over the next three weeks. Savoring the anxiety of cutting down my access to *things* from a whole apartment to a single backpack. Takeoff in four hours. Shower, shave, zip, dash.