The Hotel on the Roof of the World (21 page)

As soon as he had passed on this secret to success, I suddenly saw everything in a new light. This was how he treated all of us. Never mind Maslow's
Heirarchy of Needs
, or the trendy
Management by Objectives
. This was Barba's ‘Management by Manipulation'. Now I understood why behind the picture of his wife by his bedside stood a picture of Adolf Hitler. I had seen and heard enough.

Chef had also come to the end of his tether. He had taken enough insults about German cuisine and went to Barba to hand in his notice. I followed the same day. It was a well-thought-out and carefully worded letter. Life with Barba had become intolerable.

Barba climbed on top of his desk and shouted, ‘How dare you resign?!' He looked at Chef and at me.

‘
Nobody
is allowed to resign before me! I am the boss here. If anyone resigns it is me! HEATHER! Come in here and take down this telex to Hong Kong.'

Barba ran his hands through his hair and dictated the message from on top of his desk. ‘Quick, Heather, Quick! Write!'

Heather trembled. She had seen him angry but never this angry. And never standing on top of his desk.

‘To the Vice President, Holiday Inn Asia-Pacific etc., etc. You can use my contract as toilet paper. I am leaving this no-hope company now. Yours, E. Barba.'

HOUSE ARREST

Barba chuckled to himself as we bumped along in the back of Dorje's Landcruiser on the way out of Lhasa. He had caused panic at Head Office and considered this to be one of the highlights of his time with Holiday Inn.

‘So, Alec. We're all friends again now, eh?'

He tweaked my ear and burst out laughing. Whatever the medication was it must have been working. Dorje put his foot down as we crossed the Lhasa bridge, not in the direction of the airport but east, towards the monastery of Drak Yerpa. Barba had backed down from his resignation because ultimately he wanted to be fired, not to resign. As his character returned to his normal, just-tolerable self again, Chef and I had tentatively withdrawn our resignations.

‘I knew you weren't really going to resign,' he said to me. ‘You have just been learning too many of the great Barba's tricks.'

‘I still have the letter in the computer, Mr Barba,' I shouted back above the roar of the engine. ‘I can easily put a new date at the top and print it out again.'

He smiled.

Dorje skidded on a patch of ice as we overtook a group of pilgrims and we called out for him to slow down. The pilgrims were packed in the back of a trailer drawn by a small, open tractor engine. One step above a rickshaw, these vehicles were the main public transport system of Tibet. We had passed many of them on their way to Ganden, which lay a few kilometres further up the road. The monks of Ganden had once played a central part in the Tibetan government, together with the two other great monasteries of Lhasa – Sera and Drepung. Ganden alone housed nearly 5,000 monks until the time of the Cultural Revolution, when each building was systematically blown apart by the fanatical Red Guards. The ruins stand out as a great scar on the mountainside and are a constant reminder of both the power that must have been wielded from here in former times and the brutality that put an end to it. Today, Ganden is slowly, cautiously, being rebuilt.

Dorje paid no attention to us and sped past the pilgrims, through the stark winter scenery of the Ganden road. The Kyi Chu next to us had dried up to a trickle and the riverbed had been turned into a vast stretch of sand dunes and pebble banks. Dead seed heads of Tibetan clematis hung on to the dry stone walls between the barren fields. There were no colours other than the desolate brown of the hills and the bright blue high-altitude sky.

We left the Ganden road at a Chinese suspension bridge and crossed back to the north side of the Kyi Chu. Dorje was not concerned that the tarmac road had finished and he managed to keep up his speed along the dirt track, leaving a long plume of dust billowing out behind us.

As we passed through a cluster of Tibetan houses, we came across a group of little girls in the road, all carrying school books. They waved to us and Barba did his good deed for the day by asking Dorje to stop and give them a lift – presumably to the school in the next village. We piled them up in the back of the Landcruiser – seven smiling, shy, yak-buttery little things.

Meeting children from the villages was always one of the joys of going outside Lhasa. No matter where you stopped, children would appear from nowhere and come up to the Landcruiser. All have beautiful white teeth and rosy cheeks which glow as they smile at you. Their eyes sparkle through a tangle of matted hair and a skin which has not seen soap and water for a very long time. For some, the annual bathing festival in September is the only occasion they have a complete dip. And in this climate, who can blame them? The back of their hands and their wrists are like black leather, encrusted with layer upon layer of dirt. Their clothes are mixtures of traditional
chubas
, nylon tracksuits and factory-made polyester shirts bought from the Chinese traders. Whatever the original colour all eventually become a universal brown, engrained with dust blown up in the sandstorms which sweep across the plateau every spring. Some of the children remain sewn up in their clothes throughout the year. In the dry climate and high altitude, there has been no need for the kind of hygiene that we subject ourselves to in the West. We have become victims of our own advertising campaigns. Does your shirt really have to be whiter than white? Does your washing powder have to remove all stains, even at low temperatures? These may be essentials in our Western society but for the Tibetan villagers they are ridiculous questions.

Through sign language and example, we asked our new friends to sing to us as we went along. They needed very little prompting and as soon as they had understood, there was no stopping them. Seven little voices shrieking full blast the Tibetan top ten village songs. It was a wonderful drive; bouncing along through the barren landscape with the Tibetan hit parade being screeched to us from the back of the car. Whenever we turned to look at them, they would instantly bow their heads, or duck behind the back of the seat – but they continued to sing.

We were wondering where their school was when we came to the turn off for the Yerpa valley, which turns north away from the Kyi Chu. They hadn't shown any signs of wanting to get out of the car. The track crossed a dried-up riverbed with patches of ice where the last of the summer water had been trapped in pools. We stopped to pick up a young monk who was taking supplies of tsampa (ground roasted barley) up to Drak Yerpa. He beamed smiles at us and against the background chorus of Tibetan song, we all said
tashi delai
to each other for the next five minutes. Dorje switched over to four-wheel drive and took us up through a series of terraced barley fields, small villages and along the frozen stream bed until we reached the final village directly beneath the mountainside of Yerpa. It had been Barba's idea to visit the remote settlement of Yerpa as a means of reconciliation and to celebrate the withdrawing of our resignations.

For a Tibetan, Yerpa scores highly in the big-time Buddhism league. Several of the key players in Tibetan history have stayed here – Atisha, Songsten Gampo and Guru Rimpoche. The caves of Yerpa are considered to be amongst the most important meditation and power centres of Tibet. Barba was already shaking with the ‘good vibes' in the village at the bottom of the hill. What was he going to be like when we reached the caves?

It was a forty-minute walk up the steep slope and this seemed to calm him down again. He paused on the way up.

‘Alec. Why did you come to Tibet?'

‘For this, Mr Barba. For adventure.'

‘Adventure! Ha! Call this adventure?'

He was taking on his role as my mentor again and I could tell that a big lesson was approaching.

‘A real adventurer, Alec, is someone who travels through the four disciplines of life: the mind, the body, the soul and sex.'

We took a few more paces before stopping for breath.

‘Alec, have you ever taken drugs?'

‘No, Mr Barba.'

‘Then you have never travelled in the mind. The body? Well physically you are here, so I suppose you might pass that one. The soul? What do you know about tantric Buddhism? About the secrets of the Mahayana way? While you waste your time in the Barkhor and in the hills looking at nature I have received my second stage teaching on the path to enlightenment.'

‘Mr Barba. Buddhism is about compassion and wisdom, right? So if you are a Buddhist, how come you have a picture of Hitler by your bed and why did you threaten to break Chef's arms and legs when he wanted to resign?'

Barba exploded: ‘I am a student of Buddhism!'

Somehow this was meant to explain everything. We walked up for the next ten minutes in silence, pausing only to regain our breath. The monk with his heavy sack of
tsampa
had already reached the caves and the group of schoolgirls were up by the first set of ruins. Just before we reached the strip of flat land with the ruins of Yerpa Drubde, Barba stopped and looked at me.

‘And sex, Alec. Do you ever tie your girlfriends up in chains?'

‘Er, no, Mr Barba.'

‘No. I didn't think so. You have so much to learn. I tell you what. I'm not going to stay here long, Alec. I will be leaving as soon as I have finished my studies. Then, when I go, I shall leave you my chains.'

We walked on a few more paces until we reached the top of the first hill.

‘I have a mirror too which you hang around your neck. And a mask. Have you ever…'

Fortunately he was interrupted by a new burst of song from the group of little girls who had come back down the hillside to see why we were taking so long. The monk with the bags of
tsampa
waved to us from up ahead.

There was not much left of Yerpa Drubde, the old monastery. The Red Guards had made an even better job of it than they had at Ganden and a pile of rubble stood where the teaching college had once been. Robin accentors perched on the ruins, just a few feet from us. The birds here were remarkably tame, as if they knew they were in no danger from the humans who lived here. From the hill where the monastery had once stood, a magnificent view opens up of the cliff-side above with its dozens of caves and small temples. Many have now been restored and the guidebooks we took with us were way out of date. Even as we looked inside the temples, major restoration work was being carried out. A set of new statues, each over 5 m high, was being built inside the main temple. The heads and bodies had already been completed – beautifully sculpted out of brown clay. The painting still had to be finished and bundles of straw and twigs poked out of the arms where the hands were missing. As with all Tibetan Buddhist art, seen in the right context, this was going to be awesome. Put on display in a showcase in the West, it loses all of its power. It has to be seen against the backdrop of a stark and unforgiving environment in a land where the people believe in demons and Bodhisattvas and where Dakini walk across the sky. Apparently, Yerpa had been a good place for this, and it is said that a group of eighty yogis who lived here regularly took to the air, soaring around the valley.

It would certainly have been a handy way of getting from one cave to another. Barba stayed in one of the small temples to meditate, and I continued along the
kora
with the group we had accumulated – Dorje the driver, the monk with the
tsampa
, several recluses from the hill caves who had ventured out to greet us and of course the seven little girls.

The caves were fascinating and the monks proudly showed us around, pointing out many ‘self-manifested' images. These are statues and carvings coming out of the cave wall, that no one has carved. They just ‘self-manifested' out of the rock. Yes. Honestly. They weren't there one day and then they were the next.

We were also shown an extraordinary ‘Om,' the Tibetan writing of the first character of ‘Om Mani Padme Hom.' It was made of what appeared to be a seam of white quartz in black rock and this too had self-manifested. Quite something. If you choose not to believe in self-manifestation, just how
did
it get there?

The
kora
took us high up to caves along pathways jutting out of the cliff edge, and to grottos where the ancient masters had meditated. It was an incredible setting – these small caves and temples perched high on a steep slope with a view stretching down the Yerpa valley to the dry riverbed and the snow-capped mountains beyond. If I was going to come back as a flying yogi, this would be the place for me.

There was silence except for the distant chanting of solitary monks in their caves and the incessant nattering and giggling of our seven little friends. I rested on the sunburnt grass near the stone seat, which the monks told me is the throne for the Dalai Lama when he visited, or for when he will visit. I slept for a while, thinking of the Dalai Lama sitting on this stone and imagining the great crowd of Tibetans there would be across the hillside. How I hope that day will come.

The cry of Red-billed Choughs woke me, as they played in the air currents hitting the cliff-side above us. Barba meditated, Dorje chatted to a nun who was in her third year of isolation, and the little girls played in the ruins of Drak Yerpa. Through a combination of my fluent sign language and extremely limited Tibetan, I discovered that they were not
going
to school but were on their way back from school and had just been standing outside their own village when we picked them up. For all they knew we might have been taking them off to Kathmandu. What would their parents be thinking?

We moved on when the sun fell behind the mountains to the west, causing a dramatic drop in temperature. Himalayan Griffon vultures with wingspans the size of golf umbrellas hoisted themselves skywards on the last thermals of the day, heading for their evening roost. We set off in great style – our little friends singing away full blast in the back of the car. One of the hot favourites was a musical version of ‘Om Mani Padme Hom' – another ingenious idea, which means that you can even gain merit while you sing. We gave two other people a lift back down the hill. It was hard to tell who they were; pilgrims who had been along for the day, visiting monks or nuns, or residents going for a night out. At first glance, monks can be difficult to tell from nuns. They don't make it easy like Christian nuns do. As far as I could see, they wear the same colour robes, have the same sunburnt skin, the same cropped hair and exactly the same beautiful smiles. The giveaway to look out for is that Tibetan nuns sometimes wear a brown woollen cloth wrapped around their heads.