Welcome!
It all started back in Zurich, where I was living, playing a bit of violin in the Opera and teaching English to some good people. Over those 4 years I had made some precious friends, come to love the landscape and culture and found it to be a sort of home for myself. Things were however, stuck, and it was three words on the screen of my laptop, that were to change everything.
'Teaching in Lhasa'. I thought a while about what that might mean. Where was Lhasa? Who would I teach? Could I manage it? Would I get some beautiful pictures of an exotic people? Thinking however, got me nowhere. Rather than go round in circles in my mind, I just had to go for it without thinking. So I did. And within a couple of months, I was on a plane to Shanghai, gazing at the sun as it hovered silently above the horizon. That evening the sun did not set, but dipped slightly below the horizon to the North and then rose as morning in Asia broke.
I can't very easily describe just how confused I was upon arrival in Shanghai, after 11 hours in the plane, accompanied by a Brazilian dance troupe and totally unprepared for the climate, time difference and inability to communicate with anyone whatsoever. The cab ride from the airport lasted a couple of hours; it was total gridlock along the motorway into Shanghai as Wang, my driver, tested my nerve as he swerved, weaved and hooted his way into impossibly small gaps in the traffic. The cars and lorries pumped out acrid fumes and a brownish haze hung over the huge hellish-looking housing blocks to the left and right of the bridge over the Huangpu River. It was an awesome sight to behold. Wang dropped me off in the middle of town by People's Square after teaching me a couple of useful phrases in Mandarin and I took a deep breath, not the best idea, before heading into the massive grinding behemoth of a metropolis trying to appear as if I knew where I was going. I had no idea where I was going, though and was stunned to be in the midst of twenty million Chinese, to whom I must surely have appeared as strange as a visitor from space. I saw one or two westerners, but it was a huge shock I was totally unprepared for. And one that led me directly into the jaws of a humiliating trap. The tea house trick.
They seemed so friendly and so beautiful, the two Chinese students that appeared before me with frilly lemon and pastel coloured parasols as I tramped wearily out of a subway, sweating beneath my 20 Kilo pack. I was exhausted and besides, it seemed so natural as we chatted awhile before heading off to a tea house to see 'the tea ceremony'. It was strange, in retrospect, the almost robotic translation by one of the 'students', the surreal atmosphere in the modern building containing several box like tea rooms, but as soon as the bill came, I knew I'd been had. Somehow, though, as an Englishman in a foreign land, I wanted to remain polite and gracious. I paid, the girls visibly surprised and even a little ashamed upon our parting. But I was glad I had only been duped into buying the most expensive tea in the world and not lost a kidney or worse...
In Shanghai I met some wonderful people. Complaining of my misfortune at the reception of the hostel I had eventually found, I met Alexis, an Austrian New Yorker and is partner, in town to check out the scene as they built up their business, Semapedia.org- a fascinating concept uniting Wikipedia with ordinary peoples mobile phones. There was LiLi, a very generous Chinese lady who took care of everything for me, from buying a violin, to screaming at the officious man in the Tibet Travel Bureau, who demanded 20,000 Yuan for a permit, necessary at the time due to some seriously misguided American behaviour, namely the hoisting of the Tibetan flag at Everest Base Camp. Some Americans had even tried to smuggle people out by van, got caught and certainly caused a lot of trouble for their charges and even for the tour guide who brought them to the Border with Nepal, who lost his license for life, I have been told. It wasn't easy, but LiLi pleaded in the train station on my behalf, the lady took pity and gave me a seat leaving on the 10th of July. A hard seat for 53 hours, but I was ecstatic. I would make it after all, see Brigitte, who had written the three words that were to change my life and begin teaching English.
For a week I enjoyed stick food, or food on sticks, the ever changing hostel population, from all over the globe and experienced the wildly contrasting extremes of total poverty and wealth in this exploding city. I remember the family selling grapes on a corner and beneath a huge flyover, the foul air from millions of cars and buses enveloping us as I played footbag with the son for a couple of hours (what's footbag? -go to the links to find out!). These were kind and decent people whom I trusted with hundreds of pounds worth of camera gear and was rewarded with handshakes and genuine smiles.
The development is staggeringly fast, even in such a developed city as Shanghai and though I spent such a short time there, only a week, in a few days it was surreal to see a nearly complete building where before there was only a building site, wooden scaffolding and dedicated workers pushing on, day and night, to get the job done.
It was an exciting but disturbing place, but I was due on the 6pm train, direct to Lhasa, so I packed up my things and heaved the bag onto a bus, accompanied by LiLi. Though I had been strong on my arrival, a week of foul air and shock had brought on a cold and the next two days were hard, perhaps the hardest journey I have made, except perhaps that drive from London to Zurich I had made back in the New Year of 2006. The Tibetan students on the train were wonderful and we talked through the night, I played my violin and wondered what the future might hold. If the people of Tibet were as warm and loving as the students from Nanjing, I was in for an eye-opening experience, I was sure. I smiled to myself as the countryside rolled past in the morning. I was so tired, but I tasted a strong kind of deep and peaceful happiness that had been absent from my life for a long while.
The train pulled in on the third evening, at around ten and I staggered out to meet Brigitte and Purbhu who promptly adorned me with a Kata- the traditional ceremonious white scarf of Tibet, reserved for loved ones arriving, leaving, marrying and for images in temples. My time in Tibet had at last began.
What happened next? Did Darius perish from Severe altitude sickness or did the food finish him off? Did he become a Buddhist monk and retreat from life forever? What about the rampant orphans?
Well, it was a close thing. The AMS got me on arrival and got me bad...I was in bed for a few days with all the usual symptoms, headache and nausea among them. As if that wasn't enough, once I started teaching the high-school students, the food got me for a month on and off. It was hard, but I've heard a lot worse. Once well, I left any thoughts of going home far behind and threw myself into Lhasa with abandon, exploring the old town, the temples, the monasteries, the building sites and squalor included. In fact one day will remain with me, that first walk out of town behind our home and school, to the hills behind Lhasa. I had had it with sitting in the flat feeling weary, so I struck out with my film camera gear to see what i could find. I walked through the fascinating dirt road villages on the East side of town and ended up in the patchy agricultural area that you rarely see if you come here as a tourist. There are little Tibetan hamlets and Chinese settlements, growing vegetables in polythene tubes, little irrigation ditches all over the place, rubbish festering almost everywhere you look and curious children playing in the dust.
This day I met a pair of shocked Tibetan girls who I photographed along with a very old Chinese man in Mao era military dress. His smile was typical but unforgettable, toothless but charming. I have yet to see, it must be said, any of my film pictures which sit in the fridge as I speak. After a few hours I headed home, past a massive building site with cranes and shacks, but arrested by friendly cries of 'hello!', I turned into the muddy, stinking place, to see who these people were. I ended up staying in their shack until midnight, eating with a group of Tibetan workers who among hundreds, come to work for 35 Yuan a day on the site and live in tarpaulin and wood shacks, cooking in the muddy wayside with bricks and scrap wood, the smoke of which flooded the tent-like abode with it's acrid fumes, but could not lessen the good vibes within. 35 Yuan for 10 hours work. That's about two Quid a day to you and I. They were sweet and even offered me a bed for the night, but I was on my way after eating, resolved to return with some precious and expensive Yak meat in the coming days. I came back two weeks later, but they had left.
Well, the next few months I spent teaching my orphans and hanging out in Dunya with Isa, Guzman and all the others. We went trekking and whiled away many an early morning in Babila, the hottest nightspot in Lhasa city. But the time came to get away and so I packed my bag and walked East to Drak Yerpa. Drak Yerpa is built on a sheer mountainside with more than 80 meditation caves and is described as the "life tree" or spiritual axis of Lhasa. The site has a powerful spiritual heritage, having been visited by Songsten Gampo, Padmasambhava, Yeshe Tsoygel, Padampa Sanggye, and Atisha Before the Cultural Revolution is was the home of several hundred hermits, monks, and nuns. Now one can still see how severe the bombardment by the army must have been, with only twenty or so monks now living in those buildings that cling to the hillside above the old ruins (see right-The Cook at Drak Yerpa).
It was during one of my four visits to this beautiful place that I made a two day hike over the nearest mountain, to find some peace and quiet. I certainly got that alright! It was deserted up there and after being accompanied up and over the top by a yak herder I spent a day cutting barley with a family. The whole day they toiled and I tried to keep up. It was truly impressive, the skill with which they all cut and bundled the barley, stacking it in piles to dry over the next month or so before threshing and roasting on hot sand. The grain would then be milled into Tsampa, that ubiquitous Tibetan staple food. Tsampa is pretty unexciting as food goes, being flour mixed with butter tea and moulded into little golf ball sized morcels. Mmmm! Tsampa! I must say, I have more than once gladly stuffed myself with it, so hungry was I on some of the strange trips I made.
