Phil's Fabulous Tibetan Journey: Part 4--Sightseeing

Our traveler having nothing but vacationing to do while he waits for the travel agent to work a miracle, he goes to see what Lhasa has to offer. Of the most notable aspects of Lhasa’s culture are its bad food and butcher shops. The food, which one would have thought our traveler would love, consists mostly of yak meat, potatoes, and other yak products, yak being available as a part of everything in Tibet. While this diet has potential, like the Irish, Tibetans have as yet failed to understand the existence of spices. But our traveler questions the need for spices, since the way they store their meat probably ensures a healthy dose of foreign matter. Butcher shops generally set all their meat on top of the counter, sometimes these cuts still have hunks of hair on them to prove that it really did come from a yak, and holler at people to buy it. As our traveler was walking by some of these shops, he could not help but get splattered with various pieces of meat and cartilage as the butcher hacked away.

Moving on from Chopping House Row, our traveler comes to the Jokhang, one of the holiest temples in Tibet. After paying the traditionally exorbitant entrance fee, this traveler finds himself in a packed procession of pilgrims making their way clockwise around the Temple. The murmuring and shuffling combine to make an intense throbbing which almost reminds one of a beehive, if one’s head happened to be stuck deep into the middle of one.

The temple is dark, lit only by the soft daylight which filters through the many layers of the building and the light from candles stuck in some sort of goopy substance. Our traveler, eager to know what this substance might be, takes a closer look. His nostrils are assaulted by a deeply rich smell which is unlike nay other candle he has ever smelled. This is because our fearless traveler has never smelled yak-butter candles before. But, being the quick witted fellow that he is, he notices that the pilgrims, at least the especially devout ones, ladle a healthy spoonful of yak butter from their own personal supplies (which they carry with them in large plastic Mayonnaise jars) into every candle-bowl. While burning yak-butter does not smell as foul as our traveler might have imagined it would, its smell is an interesting one. It does not smell like incense, but rather some sort of overly heavy, overly oily perfume, such as you might imagine a heavy-set Russian woman wearing too much of.

In addition to the unsettling effects of the yak-butter odor, our traveler has to deal with prayer wheels. Prayer wheels are metal wheels on wooden sticks which pilgrim’s spin in their hands. For the most part, these wheels are not large, often about the size of their wielder’s forearm, like the one to the left here. However there are occasionally those super-pilgrims who wish to excel in their devotion and so wield huge prayer wheels much to the chagrin of the nearby populace. These wheels become nothing less than weapons which often leave large dents in the temple walls and decommission otherwise devout Buddhists.

Upon emerging from the musky confines of the Jokhang, the Traveler finds himself caught up again in another clockwise shuffle, but this time around the outside of the temple. This shuffle has a wider berth and so there are fewer causalities from the prayer wheels, but there are also new obstacles, the greatest of which is the “diving pilgrim.” There are a set of pilgrims, who rather than demonstrate their devotion through size of prayer wheel or gifts of yak butter, choose to prostrate themselves at every step as they shuffle around the temple. For this purpose they wear a thick canvas apron over their robes so as not to tear them to shreds, and wooden sandals on their hands. Those diving pilgrims who are not as serious as the rest, dive in long fluid motions which allow them to almost slide along the ground so as to get the most out of every slide, distance that is. But those who have begun to really attain the true devotion disdain this practice as cheating. They gravely prostrate themselves with each step, rising to straight back up to take another step and repeat the process.

Finishing this clockwise circuit (a kora in the vernacular), our traveler heads to the most visible sight of Lhasa—the fortress high on a rocky hill in the center of town. Known as the Potala, this massive structure with a thousand rooms used to be the palace of the Dalai Lama, at least until the Chinese government decided that it would serve better as a tourist attraction. Thankfully the Cultural Revolution never got its destructive little hands on this one. On the outside the Potala is one of the most beautiful buildings our traveler has ever seen. It’s white lines sloping upwards towards a deep red—the shape and color of the building are amazing. Unfortunately the inside is nowhere near as attractive.

The tombs of the various Dali Lama’s housed within the Potala are one of the few attractions and are surely some of the most majestic the traveler has ever seen. Often rising to more than 25 feet, and having 1000s of kilograms of gold, tens of thousands of precious gems, and even some pearls which supposedly came from elephants brains (a fact our traveler later determined to be unreliable), these tombs are some of the most amazing works of luxury our traveler has ever seen. And perhaps that would be the way the traveler would describe the Potala itself to you: one giant, magnificent and splendid tomb.