Tibet: Hill Climb

Today my aunt and her friend went off on appointments they’d arranged long before, taking our guide along as a translator, and leaving me to fend for myself. A small hillside hermitage intrigued me. It sits high above a monastery we’d visited two days ago.

Going there alone wasn’t advisable. Our guide told me that as the holder of our travel permit he would definitely get in trouble if I were ever stopped and questioned while walking on my own in the mountains outside Lhasa. He suggested that a friend of his could stand in for him.

She was a great substitute. Even though her English wasn’t quite as good as his (or perhaps because it wasn’t?), she never complained about the hike. I thought she might roll her eyes a bit after we looked down from our first destination and spotted the switchbacking trail that somehow we had missed on the way up, forcing us to bushwhack. Instead, when I said, “Where to next?” she answered in classic Himalayan fashion, “It’s your wish.”

We followed the contour, admiring the views of the city, finally crossing over a ridge into a new valley. All told we stopped at three different secluded religious places of varying sizes. As was the case at every such community we visited throughout Tibet, the residents made sure we knew that the current census was way down from previous years. The typical refrain went something like, “We used to have 50 monks here, now only two.” Unspoken were the reasons for the drop: restrictions from Beijing that dictate the age ranges and teachings of monastics, and arrests that target monastics during political demonstrations. We never once saw a picture of the Dalai Lama, or heard his name spoken. What if Catholics couldn’t mention the pope?