(© April Orcutt)
Landing on the Tibetan Plateau
Little Green Men — and Women — Aren’t Always Green
April Orcutt
Until this trip, I hadn’t realized how far you could travel on a bus.
The cosmos had been my ultimate wanderlust goal, but I wouldn’t get into space in a car so I applied for NASA’s Journalist-in-Space program. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was seeking a writer to convey the emotion and experience of space travel. I was eagerly all in. But, in 1986, when the Space Shuttle Challenger with the Teacher-in-Space tragically exploded, the Journalist-in-Space program ended, too.
Sadly and with dream dashed, I looked for another adventure — and a month later China offered an “open door policy” for individual travel in Tibet. I got a visa, headed to Asia, and found a small chartered bus traveling from Nepal across the Himalayas to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.
Departing from Dram/Zhangmu, a village on the Tibet-Nepal border, the bus climbed the single-lane, winding, dirt track, past thick forests hanging on near-vertical walls slashed with the naked paths of landslides that had stripped the mountainsides down to rock. The bus drove so close to the edge that I could not see the road below — just empty space for thousands of feet down. Green morphed to brown, plants to rocks, enveloping mist to broad, dry expanses as the bus crossed Nyalam Pass at 12,468 feet, entered the Tibetan Plateau, and continued up to Lalungla Pass at 16,564 feet. We stopped for a break.
Lalungla Pass presented a cold and silent hill bereft of plants or birds, animals or people. When I stepped off the bus, a dry breeze riffled my hair and made the only faint sound. Dust left the only scent. Brown dirt studded with boulders stretched over hills and plains all directions.
Behind me glacier-covered peaks — including Xixibangma, at 26,293 feet the eighth highest peak in the Himalayas — loomed as sentries guarding the edge of the plateau and capturing rain and snow before the moisture could reach the dehydrated land. I had never seen a landscape so barren, so isolated, so bleak as the Tibetan Plateau.
From here you would never know Earth is called the “Blue Planet.”
Back on the bus, for mile upon mile I saw vast expanses of desolate valleys speckled with gray boulders receding to barren brown or red hills — like photos lunar astronauts and Martian landers had taken. At night icy temperatures, absolute silence, and billions of stars turning the black sky gray made the plateau a worthy facsimile for the “Final Frontier.”
The Tibetan Plateau sprawls west-to-east for 1,500 miles, three-quarters the diameter of the moon; and, at more than 15,000 feet in elevation, this was about as near to the moon as I could get.
Only three other passengers rode on my bus: a young Nepalese couple that kept to themselves and Cauley, a six-foot-tall, pale-skinned, red-haired Scotsman.
On the second morning, somewhere along the empty road between Xigatse and Lhasa, the bus began to lurch. The young Chinese driver stopped, pulled a bag of tools from behind his seat, and tinkered with the engine. We drove again but limped only a few miles. The vehicle sputtered to a stop beside some scraggly bushes at the edge of dry barley fields. The driver crossed his arms over the steering wheel, pressed his forehead down against them, and moaned.
Vehicles were nearly as scarce on this road as on the moon. There was no other driver to help, and our Scot was no Star Trek “Scotty.”
Outside the window two teenage Tibetan girls peeked from behind the bushes. Deep rust-colored yarn twisted through their black hair, and they wore black mid-calf-length skirts, frayed brown blouses, and faded aprons with narrow stripes of sienna, beige, and brown. A woman carrying a baby in a blanket slung over her back and other Tibetan adults and children cautiously wandered over.
The driver slowly raised his head from the steering wheel. He poked around in his bag of tools; and Cauley and I headed for the bus door.
Cauley, freckled and wearing a bright blue polo shirt, reached the door first. I — with curly, sun-bleached hair, red plaid shirt, and jeans — stood behind him on the bus stairs.
The driver opened the door. Cauley stepped out, and I hopped out behind him. The Tibetans stared at us for a moment — then screamed and ran away. I felt like the humanoid alien Klaatu with the tall robot Gort from the classic sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still.
The Tibetans stopped, turned, paused, and tiptoed back.
I pulled out stickers showing bunnies, kittens, squirrels, and cocker spaniels and handed them to the children — although because the kids had never seen those critters, they might not have known they were friendly.
Cauley held up a sticker of a cat, threw his head back, and screeched a blood-curdling cat-fight howl, which sent the Tibetans screaming and running away again.
But they crept back, this time laughing.
We blew up balloons and released them. The kids chased them, but when I pulled out my camera, they all screamed and ran away again. We launched more balloon-rockets, and the children returned.
A woman with gray hair, a large hand-made basket on her back, and an uneven stick used as a cane crept tentatively from the bushes toward the bus. Eyes open wide, she stared at the side of the vehicle. She inched closer until she stood only two feet away, her shoulders hunched and her face tense. She tentatively raised her arm and stretched her gnarled fingers toward the bus. She paused with her fingertips just above the metal surface.
The woman took a deep breath and slowly pressed her fingers against the vehicle. She paused. She ran her fingers over the hard metal surface, tracing patterns and feeling its coolness and rigidity. She pressed her whole hand against the side. Her shoulders relaxed, and her mouth formed the slightest smile.
Seeing her, some of the children stepped toward the bus. They, too, reached hesitatingly toward it, then gingerly touched it.
I realized that no bus had ever stopped here. Maybe a “URO” — an unidentified rolling object — occasionally roared down the road, but none had paused for introduction or inspection. The woman reacted to the bus the way I might if a flying saucer landed in my backyard.
But we were not aliens. We were people who shared a curiosity about the universe.
The driver now closed the engine cover, hopped back into the bus, started the motor, and gave a shout of joy. He motioned for us to get inside. We had “lost” a lot of time.
I waved at the children and reluctantly got on the bus.
Looking out the back window toward the receding figures of the Tibetans, the land didn’t look so bleak. I thought about where I would journey next — Lhasa, the moon, Mars? Or had I already landed?
###
Find more of April Orcutt’s stories at Medium.com/BATW-Travel-Stories, Medium.com/Travel-Insights-And-Outtakes, AprilOrcutt.Medium.com, and AprilOrcutt.com.
