Video: Ping Pong Ka-Pow, Episode 16

TIBET LAY: before us, and though the distances were incredible, the travel times mindboggling, the costs far too high, we somehow thought we would get there. It had been the dream from the start – out of Thailand, through China, into Tibet, and then on through Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran…

It couldn’t have happened, and here, rising endlessly through the mountains of Szechuan Province on the ridiculous excuse for a road that is the Szechuan-Tibet Highway, we finally gave in. It was here that the outcome of our trip was decided: we would travel on together as far as Chengdu, the capital of Szechuan, and then we would go our separate ways, Adam to Bulgaria, Turkey and the Middle East by way of Hong Kong, Erin and I to Burma or Malaysia or Vietnam, whichever we could afford with the small change we had left available to us.

But first there was this – an extraordinary trip through the small towns of the mountains, populated mostly by Tibetans, wheezing our way through the 16,000ft altitude, forgoing any kind of running water – showers, taps, flushing toilets – for days upon days, all of it frozen, the toilets in the guesthouses just full of unimaginable horrors the likes of which I hope nobody reading this will ever have to experience in their lifetimes.

From what I wrote at the time:

We set out two days ago on a road infamous as one of the most dangerous in the world, the Szechuan-Tibet highway, little more than a dirt track skirting narrow ridges with sheer drops of a kilometre or more on either side. For ten hours on the first day we tried to act manly and not whimper and cry “OhgodfuckI’mgonnadienopleasefuck” as the bus grunted its way through passes layered heavily with snow, surrounded by mammoth peaks in every direction.

I tried to pass the time solving problems (as in, “How many flimsy-looking pine trees clinging tenuously to the cliff face would it take to stop a 4-ton bus of screaming passengers from rolling down that cliff?”, or, “How many times can the bus roll down that hill before one of those giant pieces of heavy jagged metal that they’ve loaded into the aisle is certain to fly around and decapitate me?”); and eventually made it into the town of Xiangcheng with my dignity intact and my pants comfortingly dry.

Our dignity didn’t last long there, however. Xiangcheng is less a town than it is a bunch of people working a vast transport scam. Namely, the woman supposed to be selling bus tickets onto Litang refused (illegally) to sell them to foreigners (we had been told by an expat in Shangri-La that this would be the case; this woman also happens to run a far more expensive – and therefore profitable – taxi service to Litang). We then tried to wake up early in the frigid morning and bribe / blackmail / violently coerce the busdriver into letting us on the bus, but he was having none of it, and when Adam and I tried to kick some ass he quickly subdued us with the “Seven Dragon Fists Beating the Shit Out of Weak Crying White Men” technique. How were we to know that he knew Tai Chi? 

In any case, we eventually ate a big serving of humble pie (tasting a lot like rice porridge) and shelled out the extra money to share a minivan with a Tibetan man whose breath smelt like all your worst nightmares, a Chinese man who inexplicably whimpered on every third breath for the entire trip, and an irritating German who couldn’t tolerate the locals smoking in the van and so opened his window to a -16 degree breeze that cut through us like a knife covered in thick poison which is, itself, covered in rusty steel barbs which are then cursed with infinite misery.

At least the road was paved this time. It wound over endless arid plains, looking more like the scenery you’d expect to see in Iraq or Jordan than here. On each side frozen rivers wound by like white ribbons threading across the boulder-strewn landscape. It was a breathtaking 5-hour journey (in more ways than one), and left us here, wheezing and dizzy in Litang.

If Tibet gets any more Tibetan than this town, I’d be surprised. It’s quite rare here to see a Chinese face, or to hear Mandarin spoken (unfortunate, since we know absolutely nothing in the Tibetan language). Yaks wander the streets; the motorbikes are ridiculously pimped out with streamers and flowers and psychedelic mudflaps; walnuts and dried apricots have taken over as the market food item of choice, and we are continually mobbed either by friendly faces shouting “Hello! I love you!” or robed beggars (some with demonic face-masks) chanting something that sounds like the word “Ziggy” over and over again, like “ziggyziggyziggyziggy”. The beggars here are the most prominent and persistent since Battambang in Cambodia, which seems odd – outright poverty of the kind we saw so often in S.E. Asia has been thin on the ground elsewhere in the country.

The track behind this video is the very catchy ‘Zhong Nan Hai’ by Beijing’s Carsick Cars – kind of a Mandarin version of Sonic Youth’s ‘Teen Age Riot’ (ie, brilliant).