This is a travelogue e-mail sent to my family after returning from a head-splitting trip to Litang, the highest town in the world. Or so the locals claim it is. The nasty altitude sickness I had to deal with made their claims much easier to believe. But the horse races I attended there were pretty darn awesome!
I took off for a month of travel on July 29. I started off by heading out to a huge Tibetan horse race in western Sichuan (the province I live in, if you haven’t figured that out already… duh!). The town it takes place in is Litang, which you might (but probably don’t) remember as one of the towns I passed through on my four day backdoor trip through Sichuan 3 years ago with Patrick Sadik and crazy British doctor friend Laura. At 4680 meters (not feet!… that’s far higher than the highest point in the continental US) it’s one of the highest towns in the world. Although it’s outside the official borders of Tibet, it’s very much a Tibetan town, with the colorful lull of the Tibetan language greeting you at the turn of every corner and the even more vibrant colors of traditional Tibetan garb livening up the streets. It’s certainly a very photogenic place, especially at festival time when the Tibetans are wearing their best and brightest, but not the most hospitable environment for a big city Texas boy born on a bayou and raised in the flat oil lands of east Texas. Shoot, even a lot of the Tibetans have problems up here. Who’s idea was it to start a town at 4680 meters anyway! There’s much lower land half a day down the road people!
I took a 7-hour bus (which turned out to take over 10 hours, a recurring theme throughout this trip) to Kangding, the edge of the Tibetan frontier in western Sichuan and only half as high as Litang. Nestled in a valley between several very steep mountains, it’s not at all an unattractive place, although the view from above is much more spectacular than from below. Unfortunately, the famous Pao Ma Mountain hiking trail is temporarily closed, so I settled for more down-to-earth shots. I didn’t get in until just before dark (again, thanks to my 11-hour ride on a 7-hour bus). The whole town seemed to be congregated in the central square for some merriments and dancing, and I of course got right in the middle of the circle with my big, fat camera and fired away. Some adorable children playing inside the circle took an immediate interest in this strange alien creature with the big, fat, black apparatus attached to his face, and I quickly had some great photos of Tibetan and Chinese children frolicking together in front of my apparatus (i.e. my camera… don’t be disgusting). I took some slow exposure shots of the town after dark, putting my travel tripod (thanks mum and dad… great Christmas present) to good use at last (on my last trip down to the jungle I hardly found any use for it). I stayed away from the hotpot restaurant that had haunted my bowels for 4 days straight on the last trip through this town, opting for a rather tame meal of oily vegetables, oily pork, and oily soup. By the way, Chinese cuisine is very oily. Not so good for the bowels either. But certainly better than the tub of boiling lard with two tons of hot chili pepper sauce known as hotpot that Sichuan claims as one of its many famous spicy local specialities. Weirdos. Don’t they have any respect for the human gastro-intestinal system.
The next day I took another early bus, this time supposedly an 8-hour drive uphill to Litang that stretched into the better part of a day. Crossing a few points over 5000 meters, I was surpised at how well my body handled the altitude while on the bus, considering the last time I visited Litang from the other direction I suffered serious altitude sickness and thought I was going to die. Of course, that’s also the time that the driver went off the road twice in the middle of a May snowstorm at 5200+ meters and in my already dehydrated state I thought it would be a good idea to help dig the 3-ton minibus out of the snow. That might partly explain my earlier, somewhat negative experience with Mr. Altitude. I thought for sure this time he was going to be a friendly chap.
I got into Litang sometime after 5, and the first thing I did was enquire about an onward ticket through northwestern Sichuan that would help me go the back way up to Xinjiang, China’s westernmost and largest province and my final destination (that’s right, I’m not going to Tibet this time around… too expensive and too big a hassle, thanks to the Commies here making a quick buck off the western fascination with Tibet). I was quickly told that there was no bus to the place I wanted to go, and that I would have to backtrack a day to Kangding (where I had just come from) to get there. There was a road though, so I figured for sure if there was a road there must be cars using it, and where there are cars, there is always room for a hitchhiker. But I put that aside for later. At that point, I had a horse race to worry about and that meant we needed a place to stay. I left my beautiful Chinese companion (who I haven’t and won’t mention in this little story to avoid any premature conclusions from being formed) behind at the station where she was talking with a local Tibetan about our hitchhiking situation and went in search of housing with a Dutch couple I met on the bus. I was very worried that we wouldn’t find a place to stay, as the town was packed with Chinese and foreigners newly arrived to see a bunch of crazy Tibetans on their miniature horses performing all sorts of crazy stunts. Oh yeah, and they were eventually going to race their little horses into town for big prize money, but I didn’t have enough time to stay for that part. Anyway, I found a place right across the street from the station that wanted a whopping US$1 a night for a bed. There were no showers there, but as I remembered from the last trip, there was only a public shower to bathe the entire town and it didn’t get much use. Tibetans (and I’m guessing even Chinese in these parts), aren’t prolific showerers (yes, that’s a real word, I’m sure of it), and judging from the climate and their tough way of life, showers are more of a luxury than a necessity anyway.
So I headed back to the station to share the good news of not only the availability of accomodation, but also the reasonable rates on reasonably clean beds. The Tibetan guy who had been talking to my lovely friend for the past 15 minutes had offered to put us up in his place for about US$2 a night, a possibility I had hoped would present itself before we arrived as we would get a much better insight into Tibetan life. In fact, a good Tibetan friend of mine here in Chengdu had given me the cell phone number of his friend Banjoe here in town, but the text messages I had send his phone hadn’t been answered, so I had guessed it was a lost cause. We decided to take a bit of time to consider this guy’s offer to stay in his house, and my friend put his number in her phone. When she asked his name and he replied Banjoe, and I almost fell over. This was the first guy we had met in Litang, we had been talking to him for over 20 minutes, we were seriously considering staying in his house, and in the end it turns out he is the guy we were looking for anyway. When I told him I was friend’s with his buddy Jumei, he grabbed me, picked me up off the ground in a giant Tibetan hug, and started dancing up and down there in the tiny little bus station (this is of course after he put me down, as he isn’t a man of extremely large stature and I still carry a good 175 lbs. or so even after my ugly bouts with Mr. ChineseDiarrhea).
It was a lovely day, so as soon as the four of us (my lovely companion, the Dutch couple, and I) got settled into Banjoe’s traditional Tibetan house, we headed out for some pictures of town. Unfortunately, a rather nasty headache had already started it’s malicious attack on my poor little head at the station, and at Banjoe’s house Mr. Altitude started bullying my stomach after I was brave enough to try the beloved (at least to Tibetans) Tibetan yak milk tea. The Dutch were smart enough to put aside this unusual (i.e. – not the least bit tasty by any stretch of the western, Chinese, or any other non-Tibetan imagination) concoction, but I didn’t want to be impolite to my new friend, so I kept on sipping the strange tasting stuff until Banjoe refilled my cup while I was looking the other way. Doh! Halfway through my second cup my stomach started feeling a little queasy, if that’s how you describe pains brought on by the potent dual attack of altitude sickness and nascent yak tea. At any rate, like I said, after our tea adventure we headed out into the remains of a beautiful sunny day at nearly 5000 meters and took some pictures. My condition worsened as we walked through the far from numerous streets comprising Litang, only different from my last trip in that they had been paved at some point in the last 3 years. After about 30 minutes rain clouds had overrun what little sun was left, and altitude sickness had overrun what little was left of my body after two days in those decrepit buses. I deteriorated rather quickly, as the always cheerful Dutch couple were quick to note in their quaint little Dutch accents with gleeful smiles on their quaint little Dutch faces. I wasn’t smiling. In fact, I found a public toilet and quickly took advantage of the fact that it was like every other feces-infested, foul-smelling public toilet in China to help me loosen up my stomach muscles and spill the yak tea into the dark recesses of whatever hell lay under the shoddy holes in the cement. As if my splitting headache wasn’t bad enough, I was nauseated like a 3-year-old Indian baby with his fourth case of dyssentary. Life was not good in Litang at the moment, at least not for your once fearless narrator, friends. Oh no, life was spinning and screaming and splitting my darling little head open faster than the fastest of those miniature Tibetan horses I had come so far to see. But at least the yak tea was out of my system, or so I thought.
We went for dinner, but at this point I was barely able to stay on my feet I was so miserable, and I was far from believing the encouragements of my three companions to eat food to help stave off the pains. “It’s oxygen deprivation,” I exclaimed with what little gusto I had left, “it’s bloody oxygen deprivation and it’s racking every last limb in my body with a fury greater than that of the pouring rains that are now flooding the streets outside.” Yeah, so it was raining too. Great. Lovely little evening in Litang. As soon as the food came out and I got one look at my dear friend Mr. GreasyNastyOil, I made a mad dash for the nearest public bathroom. This one was worse than the last one by a scale of about 10, as I had to step around a trail of poo worse than out at the horse racing field the next day just to make my way to the nearest whole in the cement, where smells no human should ever be exposed to were eminating freely from the vast blackness below my bottom. Oh, my bottom was over the hole because I had a bad case of diarrhea to top things off. I won’t go into detail about how many pounds of weight I emitted from both my major orifices, but suffice it to say I lost a lot. A whole lot. And when I finally stumbled through the pounding rain with my broken umbrella back to the restaurant, my new friends were still trying to convince me to eat, possibly not noticing that my lunch was still clinging to the stubble on my chin. Sorry to gross you out, my dear loyal readers, but I must let you know that your dear narrator was suffering something awful on this fine night in Litang. Mr. Altitude was back with a vengeance, and I was in no shape to put up a decent spar.
To make a long, disgusting story just a wee bit shorter in the interest of the reader, the nice young girl who brought us our oil – I mean food – was kind enough to escort me and my lovely friend, who remarked repeatedly how suprisingly wonderful she felt at such a high altitude, to the nearest clinic to get some oxygen. Two oxygen packs, 10 pills of who knows what kind of medicine, two hours, and a good bit of money (by Litang standards) later, I was only feeling about halfway to death’s door and with a smile of relief on my face I went to get a little food before heading home at about midnight. It was not a night of peaceful sleep, as the altitude continued to rack my brain with both ends of a pitchfork, sometimes pounding and sometimes prodding, but always painful and not at all leaving me in a state conducive to sleep. But these are the ordeals that occur to many a foreigner stupid enough to travel to these heights, and I knew I would just have to live with it if I was going to get some good pictures of little horses carrying around big crazy men doing very unintelligent things. Who’s idea was this again…?
The next two days were spent out at the festival site, where the colorful attire of Tibetans who had gathered from all over western China intermingled with the massive cameras of the Chinese and foreigners who had gathered from the rest of China and the world to take their pictures. I looked like a measly lightweight contender next to the big black apparati (is that plural for apparatus?) attached to these guys’ faces, and I was suprised that the Tibetans weren’t more taken aback by all these alien invaders at their festival. Then again, this has been going on for years, so I guess they’ve just learned to cope.
The festival was interesting, though the second day was the opening day and I only took pictures for a few hours in my deteriorated state before heading back to the house to recover. We decided to leave the next morning despite six more days of festival activities ahead. For two nights I had tossed and turned all night with a splitting headache, getting up early each morning to drag myself into the doctor for some oxygen. And spending all afternoon pushing my way through swarms of photographers even crazier than I am with their cameras wasn’t exactly what I had planned for this festival. By this point my friend’s poor little head was not doing so well either, so that evening we went to the station to enquire about hitchhiking, only to be told that very few cars travel down the road we needed to take. There were only four tickets for the next morning’s bus back to Kangding, so we decided to come back to Chengdu and continue on from here. After two more long days of 12-hour rides on 7-hour buses, I arrived back in Chengdu last night headacheless and drenched in sweat. It never felt so good to be in this city. Unfortunately, there are no trains to Xinjiang, my final destination, for the next 10 days, as it is travel season here. I settled for a berth on a non-a/c train to the neighboring province of Gansu, where I can change to a bus (yippee, obviously my favorite form of transport at this point) and slowly make my way up to Xinjiang.
