Backpacks and Bra Straps (20 page)

“Shhh, shhh. This is the best one.”

Richard crooned that he would wait, no matter what. I really hoped Terri would, too. I already felt the loss of the friends who hadn’t even tried to connect with me in my absence. I knew Terri would never forget me or stop loving me, but it was hard for her to keep in touch. She never knew what to write, and I didn’t often have access to Internet cafés. Maybe I shouldn’t have plugged myself into the music that night, because it was too emotional. It was almost as if Richard Marx knew what I was going though and was singing my story.

Predictably, we were swarmed by taxi drivers when we arrived in Golmud at 6:30 a.m. while it was still dark out. With the outrageous prices they were quoting, they must have thought we were lazy, walking wallets, but we surprised them when we waved them off and took off on foot, backpacks loaded and map and compass in hand. I felt slightly intimidated by the cold, dark morning, but trusted Ammon to find a place for us.

Ammon said, “It’s just up the road,” but I’d heard that before and ended up walking hours, sweating and nearly dying on several occasions.

At least six taxis drove next to us, nearly all the way to the hotel, honking and laughing at us, sure that we’d never find our way. Really, we were the ones laughing at them, because they were losing business and gas instead of giving us a fair price.

“How long are we staying? What’s there to do here?” I asked.

“Golmud itself is really just a nothing town in the middle of nowhere,” Ammon informed us.

“For a ‘nothing’ town, it looks pretty modern to me,” Mom said.

Ammon nodded in agreement. “True. You can see how much money the Chinese government is throwing at even the far-flung reaches of their country. In our case, the only reason anyone goes to Golmud is because it’s the launching pad to Tibet by road.” That meant we’d be organizing transportation again, but this time there was a twist.

Smuggled Goods
25

I
’d never been involved in the black market before, but today was different. My fantasies of being all dressed in black and holding secret meetings in dark alleys came to life – well, mostly anyway. The hum of the Volkswagens idling on the side streets were the only sounds at 4:30 in the morning. The cars’ lights were turned off, lending an air of seriousness to the situation. When they saw us coming, the drivers moved out from the shadows to meet us beneath the street lamps’ soft glow. Our footsteps on the pavement seemed to echo and scrape in the night.

“Oh, this is so exciting,” Bree said. “I’m a Chinese ninja.”

“Bree, shhhh,” Ammon said, and left it at that. I was sure he was about to tell her ninjas were from Japan, but then figured that the need for silence outweighed the importance of correcting her on something she’d just quickly brush aside. The money-changers that we’d dealt with at each border crossing were all technically dealing in the black market, but this was the first time I truly felt we were playing on the dark side.

I subconsciously hunched over as I jumped into the back of a car after Mom. Daisaku was in the front seat of our car, and Bree and Ammon rode in the second of the two taxis. I was wary about being separated and having no telephone or other form of contact between us. I felt a lot more vulnerable without Ammon and his guidebook, but having Daisaku riding with us did give me some comfort. We had a twenty-five-hour journey ahead of us as we sped out of town under the cover of the predawn darkness. Keeping our heads down and hiding behind tinted windows, we made it through the first of many armed checkpoints. It’s not every day you get to be a stowaway.

The paved road slid through the rounded mountains and hours later, when we finally stepped out of the cars, we were at five thousand, three hundred metres (17,500 ft). It was the highest any of us had ever been.

“Oh man, Mom, you look ridiculous,” Bree laughed as she shut the car door behind her.

“What do you mean by that?” She asked, looking down to investigate her baggy sweater, hiking boots, and thick woollen socks hiked all the way up to her calf-length travel pants. Mom had never been a fashionista (She was always a lot more interested in what people were made of than what they looked like), but this was a bit extreme, even for her.

We’d come over a few high passes on the journey to Tibet, but this was the peak. I loved the feel of the crisp, frigid air after the weeks of steamy desert landscape we’d crossed to get here. We were actually looking directly across at the clouds instead of up. They hung low in the brilliant blue sky, providing a startling contrast to the greyish green of the landscape below it.

“Except for the breathing, it really doesn’t seem like we’re going through super-high passes, does it? I was expecting mountains and spectacular snow-covered peaks, but I guess we’ll get that on the way to Nepal,” Ammon observed. We’d all been anticipating this ride and expecting to suffer a few high altitude symptoms, but other than minor headaches, none of us were really affected much. So far, those pills of Mom’s were working pretty well.

The pass to Tibet was open and dry, and actually rather boring. We were so high up that there was very little vegetation or other life forms, and it looked pretty barren. The towns we’d passed through were bland, with nothing more to mark them than a few wooden telephone poles and colourful shampoo advertisements stuck on square, white buildings. The only traffic seemed to be big transport trucks with heavy loads covered with tarps, and there were a few worn-out tires and satellite dishes strewn along the roadside.

“Did you guys see this?” Mom said, holding up a bloated bag of potato chips. “One of our bags exploded on us and freaked us all out.”

“Yeah, I thought it was our tire exploding,” I said.

“This is a great example of what I was teaching you the other day,” Ammon said. “Do you know why it popped?” Seeing my answering shrug, he continued. “The bag had a certain amount of air in it when it was sealed, perhaps at sea level. The air outside the bag put equal pressure on it there and kept it together. Up here, though, the air is a lot thinner and so it puts less pressure on it, and the air inside wants to get bigger. Unlike a balloon, the bag doesn’t stretch, and the seal alone can’t withstand the pressure of the expanded air within. Eventually, it has to pop.” He turned a chip bag over and over. “This is what it’s all about, eh? Coming and seeing it for yourself. Doesn’t that make it all that much more real?”

Discovering things for yourself and testing your expectations against what you saw was one of the main perks of travelling. Figuring out the connection between air pressure and altitude by seeing a bag explode firsthand made one heck of a science field trip. I was constantly picking Ammon’s brain to get the most from being around him. I feared that if I wasn’t actively learning, mine might deflate and turn to mush by the time I got home, and I still found myself worrying about school a lot.

Feeling the tension within the Lay’s potato chip bag between my palms and considering that less than a week ago, I’d been below sea level, I wondered whether my head might pop, too, from all the history and experiences I was stuffing into my brain.

Watching our driver light his next cigarette from the red tip of the last one, which was still dangling from his bottom lip, Mom said, “Can you believe how much he’s smoking? Is your driver a chain smoker like ours?”

“Yeah, I’m sure he is,” Ammon agreed.

“Gotta be. I started counting. He’s already at twenty-seven since this morning.” Bree said. Looking over her shoulder to find her driver pacing by the car, she added, “Make that twenty-eight.” The amount that people in China smoked was outrageous; every single grown man was seemingly addicted. No matter how long we travelled there, I didn’t think I’d ever get used to the always-present cloud of secondhand smoke that threatened to smother me.

Mom frowned. “I bet they smoke five packs a day. How many cigarettes come in a pack?”

“Now that’s something I couldn’t tell you,” Ammon said.

“Okay, run it by me one more time. Why are we doing this whole secret mission thing exactly?” Bree asked before we went back to our own cars to finish the journey, which would take at least another six hours.

“Okay. I’ll lay it out for you guys. It’s a bit messed up because, in order to go to Tibet, you have to have a special permit. For the Chinese, a bus ticket from Golmud to Lhasa is a hundred and eighty yuan (US$22) for the twenty-four to thirty hour ride. For foreigners with a permit, it’s seventeen hundred yuan (US$210) to take the same bus – that’s ten times the price. It doesn’t take an economics major to figure out that this leaves a ton of room for a black market in transportation, especially when nobody randomly checks permits once you get past the checkpoints and are in Tibet. That’s because they don’t actually give you a physical visa or receipt of payment. So once you’re in, there’s no problem. In Chengdu, they don’t have this kind of black market, ‘cause it’s so much easier to control air travel, and it’s pretty tricky to smuggle yourself onto a plane. So basically, the majority of people travelling to Golmud go overland to Tibet illegally, since this system is so well established now.”
How on earth Ammon learned all this, I’ll never know. Maybe he’s just making it all up, but he just sounds so darn convincing.

“It still cost us 660 yuan each (US$82), but most of that supposedly goes to bribing the police at the different checkpoints along the way.”

“That sounds a bit crazy, but it’s also super exciting. I feel like we’re on a top-secret mission when we have to duck and hide,” Bree said.

“I’m really glad we drove it, though,” Mom said. “I like seeing the landscape of the country we’re going through.”

Ammon frowned. “Yeah, I totally agree, but here, too, my imagination and reality don’t jive. I really was expecting to see more dramatic scenery at these high altitudes. You know, shimmering snowcapped mountains and such.”

We reached Tibet, the eighteenth and final province we’d be visiting of China’s thirty-four provinces, several hours earlier than expected. That was good news, in the sense that our uncomfortable journey was shorter than we’d thought, but it also meant we had to search for a place to lie our weary bodies down at the awkward hour of one o’clock in the morning.

The drivers initially took us to the wrong location, but many hand signals later, we got them to take us to the Yak hotel, which we used as a reference point to start looking for a room. The place we’d intended to stay was full, so we went walking through the deserted city, stepping over plastic bags rolling in the breeze down the trash-filled alleys. We were really surprised by the filthy state the streets were in. Everywhere we’d been in China before had been almost pristinely clean, and we’d often seen cleaners out on the streets with their wide, brush-type brooms made from branches.

The next guesthouse we found was all boarded up for the night, so we moved on to the first of many others on the main tourist street. Ammon only had one chance to knock feebly on a large, intimidating door before Bree shoved him over with her backpack. “Oh, get out of the way, brother. I’ll show you how it’s done.” Hammering with a solid double fist on the red painted wood as if it were a war drum, she successfully woke the inhabitants.

The long-john clad guy who let us in was very friendly, even in his half-asleep state. Dangling the key for Ammon to take, he said, “Room 2. Money in morning.” The musty, five-bed dorm room was a gratifying sight at the end of a very long day. Pillars painted a bright, cheery red supporting the rickety wooden roof, along with the Tibetan art and the customary thermos of hot tea, made me feel cozy and welcome. It was all we could do that night to climb the wooden ladder to our dorm room, take off our backpacks, and get ourselves into our beds, never mind changing our clothes or brushing our teeth.

“I’m pleased to announce that I’ve successfully managed to increase our value now that we’re all ‘smuggled goods’.” With that, Ammon threw off his hat and crashed onto his bed before he continued with his joke. “Yup, it’s true. The more illegal something is – or in our case, someone – the more costly it becomes. You all owe me, big-time.”

“You sure you really want to be part of this crazy family, Daisaku?” Bree said with one of her childlike grins.

Ch. 21-25 photos
here