Where In The World Is Evan?

————— DAY 1 —————

Feeling rather pleased with ourselves after our achievements on Everest, Sergio and I understandably thought that the hardest part was behind us. Now, however, we faced the unheralded problem of how to get home. As we were the only group at EBC who had actually hiked up, everyone else had charted jeeps waiting for them halfway down the mountain–in the spirit of squeezing every last cent out of tourists the jeeps were not allowed to go all the way up to EBC.

After some hard bargaining with local Tibetans the four of us—Sergio, Jerome, his Taiwanese girlfriend, and me—organised to be taken from EBC to Rongbuk Monastery riding pillion on beat-up motorcycles for 5 kuai each. To save money my rider kept intentionally stalling his engine and relying on the steep gradient of the road to coast down. As a result the others had already stopped and dismounted by the time I arrived. We were, however, not at Rongbuk Monastery. From what we could gather the only people licensed to carry foreigners on this part of the road are the horse and cart drivers, who charge 40 kuai for the ride. What bothered us about this situation is that they had knowingly entered into an agreement that they had no intention of honoring. As such we refused to pay them and simply walked off. Not wanting to get caught by the police who were supervising activities at the monastery a couple of hundred meters away, they had to leave without payment.
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We started day five of our trek with renewed vigor after eating the first substantial food we’d had in several days and getting a good night’s rest in the Tibetan tent village at EBC. Having met up with Jacek, the day before, he’d informed us that in the four days he’d spent at EBC he’d twice tried to climb higher but been forced to turn back by intense headaches and shortness of breath. As he was feeling constantly ill at ease, due to the altitude, he went back down the mountain, with the intention of meeting us in Shigatse the following day.

When we’d arrived at EBC we’d met an experienced French hiker named Jerome, who was planning to climb further up the mountain. As such Sergio, Jerome and I left our main packs at EBC and set off on a day hike to reach Advance Base Camp I, at 6,100 m. We took as little as possible with us–a couple of liters of water and some nuts and lollies–with the intention of making a speedy ascent and descent in the same day.
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After spending a couple of days hanging out in Lhasa and seeing the sights Sergio, Jacek and I hired a tent and hopped on a bus to Shigatse–the second largest city in Tibet–on our way to Mt. Qomolangma (i.e. Mt. Everest).

Shigatse is by far the worst city that I have been to in China. Despite its relative size the streets remained almost constantly empty, giving the city the feel of a ghost town. In the middle of the afternoon when we arrived most shops were inexplicably closed and rubbish lay strewn along the roads and footpaths. Despite the Lonely Planet asserting that prices across Tibet decreased outside of Lhasa, both food and accommodation in Shigatse were more expensive and of a significantly lower quality. Requiring some additional equipment we found the only sizable trekking goods store in town. As I perused their selection of compasses it occurred to me that of the eight they had on display only three pointed in vaguely the same direction–the other five choosing their own unique perspective on north. What amused me most about this situation is the stupidity involved in placing such defective compasses next to each other, thus highlighting their worthless made-in-China quality.
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Since the liberation of Tibet, and the consequential exile of the Dali Lama, Tibet has been the focus of an extensive redevelopment plan by the Chinese government. On the one hand they have built much needed road networks, schools, hospitals, and a variety of other important infrastructure. On the other hand they have stomped all over the indigenous people, their culture, and their religion.

In many ways Tibet is still a police state. There are soldiers and police roaming the streets, and on guard at all of the major Buddhist sites–particularly Potala Palace, the former home of the Dali Lama.

Like Xinjiang, the largest province in China, Tibet was conquered by the Han Chinese during the Qing Dynasty. Subsequently the Chinese have encountered difficulties in maintaining political control and obedience to the Party in these culturally alien, and physically remote places. Since the time of Mao, however, the Party has maintained a deliberate policy of ethnic Han resettlement from the east coast into the western provinces. This means that the majority of people living in the cities of Tibet and Xinjiang are ethnic Chinese, and not the indigenous Tibetans or Uyghurs. In fact my ex-girlfriend, Li Dong Dong, is the child of Han settlers living in Xinjiang–they took a government incentive package to move there from Shandong province before she was born.
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