Tashilunphu monastery

Shigatse, Tibet’s "second city", was large enough to have two things we desperately needed: a pharmacy, and a heated hotel. At the pharmacy we stocked up on supplies for Jacqueline--codeine cough syrup, Contact, ibuprofen and cough drops.

The hotel’s common areas were bone chilling (the lobby, restaurant, and hallways were separated by those clear plastic hanging "flaps" one usually finds in meat lockers) but our room had a powerful heater that we put right to work. Jacqueline took her medicine and slept away the afternoon, recuperating in heated bliss; I went alone with our guide to a nearby Buddhist monastery. In a large adobe courtyard, we queued up with a large group of pilgrims waiting for the temple to reopen (Temples are required by law to keep the same official government hours as banks or bureaucratic offices; from 1 to 3pm they are closed for lunch). Once again I found myself thinking of the American southwest. In this high-desert setting in an adobe courtyard, I was surrounded by raven-haired women with long braids and silver bracelets, wearing robes of black and turquoise, carrying babies on their backs. Men in fur-lined boots draped themselves in wool blankets with diamond shapes and swastika motifs. I don’t even know how much of it is strange anthropological coincidence, or how much of this culture was preserved in the long migration over the Bering Strait…yet another thing to look up on wikipedia at some point.

In that courtyard I became the center of attention. Most everyone in the crowd was staring at me; some people found it difficult to turn away. Children wandered up tentatively to get a closer look.

My guide leaned in and said to me quietly: “They’re pilgrims to this temple; these people are from the northeast of Tibet. Very remote. They are nomads, they look after cattle. Many of them have never seen a white person before.”

I might as well have been a circus clown the way I appeared to them, with my tangled wind-blown mop of graying brown hair, my glasses and bright white ski-jacket. As the world gets smaller, I wonder how infrequent these moments will become. I slowly shuffled through the temple shoulder to shoulder with this crowd, choking on the thick and pungent yak-butter candle fumes. I was in a time-capsule, staring in awe at the massive 3-story tall Buddha, hearing the chants. It was inspiring glimpse into an alien mindset. For most of human history people have lived like this, as herders, hunters or subsistence farmers whose sense of the supernatural was essential to their daily habits and rituals.

Afterwards I walked to another small temple nearby; a group of small children who were perhaps more familiar with foreigners surrounded me. “Hello! Bye-bye! Hello! Bye-bye!” they laughed and yelled as they hugged my legs and tugged my hands.