Trekking to Tibet: Tsaparang and the Guge Kingdom

Some serious weirdness on the road

From the journal (expletives not deleted):

Another freezing night.

Found a thermal left on the ground - frozen stiff with rocks glued to it. Ice on the tents again. Slept fully clothed and jacketed.

Huge hares bound around our campsite...

I'm recalling a recurring dream I used to have when I was a kid.

One of those ones where you feel hunted.

It would always begin as I was drifting off to sleep. It would start with flashing impressions of delicate things destroyed by immense, insensate, mobile things. Think of trying to pick up the tiniest crystal chalice with the maw of a stripmine excavator.

Receiving them, I'd always know: "Oh shit, here we go..."

Every minute mote of dust in the atmosphere began to grow. Eventually they began to fall from the sky, growing as they fell, until it was raining stones. The rain of rocks would intensify, rainrocks becoming a hail of boulders. They'd keep growing even as they piled up on each other.

Eventually the rain would stop, growth would cease, and the world would be silent, buried miles deep in stones. I would be buried too, and then begin the slow journey upward through the winding maze of gaps between the titanic monoliths.

At the surface it was always night - black sky. I don't remember stars. A cloaked figure hunted me.

I would walk the crevassed rock surface until I'd come to an edge. A vertical drop into blackness. I always knew I was facing a great chasm. I always knew there was something on the other side. I always knew it was where I had to be.

How to get there? I'd search the precipitous edge of that world, looking for some kind of bridge. In a different place each time, but always close to the edge, I'd stumble across a box. A box like an old valve radio transmitter, wedged solid into the rocks, its face bearing glass dials and switches. I would bend toward it and flip a switch. It would instantly light up and a dazzling arc of colours would leap across the void, solid in the blackness, solid enough to walk on - a rainbow bridge!

I'd mount that bridge just as my sense of foreboding would peak. I'd run like the wind, but every time I reached the peak of the arch I'd look over my shoulder to see that huge cloaked figure loom from the rocky landscape and sweep toward the box.

I'd run faster every time, but would always hear the click as the box was switched off.

The long fall into the void would always end with a BANG awakening back in my bed.

I'm thinking: "Is this where that happened?"

I wonder: "Is this the world of stones?"

Midday: We're sitting in the 4WDs in the sunbaked heat of the Chinese military town of Zanda, waiting for approval to continue the final 20km to Tsaparang. The town is small, but is planted with the first real trees we've seen for a long time. The usual complement of dogs idle in the shady patches while men play pool on the torn felt of dilapidated pool tables set up in the street.

It's recommended we don't stray from the vehicles, as we could be departing at any time. We check out the few shops and see if there's a public toilet. There isn't. I decide to go in search of soft ground and a screening wall or bush...

It took us another four teeth-rattling hours to get here, across some once again incredible terrain. On leaving our camp this morning, we drove across high, rolling plains while the Garhwal Himalaya rose higher on the horizon. As we approached the Sutlej valley, the ground before us fell steeply away and we were entranced at the sight of an immense valley stacked with convoluted hills of banded sand or mudstone, backed by the blinding white of the range between us and northern India.

We wound our way down into the valley and the world contracted to the narrow canyons between those convoluted hills. It was a truly unexpected landscape. It looked like some film location in the Utah badlands. The scale is of course outrageous, and to be in there in heavy rain would be deadly, I think. Giant towers of solidified mud, scored by water, full of stones. A maze of branching, hairpinning canyons carved into ancient lake or seabed. No wonder the Guge Kingdom got lost!

Have a look at it from above - the marked location is Tholing/Zanda. You can see the "mineral mountains" pictured in yesterday's post in the top right corner of this view.

When we emerge from the maze onto the floodplain of the Sutlej River, I'm blown away by the smell of grevillea. In so many places and ways, I'm struck by similarities between home and here.

Anthony points out that the telecoms booth we're parked outside offers international calls for 2 yuan a minute. That's about 25 cents! One of the benefits of having the military in town, I guess: Cheap calls over their satellite network. I try to call home... can't get through...

1.00pm: Still waiting. We've used the time to find the telco's head office where some of us place successful calls home. I marvel at being in such a remote area and being able to bounce a call off a Chinese military satellite, but the 'phone rings out...

It's so hot waiting in the sun in the center of town and my illness adds to the discomfort. I hope we can leave soon. It's really frustrating having to spend this length of time waiting, unable to explore the town and nearby Tholing ruins because we could be leaving at any moment.

A little later we get the green light...

Wow! What to say? I've never seen anything like it. Inspiring, mysterious, melancholy, organic, ghostly, resonant, towering, dissolving, echoing, dreaming...

The road into the ruins is gated and when we arrive the gatekeepers are loath to admit us. Jagat Man paid all the admission fees for the trip when he organised our group's visa, so a long discussion ensues. Of course we wind up paying a little more - nobody's paid the gatekeeper!

Once inside we begin the climb up the hill into the heart of the old capital. It's hard going at this altitude. The path to the top alternately hugs the edge of a precipice and tunnels straight through the mudstone of the hill. The place is just incredible. Nature has been the ruler here for almost 400 years and although in ruins, the hilltop keep is still holding out.

The aeons of weathering have created flumes of material washed down from the heights. The fan of sediments at the foot of the flumes reveal scatterings of artefacts, obvious to even a casual observer. I find a tongue of corroded copper, about 3cm long by half that width, maybe a millimetre thick. It's pierced by six drilled holes, two on each side midway down its length and two in the tip.

I'm wondering what it may have been when Cyril approaches and holds out about 8 of them. They're still held together in two overlapping rows, by what looks like leather thonging passing through the holes. It's body armour! How it must have looked, when these ramparts were manned by guards resplendent in burnished copper mail!

From the Summer Palace at the peak, the extent of this ancient city is obvious. Invisible at ground level, I can see the outlines of canals, walls and building foundations all over the plain below. The cliffs on either side of the valley the hill rises from are honeycombed with cave dwellings. The range of vision is stupendous - it's a true eyrie.

A funny thing: Just before leaving home, there was a Red Bull advertising vehicle driving around town. Nobody at home had ever heard of it then. When I enter the Summer Palace a man is waiting with cans of soft drink arranged on a table. He knew what condition we'd be in if we made it that far! Among the various cans is Red Bull. I can't believe it: Brand new at home and here in the most far flung reaches of western Tibet it's already on sale. I have my first Red Bull...

All too soon, it's time to go. I struggle with the concept of driving for so long to spend only a few hours here. It was definitely worth it, but I could wander here for a week and am disappointed to have to leave. There's more for me here, I feel...

See Wikipedia's Guge entry and this China Daily article  for more on the history of the lost kindom.

6.10pm: We're about an hour out of Zanda on the way home and now I'm feeling as desolate as the landscape we're stuck in. The second 4WD is bogged some distance behind us and we're frying in the sun again as we wait. I don't know why we - ah! - we're heading back to help...

6.50pm: The white 4WD's stopped again. Clutch fluid problems. I can't stop crying. I just want this trip to be over now...

HUH? What's going on? Well, suffice to say that I managed to place a call home on our way back through Zanda and now I'm just tripping as a consequence. I'm smashed by a wave of emotion that reverberates throughout my consciousness. Deep down, I'm aware that my mind is just looping on this emotive swell - that the things I'm conceiving have no reality outside my imagination - but I'm powerless before the visions my mind's conjuring. This is completely alien psychology for me. I look back at the otherness of it now and can almost believe I was - as some have suggested - under some kind of spiritual attack...

Some time later I open my eyes to see a huge rainshower in front of us. Rain. After such a scorching day. In the middle of shifting veils stalks a towering shadow. Hood? Cloak? Ponderously walking the rocky hills. Has my rainbow been turned off again? I'm falling, I'm sorry...

I can't stop crying, I can hardly see or breathe. I cannot face this kora. The pain I'm in already will suffice. 40 days in the wilderness. stop the clocks... sweep up the stars...