Features: World View
Excerpts from the Diaries of Local Travelers

	Greetings from the top of the world Story and Photos by Laurel Schwartz

In Takoma Park you can find Tibetan prayer flags among the old trees and buried in backyards, but in Tibet bushels of prayer flags adorn every house and monastery. Tibet, home of Mt. Everest, is nicknamed the “roof of the world.” It lives up to its reputation. Wherever you go in Tibet, mountains dot the skyline. The mountains often have prayer flags on them, marking that human hands touched those high peaks.

Last month, I spent three weeks traveling around Tibet, from Lhasa, the capital, to Mt. Everest. I was there with my school, the University of Pittsburgh, studying Tibetan-Chinese relations. Tibet is one of the few places left in the world that hasn’t yet been totally touched by globalization. There are no McDonald’s or KFCs in Tibet as there are elsewhere in China. People still live in traditional brick houses. And the SUVs on the road there are used for what SUVs are really made for: off-road driving. In Tibet, everything still seems unblemished and ancient.

Because the roads in Tibet are bad, travelis long and tedious. When you arrive at your destination, you feel dusty and carsick, even after riding in an SUV instead of a tour bus. Everest, for example, is hidden from the world. The closest town to Everest on the Chinese side is Tingri, a six hour drive away on steep mountain passes and ruddy dirt roads. But it’s worth the journey.

The world’s tallest mountain doesn’t look very tall until you put it in perspective. When we drove from Tingri to Everest, we stopped at the top of a mountain pass, still about five hours away from Everest Base Camp. We saw a clear vista of the Himalayas, including Everest, but it was so hidden by clouds that we only saw half of it, making it appear smaller than the other mountains around it. But after we piled out of our SUVs and took the hour and a half horse-cart ride to Base Camp, the clouds dispersed and we had a clear view of Everest. At Base Camp, all we had to visually compare the mountain to where the small rock and dirt mountains that surrounded it. Then a friend told me that at our elevation at the base, over 16,000 feet, it was like we were on top of the highest mountain in the continental United States and mighty Everest still towered over us. That awed me.

Base Camp is little more than a village of tents that house shops and inns for visitors. Our tent had no running water and our bathroom was a grassy area that we shared with yaks, buffalo-like animals that can be found all over Tibet. Because it is still so difficult to get to, Base Camp has yet to be frequented by tourists, though I imagine that hotels will soon replace the tents. A road construction engineer in Lhasa told my group that he expects that the road to Everest will be paved within five years. When that happens, everything there will change.

Change is not something unique to Everest. On July 1, Tibet’s first railroad will start running, bringing Chinese and international visitors into Lhasa at a rate of 4,000 people per day, to a city of only about 230,000. It’s expected that most of these new immigrants will be temporary Chinese workers who will take jobs that might otherwise be held by Tibetans. Unlike foreigners, Chinese do not need a special visa to visit or work in Tibet.

As an American with my own biases, it was difficult to gauge how people felt about the political situation in Tibet. The Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, and many people in Tibet are too young to have lived under his rule. His picture is banned in China (though I did see his picture once in a nomad family’s tent) and undercover policemen monitor conversations on the street and in monasteries to ensure that people aren’t talking politics. There’s a large military presence in Tibet—they make it clear who’s in charge. Once, my group met with a monk at his monetary. We were alone with him in his room for about five minutes when the police came and respectfully ended our meeting. The monk called us several times to tell us that he still wanted to talk to us. Later, he visited us in one of our hotel rooms and patiently answered our questions. When people trust you in Tibet, they want to teach you about their home.

Politics is controlled tightly in Tibet, but the Chinese government is pouring millions of dollars into building basic infrastructure like roads and tunnels. Monasteries and temples that were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution in the 1950’s and 1960’s are being rebuilt by the Chinese government. Tibetans can have a free education through university level, either in Tibet or inner China, depending on how they do on their entrance exams (it’s easier to get into Tibetan universities than Chinese ones). The government is installing electricity and running water in remote areas for the first time. Free Western, Chinese and Tibetan style healthcare is available to any Tibetan who cannot afford it. That’s more than we can say even in the US.

Even though Tibetan students can go to school for free, many of them don’t because they’re needed to help herd or farm. When they go to university—if they even make it that far—they have tough competition from Chinese students to get into good universities. Many Tibetans still live as they have for hundreds of years as farmers and herders, and I’m not sure they want that to change. Development is nice, Tibetans told me, but they don’t want to change their lifestyle or live under Chinese rule. But Tibet can’t have development without change and change is inevitable. There will always be majestic mountains in Tibet, but in the future, they will be dotted by resorts instead of prayer flags and nomads' tents.

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