There's an article in the New Yorker, also online, that may give you pause when you settle in to that new luxury high-speed train on your next trip to China. The key quote:
“Inside the system today, if you don’t take bribes you have to get out. There’s no way you can stay. If three of us are in one department, and you are the only one who doesn’t take a bribe, are the two of us ever going to feel safe?”
You've been thinking about it for years, and of course you've been planning for months. You HAVE to. After painstaking research and dogged persistence through the bureaucracy, you've finally got your Tibet Travel Permit in hand. And now you can't go.
Numerous news sources report that, like they did in 2008 - 2009, Chinese authorities have banned foreign travelers from Tibet.
The move comes after two Tibetans self-immolated on 27 May outside the Jokhang Monastery in Lhasa, pictured above.
Here is Chapter Eleven of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We're publishing each chapter here on the blog (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book at Amazon.com, at BN.com, or direct from EarthPhotos Publishing. Here's the Kindle version (just $6.99). Click these photos to make them bigger. More photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
11 TIBET
Ashray Raj Gautam waited in the dark before dawn. Men worked under the hood of his Toyota Corolla while we stuffed our things in its trunk. We pushed the car down the hill to get it started, and little Gautam took us to a town called Banepa, north of Kathmandu. Mirja bought junk food, I bought cheap Indian whiskey, and Gautam disappeared.
We waited for a long time, and when he came back, Gautam had a confession. He did a sheepish, dusty little shuffle.
“We came here with no fan belt.”
He was sure we could get one in Banepa but he couldn’t find one.
“Excuse me sir, we have to wait for new car from Kathmandu one hour.” He went to find a phone.
So we were off, sort of, driving from Kathmandu to Lhasa. Our Tibet travel permits would be waiting at the border. The fellow who booked us said don’t bring pictures of the Dalai Lama (I had five), and don’t be surprised if the police follow you - they’re not too used to private visitors.
Banepa, Nepal, was a lane and a half of bad tarmac twenty kilometers outside Kathmandu, with twenty meters of dust on either side of the road, and businesses the length of town with their garage-door-fronts rolled down closed.
Buses bumped into the dust and blasted their horns. They shared the verge with chickens, goats, kids, bags of grain, metal rods and tubes, the general refuse, and us.
Two old folks worked the length of town with rough straw brooms, whipping up a dust tornado, moving trash from here to there to no use. Boys held up bread into the windows of the buses. They spit and coughed all the time.
It’s no surprise life expectancy is 55 in Nepal. In Banepa the air was opaque. You couldn’t even see the neighborhood hills. Forget the Himalayas, you couldn’t see out of town.
Banepa, Nepal.
Continue reading "Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Tibet, Chapter Eleven" »
Here is Chapter Eight of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We'll publish each chapter over the course of the year (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book direct from EarthPhotos Publishing, or at Amazon.com. Photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Kiosk keepers huddled under strings of bare bulbs. An ancient pagoda perched high up on the hill across the river. Fruit and vegetable vendors and a magazine stand stood open at nine o’clock at night. Around a bend in the road, storefronts set sample dishes on the sidewalk, just out of the rain.
A wet old man beckoned me in. We didn't speak a word in common except “OK” and “bye bye.” I drank a couple of big tall green bottles of beer I couldn't read and I bought a bottle of something he thought I should buy. It was some clear elixir he kept pouring and we kept toasting. Mostly we sat in his store and stared into the fog.
•••••
One side of Guilin was shiny, the other just rubble. Five years before, Guilin tore down the buildings on the whole west side of Zhongshan Road and rebuilt them all. Now they were doing the same thing on the east side.
A bed careened by, balanced on a bicycle. Pointy-nosed little three-wheeled machines sputtered along, almost but not quite trucks. Water buffalo halted traffic and chewed the roadside, right in town. Guilin, somehow, was dusty even in the rain.
Continue reading "Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Guangxi Province, China, Chapter Eight" »
Our first trip to China came way back in 1995, when we visited the impossibly exotic Guangxi Province. The center of tourism in Guangxi is a town called Guilin, much more modest then than it is today, and the Li River, which meanders around curious karst hills and paddies.
Next week we'll post the next installment of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book: Chapter Eight, Guangxi Province, here on the blog. Order the book from Amazon here. See all the book's photos, in color, at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And see 180 photos from across China in the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
I had occasion to hire a locksmith this week, and as he went about his work he observed that this would be quite an election, this next presidential one. I agreed that was surely true. He said about the President's birth certificate, "Now if they can just prove it's true...."
I was confounded by that. I suggested (perhaps lamely) that if it IS true, what more can they do!?
The energy we expend to prevent reconciliation. Of course, it's not just here in America.
In my book Common Sense and Whiskey, I write about our trip through Tibet:
Just before Xegar stood an imbecilic checkpoint where we waited on the side of the road in the LandCruiser while the local three we’d accrued scampered off into a little squat building that sat, I mean, in the middle of absolutely slap-me-blind nowhere.
Now, man may do worse things to man than to restrict movement in a place so utterly barren, vast and empty, but hardly anything more stupid. So many rules in a place so empty.
That's Tibetans versus Han Chinese.
The Tibetans in exile have just elected a new Prime Minister who has never been to Tibet in an effort by the Dalai Lama to preempt Chinese control of succession after his death. Meanwhile the Chinese insist on vetting the next Dalai Lama.
•••••
As we stood in Armenia near at the Turkish/Armenian border, our guide Levon pointed out
A really big statue on a hill, Georg somebody, Armenian partisan, (who) stands and taunts the Turks still.
That's Armenians versus Turks.
This week Turkey has begun to tear down a Turkish/Armenian friendship statue in the eastern city of Kars, formerly home to a large Armenian population (and the setting for Orhan Pamuk's book Snow). American presidents try to reassure the Armenian diaspora on an 24 April anniversary important to Armenians. This week, President Obama appears to have pleased no one. The Armenians stand, and feel, alone, save for a dubious partner in Russia.
•••••
The Tibetans have clearly and obviously come under come under the Chinese iron hand. The killing of Armenians by Turks (whom I dearly love, and I will argue anywhere that Istanbul is one of the top five cities on the planet) is well established.
If it IS true, what more can they do?
- Photo of the Potala, Lhasa, Tibet from EarthPhotos.com.
It's been a little scant here on the blog during these last few days of birthing my book, Common Sense and Whiskey. It's still on schedule to be up on Amazon right around May first.
Meanwhile, I think this is just a delightful story in the New Yorker about a group of Chinese tourists on a package tour of European cities.
March is the most angst ridden month for Chinese fonctionnaires in Tibet. Elections for a new prime minister-in-exile are scheduled for tomorrow, and travel agencies "say they have been ordered not to allow foreign tourists into Tibet in March."
Spend a few worthwhile minutes with the New York Review of Books blog, where Pico Iyer takes stock of the state of Tibetan politics and the 75 year old Dalai Lama. Nine days ago the Dalai Lama announced his "retirement" from politics, which Iyer says "was one way of underlining to Beijing that the Tibetan problem will not go away when he dies...."
Stephan Tanty has written an entertaining new book, Escape from the Land of the Snows. It's a quick read; You can do it in a weekend. It's written in a dramatized, you were there style, purporting to know the thoughts of the players, but it paints a vivid, immediate portrait of Lhasa, 1959, as the young Dalai Lama prepared for and then carried out his escape.
Escape from the Land of the Snows describes a positively medieval world that just simply doesn't exist today. It's hard to grasp the depth of change Tibet and its leader have seen across a single lifetime.
The Tashilunpo Monastery in Xigatse, Tibet from the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
To emulate the Middle East uprisings, the U.S.-based Chinese website boxun has called for protests every Sunday at 2 p.m. That's overnight Saturday in the U.S.
While we slept last night,
"... thousands of Chinese police deployed in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities to clamp down on public gatherings after a second week of overseas Internet-based calls for protests across the country."
That's coverage from the McClatchy newspapers blog China Rises, which has had consistent coverage.
More:
"While a small band of protestors came together in Shanghai on Sunday, they were quickly dispersed by police. Authorities in Beijing went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that not only did no crowds form, but that journalists stayed away from the non-event.
There were more police present in uniform and undercover, some with canine units, than are called to handle bomb scares in many countries. Foreigners at the Wangfujing Street shopping area in central Beijing, the announced meeting site, were stopped at every turn and asked for their passports. Police or their surrogates took several western journalists away for questioning, turned back TV camera crews and reportedly shoved or assaulted at least three photographers.
In addition, water trucks rode up and down Wangfujing, spraying the road and sidewalk to keep people moving. Even street sweepers had evidently been told to discourage groups from forming; they hit bystanders’ feet with brooms and said “move” repeatedly."
Here's the whole post.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com. See more in the China Gallery there.)
A couple of new accounts add richness to the story of Tibet. Tibetans have tried their best to draw the attention of the world to their circumstance. Now, Mark O'Neill reviews 1959 Lhasa in the Asia Sentinel, about the young Dalai Lama's flight to India. And Stephan Talty's new book Escape from the Land of the Snows provides an engaging you-were-there narrative.
See also Parag Khanna's 3000 mile journey through Tibet and Xinjiang.
And in the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, see photos from Tibet, like the photo of the Potala, above.
The Million Dollar Valentine's Date at the InterContinental Hong Kong is a bargain at only US$130,000 or so. It's a million HONG KONG dollars, see. It's a night in Hong Kong's largest Presidential Suite, 7,000 square feet, available between the 11th & 14th of February.
For just a million Hong Kong dollars you'll get airport transfers by Rolls Royce, "a custom-designed Valentine's message displayed by banner via a private boat at a designated time as seen from your rooftop terrace" and several other amenities.
The InterContinental Hong Kong is in Kowloon. We stayed there on our most recent visit to China, three years ago. No Presidential Suite for us, a mere Executive Harbour View or something like that. It does have a really nice view back across to Hong Kong island:
See the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com for more photos from Hong Kong and all of China.
Two opposite views on the rise of China: From Thomas P. M. Barnett and Gideon Rachman.
Denver may be the mile-high city, but this luxury resort is located 12,000 feet up in the Himalayas, in Lhasa, Tibet.
The St. Regis Lhasa Resort opened this week. Boy, have times changed. Time was, you needed a Tibet Travel Permit (Apparently you still do) and there really wasn't a choice of hotels.
In 1999 it took us four days to travel overland from Kathmandu to Lhasa. Now it's 47 hours 28 minutes by express train from Beijing. And when you arrive, the St. Regis Lhasa Resort offers you "three diverse restaurants, wine bar, and tea room" and "Iridium, the Spa...." "With awe-inspiring views of the Lhasa, our beautifully adorned 162 guest rooms and villas feature plasma TV, High Speed Internet Access, and spacious marble bathrooms."
Checking a random date next summer, we've found the Shigatse Suite, with Potala Palace View and 24 Hr Butler Service, listed at a mere $944.26 per night (6,267.50 CNY).
Here, on the other hand, is the state of the art at our hotel back in 1999:
Yup. Times have changed.
(Photos from EarthPhotos.com. Top: The Potala Palace, bottom: A less-than-luxury Lhasa hotel. See more photos from Tibet in the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And here's the story of our 1999 drive in from Kathmandu.)
If I wait until I do a proper treatment of all these I may never get them online. So here are just a few quick items that have caught my eye lately:
- China's version of Google Maps is called Map World. "Map World only provides high-altitude images outside China, with the other side of the Chinese-North Korean border a stark white blank once a certain resolution is passed. Other countries also turn up a blank page at close resolution,” says Reuters." Still, it's fun to play with the world in Chinese. (via The Map Room.)
- Two of the longer flights we've been on, both through our home airport, have been ATL - JNB, 15 hours 20 minutes, and DXB - ATL, at 15 hours 45 minutes. The current longest scheduled nonstop is 18 hours plus. Take a guess on the route, and then click here for the answer.
- There's a story about how, shortly after 9/11, a very rural town nearby here in north Georgia, USA, applied for emergency FEMA aid for its post office - and after some snickering, was turned down. Here's a story about the most remote place in the USA and the emergency aid it's applying for - equalling about $3,500 per resident per year.
- Bad translations are always fun. For example, here's a tourism site offering "a wide range of gut-curdling activities." John Rahoi's May I Take Your Order, a bi-lingual restaurant menu in China, is a lot of fun. Next post we'll link to some fun photos of questionable products, including this one, the unconvincingly named Aftertaste perfume.
Our shots from Kowloon across to Hong Kong at sea level look positively quaint in comparison to this virtual tour of the new Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong, due to open in March. No prices on its web site yet. What do you figure, a couple hundred bucks?
At 118 floors, the Ritz will surpass the current world's tallest hotel, a Park Hyatt, where else? Also in China. The Park Hyatt Shanghai occupies the 79th to 93rd floors of the Shanghai World Financial Center in Pudong, across the river from the Shanghai bund.
Speaking of quaint, it makes the days when our hometown Westin Peachtree Plaza, at 73 stories, was the world's tallest hotel seem like a long time ago.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com's China Gallery, taken across Hong Kong harbor from the Kowloon InterContinental hotel.)
Brendan O'Neill does a does a debrief now that he's back from his Tibet trip (which we wrote about two weeks ago). He calls for Tibet to be freed twice: "Firstly from the authoritarian Chinese Stalinists who rule there, and who deny Tibetans basic liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to protest. And secondly from the Western 'Free Tibet' lobby itself, whose shallow solidarity seems to be keeping Tibet in a pre-modern, underdeveloped state for the benefit of eco-conscious Westerners." Very nice.
Photo: The Amdo Hotel, Tinggri, Tibet. Vacancies.
More in the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Common Sense and Whiskey is the companion to EarthPhotos.com, where you can see and buy professional photo prints from 105 countries and territories around the world, and the blog for Common Sense and Whiskey - the book. It's Intelligent discussion about the world out there.
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