On top of the world
Museums, markets, monks and monasteries are just some of the highlights for Annie Groer on a Himalayan odyssey.
Tibet. Nepal. Bhutan. The names rolled off my tongue like a timeless Himalayan mantra. I was itching to go, but I was done with handling tricky logistics. Let someone else arrange flights, guides, hotels, baggage and, most important, assorted visas and travel permits.
Globe-trotting friends suggested Road Scholar, a do-it-all company targeting travellers of babyboomer age and older, which is how I spent 16 days in the capital cities of Lhasa, Kathmandu and Thimphu. There were 11 of us, in our mid-50s to late-70s, with fitness and congeniality levels that ranged from impressive to dubious.
Led by two guides per city, we padded though Buddhist and Hindu holy sites, trying to keep straight each faith’s main precepts and deities. We watched students practice, and thus preserve, the heritage arts of painting, carving, weaving, bootmaking and sculpture.
We traversed museums and markets, and compared the dancing skills of monks, archers, folkloric troupes and ordinary folk. We marvelled at the fluttering prayer flags and spinning prayer wheels everywhere we turned. And we consumed a lot of yak.
Shortly after we landed in Lhasa, elevation 3505 metres, my head began to pound and my heart started to race. Altitude sickness aside, (I stupidly opted not to take the prescription meds in my bag), I was eager to explore the capital of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.
We’d been warned not to discuss politics during our four days in Lhasa, especially the current Dalai Lama who fled to India in 1959 amid Beijing’s bloody crackdown on Tibet.
Our focus was strictly Buddhism and culture. Before entering Tibet’s holiest site, the 7th-century Jokhang Temple, the devout prayed. Inside, the scent of butter lamps and incense drifted over the crush of pilgrims who inched past dazzling relics, murals and the most sacred Jowo Shakyamuni, a gilded, bejewelled Buddha reportedly made when he was 12.
Up hundreds of switchback stairs was Potala Palace, the soaring cliffside architectural icon that dominates Lhasa’s skyline. Built in 1645 by the fifth Dali Lama, Potala was used by all nine of his successors as a winter palace, citadel and spiritual centre of Tibetan Buddhism.
Today, 20 of the 1000 rooms are open as a museum. Displays include exquisite religious art and raiment, as well as the narrow bed of the absent last occupant. Norbulingka, the richly embellished summer palace, is across town nestled within Tibet’s largest garden.
Yet nothing matched the set-piece drama at the Sera Monastery, where, in a shaded, whitegravelled courtyard, countless pairs of red-robed monks were locked in heated debate.
With voices raised and arms flailing, each standing senior monk argued moral doctrine to the disciple seated at his feet. The protege could only reply after the mentor clapped his hands. We understood not a word, of course, but the emphatic speech and balletic movements were riveting.
Far calmer was Tse Wang Tan Pa, a physician at the Tibetan Traditional Hospital, who explained centuries-old anatomic and botanic thangka paintings depicting ailing patients and natural remedies before he checked our pulses and inspected a few tongues. Get more exercise, he counselled one; eat less sugar, he told another before leaving to see patients.
Our major field trip was a 120-kilometre bus ride from Lhasa to a settlement of semi-nomads, where yak butter tea (an acquired taste), dried cheese (a nice salt jolt) and sweet cakes (tasty) were served in a modest family compound. Handmade tapestries covered doors and windows, and posters hailing Chinese Communist Party leaders leaned against a wall.
Back in Lhasa, a young, costumed troupe intent on keeping its culture alive performed Tibetan opera and traditional dance, including the best two-man cavorting yak we would see.
Two events a half-century apart comprised what little I’d heard about Kathmandu: the late 1960s counterculture invasion fuelled by then-legal hashish and cannabis; and the 2015 earthquake and aftershocks that killed nearly 9000 people, left about 500,000 homeless and destroyed or damaged many important Hindu and Buddhist temples, palaces and pagodas.
‘‘Hippies put Kathmandu on the map in the 60s and 70s,’’ said Sanjay Nepal, our smart, irreverent chief guide and fixer. ‘‘After the earthquake, they sent in their photos of how things used to look, to help with restoration.’’
Today, post-disaster construction is everywhere in the dusty, dirty, traffic-choked city of 1 million (closer to 5 million when counting the surrounding Kathmandu Valley) jammed with endless streams of diesel-belching vehicles).
In the town of Bhaktapur, once a major medieval city-state, and at central Kathmandu’s Durbar Square 12km away, and other heritage