From Darchen we begin the long drive back toward paved roads, the border, and Kathmandu. May 26 is a nine-hour drive to Trongba. May 27 is a 10 hour drive from Trongba to Tingri. We drive through beautiful desert valleys, with constantly changing colorations and views. However, the ride itself is physically numbing. About ninety percent of the journey is through a road construction project, so each minute or two we shift from gravel road, to rocky detour, to an improvised road through the desert.
The changing desert (Gabriele photo)
Periodically my thoughts move to the lives of the hundreds of workers building the road. Though some heavy equipment is used, much of the work is done by laborers shoveling sand, placing large rocks, delivering wheelbarrows of cement, and other manual tasks. Most are young. Many are female. They seem to be a mix of Tibetan and Chinese. I was told by our guides that they work 12 hour days. Often they smile and wave as we pass. (Looking through my pictures, and the pictures of others, I’m amazed how few pictures there are of the road-workers. Even though they were an almost constant presence, I think we all felt it was somehow intrusive to photograph them.)
One of the few pictures of road workers (Timothy photo)
An interesting moment occurred on our way to Trongba. We had pulled off the road to have a simple picnic lunch by a stream. Several hundred feet from us a canopy had been set up with chairs underneath, and a few feet away a white-coated chef appeared to be working on a meal. Several minutes later six speeding Land Cruisers, their horns blazing, pull up to the canopy.
We continued eating our beans and rice chapatis, and, after a while, a few members of the new group walked over to us. They were young, smartly dressed Chinese carrying cameras with large telephoto lens. We exchanged the usual questions: Where are you from? What are you doing here? Apparently they all worked for a company in Shanghai and the owner had decided to take his staff of 17 on a road trip through Tibet. The ones who had come over were articulate in English — one young woman had a masters from Stanford — but they didn’t seem to know much about Tibet. (For example, they knew little about the cultural and spiritual significance of Mt. Kailash, where they would go in several days.)
It seemed like for them, we were very interesting exotica: a scruffy group of Americans, Germans, and Japanese Buddhist on a pilgrimage through western Tibet. As if to emphasize this, a few minutes into our exchange four Tibetan women carrying children walked close by our group, apparently looking for hand-outs of food or money. The Chinese stepped back and raised the cameras to record the interactions. (Accustomed to being subjects, we were now objects.)
A head-scratching translation on the main street of the town of Saga.
