TIBET - Part II: The Land

As our 4WD Pajero wound up yet another painstaking mountain pass and I white-knuckled the door handle so I wouldn’t fall yet again into the two people sharing the backseat with me, my camera lens consistently knocked against the freezing glass window as I tried to capture the miraculous countryside that grew only more spectacular with every new bend.

Snowcapped peaks crowned a countryside of stone and brown mountains, roads winding up their sides and tiny villages sitting quietly beneath their majestic grandeur. The “scorpion river” sat beneath one of the highest peaks, glowing a royal turquoise beneath the cloudless sky. Standing below a windy and bitter cold canopy of brightly colored prayer flags flapping in the wind, I could see in the far off distance the white peaks that held the title of being the highest in the world.

The rooftop of the world, indeed, not much can survive or flourish in the nutrient and oxygen deprived environment, but traveling through the country exemplified just how innovative its inhabitants prove to be. Men dressed in curious hats and (apparently) warm clothing, assisted by their purebred dogs, usher hundreds of sheep through the valleys, over roads, and up and down the mountains. A woman carries a bright green jug on her back down to an ice-covered river so she can fill up the teapot suspended in the center of a large, concave metal, satellite-looking contraption that gather the sun’s rays, utilizing every natural resource to their advantage (in this case, to boil water in lieu of having no wood).

Discs of cow manure sit, neatly stacked on top of brick walls, baking in the sun so they can later be used as fuel for an indoor furnace. Yaks graze on the arid ground, waiting for the winter to be over so they can continue working the fields of barley and wheat. Smoke and incense billow out of tiny chimneys in villages of 300 people while a single wire bounces off poles sticking straight out of the ground, carrying a taste of electricity to villages hundreds of miles apart.

And one night, perhaps one of the most powerful moments of my entire trip, I stood outside of our backpacker’s hotel in Shegar, a mere few hours away from Mt. Everest, and gazed up at the sky unpolluted by any nearby light. Poets perhaps have done it justice, and I do not pretend (or desire) to recreate this most spectacular of sights in words alone, but for the first time I witnessed millions of stars flickering, twinkling, shining through the blanket of pure black sky, a moon glowing so brightly I could barely look at it for more than a few seconds at a time, and every constellation I never took the time to learn peering down at me, gawk-eyed and open-mouthed.

Had I still been able to feel my fingers, I would have stayed outside longer as the stars drifted overhead, arcing through the sky, boasting their radiant splendor to us six westerners that happened to bear witness one night, as well as the thousands of other locals who are blessed with such pure and natural brilliance every night of their life.