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Bus Ride to the Restricted Area and Yak Hair
Friday, May 6, 2005-9:03 PM
(The video of our trip to Lhasa is divided into three quicktime movies, each about eight megabytes and one and a half minutes long: "Horseback Riding in Lhasa", Tibetan Medicine, and Mount Milha.)
The ten plus hour bus ride to Linzhi was one of the most nerve-wrenching travel experiences of my life. The two-lane highway reaches an altitude of over 5,000 meters above sea level before descending to Linzhi, which sits a little lower than Lhasa.
Our bus driver from Sichuan, who looked a little younger than me, wasn't actually licensed to drive the type of bus we were on. Despite that, he handled the vehicle confidently, weaving around rocks, yaks, bicycles, tractors, and anything else in the way.
He seemed to be keeping up a good pace, too. But I couldn't tell how fast we were going because the speedometer was broken.
The most interesting place we passed on the way there was Mount Milha. It was covered with so many Tibetan prayer flags it looked like pilgrims must have been coming there since the first Dalai Lama.
As we headed further and further east, the landscape became more and more green, more and more like the rest of China I was so familiar with. Near Lhasa the hills are completely barren; they don't look like they could support a cactus.
But at Linzhi you can't see any earth. They're completely covered with trees and bushes.
Natasha and I split up from the group this evening, back in Lhasa, for dinner. The waitress gave us a pad of paper to write our order down on. I flipped the pad over and discovered a short essay in Chinese that was presumably written by a Tibetan primary or middle school student.
In Tibet, Chinese is spoken as a second language. In Lhasa, at least, nearly everyone has a very strong command of Chinese, written and spoken. Even the older Tibetans can understand Chinese well.
I felt bad that I hadn't learned any Tibetan at all to communicate with locals. I just expected them to speak Chinese, even though it isn't my or their language.
We found some hair in our food. We told the older guy there, who I guess was the owner. He said he'd investigate.
He came back and told us it was goat or yak hair. When he said yak, he used his two index fingers to imitate a yak's horns holding them up to his forehead.
Yak hair? There was no yak meat in what we were eating?
He explained what we were eating was made from yak or goat milk (and we discovered later, tsampa or barley as well) and that was where the hair came from.
He told us not to worry about it, though. It was clean.
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