Asia > Tibet > Lhasa > Lhasa > Disaster Travel > Articles > Lhasa: The long-time home

1988 must have been one of those years when China thought it had the Dalai Lama licked. Foreign journalists were being allowed into Lhasa.

Actually, we were just a bunch of travel writers out of Hong Kong being treated to the tops of our bellies by The Holiday Inn Group who had Tibet’s only habitable hotel.

As I walked across the Lhasa airport tarmac, I had an experience not normally associated with complementary travel journalism. I started to stop breathing... I wouldn’t die, they told me, especially if I didn’t panic. Newcomers from below need time to acclimatize to the reduced oxygen at 12,000 feet [3600m].

They put me to bed in the hotel where I sucked on an oxygen supply tube. It hemmed in the headache and put a cap on the nausea.

After thirty-six hours of this they decided to send me back down to the sweet, gummy oxygen of Chengdu, on China’s CAAC daily flight with an onward to Guangzhou from where I could be back in Hong Kong before the pubs shut.

On the 90 km drive to the airport, I met Kenny, the hotel’s accountant and Eddie, an injured electrician going back in a wheelchair. I was beginning to feel better. I was acclimatizing. At the airport I was tempted to go back with the bus, then felt what was done was done and let it go.

A plane was already loading. In the queue was one of our party who had left the day before for Peking.

“Go back!” she cried, a herald of mortal danger. “Our plane never came. I’ve been here all night. This was your plane!” Off in the opposite direction went what should have been the 9.55 am to Chengdu.

We sat around on steps with a lot of soldiers being fed patent nonsense that the Peking plane was coming back for us. In truth, CAAC were one plane short and across the routes of the Celestial Empire, Peter was being robbed to pay Paul. We would have to wait for the whole thing to start again tomorrow. In the meantime, we had a night in the airport ‘hotel.’

The glorious PLA soldiers thrashed each other to get on the one bus available till they hung out of the windows. Kenny and I took turns in pushing Eddie the long walk to the single story muddy bricked structure.

It was an establishment of consummate repulsion. Corridors were lined with full spittoons, bubbling from constant deposits. In the rooms, you could not walk between passing flies. Sheets showed off the frolickings and flatulences of others. The floor was its own life form. The cold water bathroom was the Limpopo in flood. Electricity was on ration.

I shared with a junior cadre of the Communist Party whose friends joined him and ate biscuits and peeled eggs over the well populated carpet. At the evening meal, attended by large hairy men in large hairy out coats, I lost a filling to the rice.

Even for the most demanding and voluble foreigner, the check-in for the second 9.55 am was incomprehensible. Kenny shouted for us whilst I guarded Eddie lest he and his chair be sold for scrap.

It was then that we learned that there would be no Chengdu-Guangzhou flight that day either and as a penalty for expecting such a thing, all through Guangzhou tickets had to be split in two there and then. Frantic last minute splitting went on in a back room with people hammering on the door in panic.

As part of the security farce, Eddie and his chair proved too wide to go through the metal detector arches. With not a flicker of assistance from the servants of the people, Kenny and I somehow passed him and then the chair through to each other. This time they gave Eddie a seat by the door on the bus - and then the soldiery thrashed their way on all over him.

In Chengdu, all responsibility for us was disowned. We stayed and shuttled at our own expense. I spent time cursing in front of the world’s largest statue of Mao Zedong.

At 5.50am we were excited to be handing over our baggage for our 7.05 flight. We were sure the electricity would soon be switched on.

Kenny was suddenly told that the rate for Hong Kong Chinese out of Chengdu had increased and he must pay more. That is when Kenny ‘lost it,’ as they say, and didn’t ‘get it back’ till the extortionist clerk relented. Then came the news that tickets issued in Chengdu got chances of boarding passes over Lhasa ones. Then I ‘lost it’. For all the good that did me. The girl clerk cut me off by simply folding her arms on her desk and laying her head down on them.

We didn’t get our 7.05am flight till 2pm. It had been sent up to Lhasa for another load. Crazed with the tedium, I watched them disembarking. First off from the first class section was my Holiday Inn press group. They had a direct flight to Hong Kong. They’d be home before I was.

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