HITCH-HIKING LAO

Watching tropical landscape roll by from the back of a pick up. A pleasure for a hitch-hiker worldwide.

Folks in Pak Lay play an old game inherited from the French, called "petanque". And they are really serious about it. The picture is taken in the back garden of the Bureau of Finnances. Not much accountancy to do around here it seems.

 

The mist and the road on the early morning.

A road builder smiles when photographed with his work on the back. The bridge may have been borned in the board of an engineer, but it's still the road builders' work.

Tradition and change.

Peasents process and pack corn by the roadside.

Curious type of oil pump widespread in Lao countryside.

Rural workers wait to be called for their shifts atop an old  Hino truck.

THE ROAD TO LAOS... in pictures

Photo 1: That night we put our tent in the unfinished motorway..... Photo 2: hitch-hiking with Channing and Rocio, from the Cyclown Circus. Photo 3: my tent among local Lao trucks waiting for their merchandises to arrive from China. Photo 4: The Chinese businessman that drove me to Luang Prabang and his Mitsubishi. Photo 5: one of the eight bricks of local currency I received in exchange for 50 euros.... Photo 6: Maria Paz and Maureen, something like the granddaughter of Allende, and Jesus from Luang Prabang, as more than one subtitled me....

IN LUANG PRABANG, WHERE PEOPLE CAN HEAR RICE GROW…

 Lao is so quiet that John Steinbeck once penned “People in Cambodia see the rice grow, in Lao they hear it grow”. And it makes sense. No town in Lao is big enough to minimize the sorroundin nature, the rice fields, the banana plantations, the jungle… Luang Prabang is one of the touristic spots of the country. In spite of the quantity of tourists, and the artificial character of the town, with Western style cafes, bistro bars, etc, the town is undeniably charming, with its French maisons of the time when the country was French IndoChina, and its temples of a more glorious and independent past. In adititon to the colonial houses, the French left –God bless them- baguettes! For less than a dollar is possible to have a chicken baguette on the sunny streets of Luang Prabang.

 I have very ltttle to say about the real Lao. I spent most of my 25 days in the country I Luang Prabang, working on my book project, and selling my old book to finnance my staying. I soon fitted into a comfortable routine, spending the mornings selling my book in the cafes along the Mekong River, and the rest of the afternoon writing (the evenings, of course, drinking). Earnings from the books typically added up to 20 dollars a day, while the accomodation was only four….

The most interesting aspect of selling books is the people you meet. One day I ended up having a beer with Maureen, the granddaughter of ex-Chilean preseident Allende, the one that was overthrown by Pinochet. He was travelling with another two Chilean friends, and the funny thing was that Pinochet had died only a few weeks before! His grand-grand father had been the founder of the Communist Party of Chile, confirming the lineage. On another ocassion I met Kath, one of the organizers of Bummit, a charity event that involves a hundred people hitch-hiking from the UK to different points in Eastern Europe, raising money for orphanages.

Some days before Christmas I met Harver, a French resident of San Fransisco, who insisted that we should all wear Santa Claus suits for Christmas night and then get drunk on the streets. According to him this was a way to demonstrate against the commercialization of Xmas, and is supposed to be a major event in alternative San Fransisco. He didn’t quite get the reception he expected, but I respect all crazy endeavours! I also found interesting his idea that Americans are over-achvers in everything from war to festivals. They cannot make a party, they have to do Burning Man. If the bike already exists, they have to build “tall bikes”.


Among the rest of the people I met I would like to mention some friendly folks from the Isle of Man, and also a Libanese who lived in Australia, and who gave me my first lessons on Arabic writing. I had learnt how to say Salam Aleikum in Norway, and I learnt how to write it in Lao… I may master this languagew in another 300 years. I also met Stephane, her Freckled Majesty of Sydney, but that’s another story. I will only say that she had a car, if you can use that word for a 1983 Subaru. And the car had a name, which was Jeff. Stephanie had a amorous ralationship with her car, and was sad because it was comprehensively starting to fall apart.

Most importantly, there was a more meaningful meeting. I am talking about the Poi tribe that I met in the streets of Luang Prabang. Pois are ropes which have a ball knotted to each of their ends, and which you can spin a million of different angles and directions. Another way of playing with movement. I happened to think that Pois are, in a microcosmic level, something similar to hitch hiking, another way of diving into movement. There is no way to relate in a tidy prose all the things that crossed my mind those days. Fortunately, a combination of marihuana and an accidental overdoes of malaria medication gave me a free trip that inspired me to put it down in a more coherent way. Good luck with reading it. (see next post “Circus in the dark”)

Circus in the Dark (Barfuss)

Caravan suite in D minor for drunken poet, broken violinist, base and fire.


“The only people for me are the mad ones, th e one who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles…” Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

I love Laos, it‘s magic, like us –Maddi told Ronan as they both spanned fire by the Mekong River. Don’t tell me that you guys also believe that the freaky marvelous accident of happiness takes place in the outskirts… We do, and moreover we believe that it’s possible to juggle and to spin fire at the same time. That would be total freedom – said Ronan. I met this family short time ago. In the beginning, Maddi used to play with the street kids. You have to allow the balls to become an extension of your hands. I understand the point in movement you are talking about.


Barefoot, once you get used to walk barefoot it’s beautiful. The pavement is also the Earth on which Michi, the German rasta girl, steps, and the Earth she belongs to. Barfuss…each word of the German language is sweet, but the accent can turn then quite monotonous. When I had seen the family in the street I was sure I would run into them again. The same with all the circus. This is like a convention of fire artists! Pois can be made with 110 grams of rice or with tennis balls. I cannot allow myself to eat out in restaurants every day. Barfuss…the true traveling band. Are you from Lubeck, Michi? No, from more to the North, from Schleswig Holtein. That’s where they speak Plat-Deutsch, one of those dead languages that some nerdy always tries to resuscitate. I was once in one of the islands south of Funnen, and somebody said: there’s a boat sailing out to Germany tomorrow. Is anybody up for it? While she let the ball guide her, she smiled and said to me: it’s all I do in life tanzen und spielen!. Her eyes, of an infinite clarity. I can play the “contact ball” with my feet – I rather stupidly told her. Ronan was saying that only when we will have complete awareness of our balance and movement possibilities we will stop being tamed by the pressures of the material world. And Ronnan, was a smart guy.


Everything rolls down the Mekong river, specially the oranges that have just fallen from Maddi’s backpack.. It was warmer in Chiang Mai, wasn’t it? Some of them are going to the Rainbow. What do you do? I am a verse smuggler. I sell books and words to pay for the beer and the food. In a way I juggle with words to create worlds.


(interludium for fire)


The spinning balls glow in the dark. Carnival of fireflies defies the integrity of night. Maddi says they should have an alternate rhythm. Maybe the balls are actually a spell, and like the meanings in a poem, they unlock worlds that exist only for the eyes that detect the frequency. Juggling. Poetry. Hitch hiking. Synergy. Same same. Its like the one word poems, whose letters can cypher the history of a kingdom or a love. Beer Lao. Sabaidi. Don’t worry about a thing, cause every little thing is gonna be allright. It was allright that we finally didn’t sleep the seven of us in the same room. Ronan knows Michelle, the girl from Galway, thanks to whom an Afghan hat designed to fit the defenders of Allah (Akbar –reply musicians) unexpectedly passed to accommodate beauty.


The weed – and an overdose of malaria medication- prompted into the night the colorful symbols of Reiki. That crossroad had already been foreseen by a homeless shaman from Buenos Aires. We cannot expect the words to become more than empty nets. Otherwise, Michelle would have revealed me more than her thoughts. It’s a pretty dirty kind of trade. Since they heard the one word poem, some kings have dwelled penniless and barefoot. Juggling. Poetry. Hitch hiking. Synergy. It is imperative to have always on tap an excuse to make the village children smile. What about spending Christmas eating free bananas? Another free thing that was given away in a corner were hugs, and the people who received it became lit with new energies. Some couples protested with orgasms and through the wall you could hear voices in Hebrew asking for the exact location of the Rainbow. Four years before, in Argentina, a bunch of people had also started to hit the road by thumb. They celebrated movement and the furtive production of the distance that, paradoxically, brought them together. Viky had been the first one to wrap it in words, and the first one to talk about messing up the soul and launching assaults to the park’s carousel. There were so many ways to emigrate…! In other latitude, some loonies had decided to build double deck bikes in order to reach the upper leaves of the trees. They pedaled with the circus on their bikes. Simultaneously, they pedaled against the oil wars. Nobody opened cans of Coke anymore. The societies they visited were deconstructed by slapping pedestrians in their face, addressing them with the tender label of… “stupido”. Tribes, communes and squats, had all set free their bulldozers bound for Babylon. Each time the jewelery maker twisted a world out from the alpaca thread, a bullet would pierce the chest of the Minotaur who preyed on Beauty. Latin America had finally starting marching towards herself. It was the topic of conversation even in the arctic pubs of Tromso, where people had never seen a man of the color of the night. I was there the only one who had grown up gazing other stars. Of course, among the ciclonauts there was also Rocio, who loved to say “Voy caminando por el aire” but had forgotten the word “carozo”. In Nicosia, the circus had squatted a large house inhabited by a rasta who coexisted with his trash. They had to clean consciously before getting in. When he met Channing, Bo, the Chinese fellow from Kunming had quited his job in Siemens. He didn’t want to sell X ray equipment for the rest of his life. La vita e gioco. Life is fire… pyros…fire…fuego…


(interludium for fire)


Months had passed since a magic drop in the Himalayas had made our eyes tremble. We had been the rain and also the mountain to avoid the divergence of the Ego and the world. Reality yelled behind a watermark of purple and orange hexagons. There is a little confusion, don’t you think? –asked the Captain. It wasn’t clear whether the shapes who danced rock and roll in a corner of the Shiva Café belong to Tibetan farmers or not. With our breath synchronized we all become interwoven in a vibration that ended up in the OM. We all suspected that Dionisia, the Greek girl, was the sorcerer behind the scratches in the Veil of Maya. Lucas had an explanation: some mushrooms free photons that codify information about the universe. Lucas as a gentlemen in every sense of the word, but we all wondered how he hadn’t been evicted from the gene pool way before. In the Mayan calendar it would have been the day of the self existent red moon, but instead, it was barely a Friday. The satori couldn’t last forever: what looked like a cat soon became a cushion again,. That was unacceptable, so to cheer myself up I remembered the people of Venado Tuerto, who dance murga over the corpses of the empires, and I also remembered Cecilia, who when the mercury smashes the glass wanders the sleepy streets of Corrientes on stilts. Dear memory also rescued the day in which The Count and I awoke a 1938 Ford pick up that was rusting away in an abandoned farm in the middle of the Pampas. That had been our way to receive the millennium, I mean, crashing the brake less Ford against a truck in the first crossroad. But better to let some kaleidoscopes in the dark.


Michi brought me back into reality. Is it true that Christiania has been shut down? I don’t really know, it’s closer to your home. Michi was a believer, that’s to say, a believer in the farms of unicorns, which are not compatible with the European Parliament. All creative spaces seemed to be packing up. In an attempt to delay destiny, some travelers had set off to cross Mauritania in white camels. There they found timeless tea rituals punctuating dirty unpaved roads. They knew beforehand that the best things in life were not things, but they were free. Kinga had told them the secret, before directing her steps to heaven. Pinochet had left for the same place, but a collision was impossible. Somebody asked me when would I go home. I answered that somebody always made the top spin, and that I admired snails. I walked down the Mekong to crush on my bed. The event took place in Luan Prabang, Laos, at the end of last December. Each word that portrays it is one second younger than the previous one. Besides this unfaithful mirror, I know that the balls keep spinning in the dark. Juggling. Poetry. Hitch hiking. Synergy. And every other invisible circus.

KUNMING: BUMPING INTO THE CIRCUS AGAIN.

Photo 1: Channing, from the Cyclowns, with Bo, our friend from Kunming. 2. Channing and Rocio doing their show at "Speak Easy Bar". 3. View of Kunming.

Kunming is another Chinese city that has evolved into a sort of annonymous modernity, featuring tile-and-glass towers, MaDonalds, Starbucks and some traditional neighborhoods which are being gradually demoolished to give way to the tidyness of pregress.. In comparison with foggy Chengdu, the weather in Kunming was radiant, justifying its title of Spring City.

I was expected by Bo, my Hospitality Club (http://www.hospitalityclub.org/) local contact. Bo is 24 years old, and has recently graduated from the Medical College. Felling right in step with China’s fast pace, he is already working for the Medical Solutions’ department of Siemens China. In other words, he sells X-ray equipment. My surprise came when he confessed he went to work every morning with scorn. Even if he has a salary well over the average Chinese, he feels unsatisfied to be working for a big corporation instead of helping people in more esential levels. In those days he was medditating the possibility of quiting the entire thing. He is the first Chinese fellow I meet that questions the worthyness of the rat race.

Bo is a Christian by choice. Acccoring to himself, what beckoned hijmmore of Christianity were Jesus’s words: “I am the way, the light and the life”. He adds, as he gets emotional (and Bo always speaks with a big smile) “Not even Mao has ever said something like that. This guy –Jesus- is either mad or he knows what he says”

My original plan was to stay for a few days. Destiny had, however, other plans. (The first plans of destiny were that I would catch an Influenza-Avirus and stay five days coughing and shivering). By e-mail I had got to know that Rocio and Chaning, two of the Cyclown Circus were bypassing Kunming in their way to Laos, where the rest of the Circus was. Before internet could anticipate us, chaos made us run into each other in a party held by expat students in Kunming. A crowd of Westerners study Chinese language in Kunming, some of them even paid to go there by their companies in Europe or the US.

Pablo –the Argentinean guy with whom I had cross Tibet- and I had entered the flat in a centric neighborhood of Kunming slightly afraid that the party wouldn’t be more than a small gathering of students talking about their difficulty to learn Chinese. We had even feared our two bottles of Tequila would turned to be an excess. After crossing the doorstep, however, we learnt that the bathtube was full of ice and bottles of any drinkable kind. The Gospel of San Pablo Olive, verse 34: “Tomorrow the police will have to drag me out of here”. Bo ended up sleping in the sofa, somewhat drunk. As I tried to steel some kisses from a Boston girl, Pablo was negotiating his way to the simpathy of one of the Italian girls. I guess there was an edipic conexion with Boston. My parents had lived there in 1960. I can remember myself as a child coming across old white framed photographs showing Bunker Hill, or a park inhabited by sociable squirrels. But none of these affairs were the highlight of the night. The encounter with Rocio and Channing, from the Cyclown Circus, instead, was.

We had met for the last time a year bedore in Capadoccia, Turkey. There, we had agreed to met again in Mersin, Southern Turkey, but we had missed each other, since they were cycling and I was hitch-hiking. Instead, we had run into each other in a party in Kunming… For a year, the Circus and I had traveled different roads leading to the same meeting point. The had spent the winter of 2005 in Cyprus, afterwrds they have pedaled their way to Georgia onto Russia, from where they had taking the Transiberian Railway to Mongolia and China. On the other hand, I had crossed Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan on the way to India, and afterwards had traveled north to Tibet, from where I had reached Kunming at the same time as them!

But who are the Cyclown Circus? http://www.cyclown.org/ It’s a group of musicians, jugglers, clowns, violinists, whateverists that travel the world on double deck bikes they build themselves. The bikes consist of frames wielded vertically, with an extra set of pedals in the upper frame. They perform their shows of Jazz and circus in streets of cities and villages, bars and orphanages, beaches and parties. In order to make money they sell their CDs, but when in villages they often trade their entertainment for food and lodging. A real caravan.

Besides the artistic dimension, they also feature a light enviromental activism that matches them really well. One of the bikes has indeed a sign that reads: “Cycling against the oil wars” Another thing I love about them is the fact that they convey the idea of an absolutely alternative lifestyle to the people they meet across the globe. For many, it is a wake-up call. Matter of fact, Bo was soon going to leave his job at Siemens.

On the afternoons we would gather to drink mate in Silvia and Eva’s place, our Italian friends. At other times we would go to Green Lake Park, where Rocio and Channing would make their show, They needed some money to catch up with the rest of the group that was already in Laos. Some people would put money into the hat, while a few would even put food! When foreign tourists would approached, I would offer them my book “Harmony of Chaos” that I have recently started to sell again after a long break.

It could be said that the magic for me started in Kunming, a city that had only been a point in the itinerary but now was starting to show its real consequences. It was a split second and it was obvious to me that I should join the circus! It seemed to me a much richer opportunity that continuing to hitch-hike alone around the world. It wasn’t an easy decision, somehow part of me was stoic and commited to follow my original plan of a solo trip. In the end, the prospect of travelling the world with a family of artists, a furtive caravan, beckoned me more.

At Silvia’s house I spent a whole afternoon with fever, drinking lemon tea and looking at the album of Channing, the poliglote and accordeonist from Texas. The book related the journey through Turkey, Cyprus, Georgia, Rusia, Mongolia, and China. The pictures were glued in the pages of an old accountability book he had found in the streets of Turkey, and the stamps of the commercial transactions revealed the fact it dated from 1957. With a colorful script, Channing had retitled it: “Yeni Circus Kitabi” (in Turkish, the Book of the New Circus) After turning the last page, I was convinced that it was a life style I was interested in experimenting.

Joining the circus would mean abbandoning Hitch-hiking for a while and taking up the bycicle, which I still have to build. I will maybe start to travel paralely by thumb. Rocio gave me an axis for the bike, the very first piece. While in Kunming I had learnt to ride the “tall bikes” and was now sure that I wanted my own. Of course there is still a question: What I am going to do in the circus? That was all together another question, sincce I am no musician and less clown. Poetry will have to find yet another reincarnation to match the circumstances. I have managed to convert poetry and literature into something that can pay for my trips, by selling my books. Now I will have to find a way to make poetry explicit and entertaining enough to share the stage with something as vivid as the tunes oozing out of Channing’s Weltmeister accordeon….

THE ROAD FROM KUNMING (CHINA) TO LAOS

 

Pablo eventually took his train to Shanghai. He was transported in the front luggage carrier of Channing’s tall bike. Suddenly afterwards I realized that it was the first time that I had had a travel companion for more than a month in this trip. Channing, Rocio, and I, started together our trip to Laos. As they were on their bikes and I was hitch-hiking, we agreed on intermediate points where to meet. At last, I was on the road with the circus!




The first of these meeting points was a town just 20 km south of Kunming. We couldn’t be ambitious, since we had hit the road at 4 pm. Meeting up there was not a problem, I arrived first, leaned over my backpack by the roadside, and waited for Channing’s bike to stand from the rest of the traffic. Together we looked for a place to camp, and were happy enough to do it in the new motorway which still being built. It was funny to set up the tent in the middle of the pavement! On the following day we made a fruitless attempt to get a ride for the whole pack, which counts not only us three but the 2 giant bikes loaded with accordions, clavs, etc It was impossible, so we split. As usually happens with the circus, separations are parenthesis that opens indefinitely, and the circus was going to have its own adventure before meeting up with me again.

                    

Without difficulties I reached Jinghong, not really far from the Lao border, in a region called Xishuanbanna, famous for the density and diversity of the ethnic minorities that inhabit its hills. These groups have more in common with Lao and Thai people that with the rest of China. I spent five days in town, selling “Harmony of Chaos” (my old book) to other travellers in the Mei Mei Café, owned by a Belgian ex-pat. In that venue Ihad the chance to speak with a group of Norwegian anthropologists who told me that the central government had sent coreograophers to make the native’s dances more stylish and therefor more marketable for tourism. Trekking with an official company in Southern China? Now you know what you are up to！I didn’t dare to go look for these hill tribes. As the readers may have already noticed, there has been a change of priorities since I entered South East Asia. I am exploring only those things that come across my eyes. All my efforts have deviated towards the completion of my next book “Vagabonding in the Axis of Evil” whose street version should be readay in a couple of months. I will continue to work in an extended version of it to be presented to some publishers in the UK and Spain, but that will take another year. The sooner I get the book done, the sooner I will join the Bike Circus in body and soul. Until now, I am travelling with them, but I haven’t done any move towards articulating with their show.

 
I crossed the Chinese-Lao border at Mengla. The ride consisted mainly of Chinese trucks “:Dongfeng”, those blue square moving structures that bump around the whole country. Even if the road was at moments really bad you could see the new motorway being built at the side of our road full of ditches. Outside the Chinese customs I changed my remaining yuans for kips, the currency of Laos. On handing out the equivalent of 50 euros the woman started to take out bricks of money from a large plastic bag. I received, in total, 633,000 kip, and considering tthat the largest denomination consisted of 5000 notes, I received enough notes as to full my front backpack to a point the zippers needed to be forced in order to close it. I felt as if I had just robbed a bank! I got my Chinese exit stamp and walked towards Lao, a new country in this trip.

 

I camped for two days next to the road, sheltered by a group of trucks that were posted there for the week waiting some merchandises from China. I was hoping to see Chaning’s bike appear on the horizon at any moment, since this time we had arranged that we would simply meet after the border. I wouls cross the border and sit in some visible spot on the right hand side to wait for the circus. However, three days passed and the circus didn’t show up. As a border is a really boring place to be waiting, I decided to head on to Luang Prabang. I soon got a ride in a Mitsubishi Pajero 4WD of a Chinese businessman going all the way to Vientianne, the capital. We stopped overnight in Udumxoi, and in the following morning we were entering the sleepy town of Luang Prabang. In the meanwhile, nevertheless, I had the chance to get a picture of the countryside that this time I didn’t intend to explore. Most of the houses along the road were straw huts built on stilts to separate them from the ground which gets really floaded in the rain season. Its inhabitants can be seen most of the day chatting around fires next to their dwellings, smoking, and drinking a rice wine known as lao-lao. Only in larger towns houses are made of wood or bricks....

ON THE CHINESE ROADS...

Photo 1: Chinese workers by the roadside. Photo 2: The VW Touareg we stopped, our black unicorn...

Initially only taxis seemed to be using that road. Eventually, a Cherry QQ, a miniature car of local design, stopped for us and took us to a place called Yingjing, through forested hills that ended up in terraced valleys. Farmers with conic hats worked hard in the ricefields. Mist seemed to be a 24 hours resident of those hills, and we could never afford to see further than 100 meters ahead. When night fell, after having tried in vain to spark the hospitality of a couple of hamlets, we decided to camp just next to the road. We set off to explore the area a little bit to find a suitable terrain for our camping ground, and we found that somebody had already set some sort of tent made with stitched potatoe bags. Inside this unusual tent, a perfectly clean bed awaited its mysteryous inhabitant. There was even a packet of peanuts under the pillow. And that was as far as we dared to investigate. We smoked a cigarette in the dark, trying to guess who on Earth could live there. We finally went to sleep. In the middle of the night, a man, and a woman carrying a crying baby entered the odd tent. Still wondering.

On the second day hitch-hiking results improved a lot. We stopped a Mitsubishi Pajero whose driver invited us for lunch and drop us off in a place called Hanyuan. There, fingers crossed, we looked at the card of the saint that Pablo had met in the mountains of Yaan, and in 10 minutes a VW Touareg 4WD was still next to us. That was not a car, but an unicorn! In that bolid we reached Shimian, where Pablo, who had less days left in his visa, took a bus to Kunming. As far as I was concerned, I was still cleaning the sin of having taken a plane from Lhasa to Chengdu, so I continued my pilgrimage on foot, postrating every three steps, and asking forgiveness to the God of Roadsides...

Being alone, the hitch hiking became really smooth, and soon I was overtaking the Kunming bound bus Pablo was in. In spite of this optimistic prospect, I did not rejected the free train ride that I was offered by the police in a town where I arrived by night. People there could really understand I was tryingto hitch-hike! So the free train payed by the cops landed me in Kunming, on the morning of the third day.

YAAN AND THE STORY OF THE FALSE POLICEMAN

On the pics: Pablo and Johnson, the falso policeman. The "real" (and pretty) policewoman at Ya'an. And me with the fake old bridge in the background.

Coming from Western Tibet the arrival to Lhasa had been to a certain extent a real shock. We were catching up with civilization! After five days in Lhasa, we didn’t have other choice but to board a plane to Chengdu, even if our original idea was to hitch hike to Kunming. My Chinese visa was about to expire and the PSB office at Lhasa was refusing to grant me an extension. After hitching for 20 months from Europe, I should say it was a heavy joke..

Eventually we landed in Chengdu, a mega city of 11 million bodies which lets you know that any provincial capital in China has more high rises than Paris and London together. Modernity is clearly something else other than glass panels, but the Chinese seem happy to crowd their country with future ruins. China seems to be embracing everything that the West gradually starts to abandon.

Since in Chengdu bureaucracies were too complex, I decided to extend my visa in Ya’an, some 100 km south from Chengdu. We had been told by our HC hosts in Chengdu that Ya’an definetly didn’t deserve a visit, that the town was forgettable. In other words, the town was not mention in any Lonely Planet. And that was like a letter of recommendation for us. The first thing to surprise us was the pretty police woman in the PSB, the department in charge of extending my visa. For a couple of seconds Pablo and I envisioned alterntive futures, in which we wrote letters to our families explaining the odd event of settling in Ya’an.­ The little police girl there was not only cute but also helpful She and her collegues had my visa extension ready in one our. At the end of the task, they wanted to have a picture taken with us and even invited us cofee in their office!

The city, as forecasted, didnt have anything spectacular, besides the vague pride of having been the cradle of the tea culture in China. Yaan’s second abstract claim to fame was being the place where the first giant pandas were found. The city has some relax pace of life that pleases us. Archaich looking new bridges crossed the river which name we never asked. The people, with only looking at us, make some exclamation. Wow! Ah! As if they had seen an animal absent in any catalogue. It was clear the city didnt draw many visitors. Yet, Yaan was going to stay in our memory for ever. Not due to their markets selling catfish or sea turtles in buckets. Not for the kindness of its citizens. We will always remember Yaan for its false policeman.

He wanted us to call him Johnson. Being his real name closer to a tongue twister, that was merciful on his behalf. He approached us with the excuse of showing us a good place where to eat duck. (since Tibet the indulgent and luxurious combination of taking a shower and eating a duck had come to simbolize all things unreachable) Finding an English speaking friend in such a forgotten city was already something notorious, so we gave it a go. From the beginning he had been unable to explain what his job consisted of. While we ate the duck he had made to us some vague not to say stupid questions of the kind of :do you like the city? or how do you like the people of the city?. He tried to convince us that it was a survey for his studies.

After dinner Johnson guided us to a dance hall where people danced in the most ridicolous way imanigable. It looked like a 1950s disco. Men grabbed women with tango manners but described waltz orbits on the dancefloor. There we noticed for the first time that our young new friend (he was some 21 years old) would come up more often than not swith a strange behaviour. In that case he introduced us to the disco owner, made him come to our table, and then pretended to translate his words (but actually put his own message through). So Johnson said that the owner was asking us if we wanted any girls, fior which we inmediatly undesrtoos that he was trying to sell us a couple of prostitutes. We said a big and noisy “No!” only to see how Johnson called the resident singer and had her coming to our table. Pablo and I crossed sights. “He is crazy!” And we were only starting to browse the extraordinary repertory of absurd ideas Johnson could come up with. After a few second he suggested that we should climb the stage and sing a song together with the disco owner. Yeah, he was not playing with the full deck. When we eventually left the place we were invited to visit again. Pablo and I imagined the hipothetical act of dressing up in smoking suits and white shirts and going for a waltz­.. thus commending ourselves to destiny.

Once in the street Johnson invited us some tofu that smelled like my socks after Tibet. Piece by piece we had to throw it to the ground, with our hands in the back, much to the happiness of an impromptu assortment of street cats and dogs that followed our way. Johnson had already invited us to stay with his familiy for a couple of days. The most logical thing would have been to leave that city, but the stay with Johnson promised a decent dosage of absurd.

In Johnson’s house we were treated as part of the family. Everynight Johnson and someone who was supossed to be his elder brother. By that time we stilled believed his words- would invite us to eat out at a local restaurant. The local way was to ask for a hot pot full of mushrooms, egs, fish, pork, vegetables, and everything cookable pinned in the end of a stick.. The essence of Chinese cuisine is to turning usual ingredients into unidentifiable shapes. Here comes a plate with something resembling rice. But it’s egg. Oh! These ought to be sausages. Never mind, it is rice. Everything is cooked, cut and presented in an absolutely different way. Those were really filling meals that we really apreciated since Tibetan frugalty was still fresh in our memories. Pablo celebrated local hospitality “This guys put cigarettes in your mouth!”. One night our stomachs were full to the extent that the idea of a single grain of rice being offered to us became abominable. Then, Johnson reminded us that later on we were expected in his third brother’s house to eat calf. Johnson would always refer to his relatives with an ordinal number. My third brother. Ny second uncle. The second sister of my fourth uncle. Pablo admited that in such conditions we couldn’t eat calf even by IV.

While I vainly scanned the city in search of a road map, Johnson guided Pablo to a sacred mountain. There he met a saint that gave him his own card! Pablo later related how Johnson would at every step tell him: “Pablo! This man is inviting you to lunch at his house! Then he would tell the man: “this foreigner wants to eat at your place!” We realized he repeated this strategy on and on. For what porpouse we will never know. We can just think he was as compulsive lier. The last afternoon Johnson showed us around town, always screaming to us if we would stop for an extra second. He seemed to specially target Pablo. If he would stop to tie his shoes, Johnson would shout “Oh!, Barburi (that was the closest he could pronounce Pablo) What are you doing! Come on!¡”

On the last night the “great confession” took place. We were in local fast food shop, a sort of Chinese KFC. We had spoted two other foreigners (the firswt we saw in Ya’an) ordering their chicken burgers. They turned out to be a Nepalese tea businessman and his son. They had come to China to buy machinery. We were talking over the burgers about the political events in Nepal when Johnson stood up and said, with a ceremonious voice that could only spark laughter .
“Now I can tell you the truth about my job. I am a policeman and my jobe is to make sure that the tourists have a good time in Yaan. Sorry for lying to you!”
Against all his expectations we continued talking to the Nepalese guys, who realy had interesting staff to say. In any case we were sure that the policeman story was just an excuse to hang around with us. The whole episode was redeemed by the faces of the Nepalese when Johnson made his confession. Worthy of a portrait.

ESCAPE FROM TIBET: ROADSIDE TOTEMS, HUNGRY COOKS AND NEW SAILS.

To say that in Horchu the scenario would repeat itself would be an optimistic reading. In fact, things got worse. Each day in that autumn Tibet was colder than the one before. In the frozen mornings the ditches filled with water by the roadside would seem broken mirrors. Route 219 continued silent and humiliating as always: our roadside was a balcony to eternity. Between that afternoon and the following morning we would wait 14 hours in Horchu. At last, we had reached the point of seeking refuge from cold underground, in a sort of natural trench, keeping an eye on the road in turns, and running desperately each time a truck would roar in the horizon.

But all tragedy has a hero, and ours was the Tibetan driver of the truck that eventually felt sorry for our persistence and ordered to board the back of his truck, where among a potpurri of construction tools we found place to enjoy the almost forgotten sensation of being on the move. 160 km later we arrived to the checkpoint in Mayum La, a pass at 5200m. One kilometer before the checkpoint the driver stopped his truck. He wouldn’t risk to hide us in the cargo as some of his collegues do, for fear of loosing his license due to the forbidden act of transporting foreigners. The checkpoint was a sad place, as all places where its inhabitants are there against their free will, as militars deployed there by their goverments or as prostitutes deployed to assist the soldiers. Finaly, a bar painted with red and white stripes appeared behind our eyes. The golden buttons in the uniform of the soldier barring entry did little to mask his teen age, and only visibly bothered he stopped playing games in his mobile phone to have a quick look at our passports. He never asked for the permits. We are soon walking again in the snow covered road, asking the first stars what shall we do. We were considering the possibility of staying overnight in a tea house when we heared the sweet puffing of our beloved truck. They had delayed to change a tyre, and now past the checkpoint, the source of their fears, they were ordering us to jump in the back again. Warmed with all our clothes simultaneously, we got ready for the coldest night ever, in the back of that truck., peeping ocassionaly trough the sleeping bag to look at the starred nightsky.

Having crossed the Mayum La had innitially given us the false impression of having reached some kind of plus ultra. The epicenter of our hope was obviously the reactivation of traffic on the 219. When we reach the toen of Drongpa, our expectations seem to confirm as we see the asphalt reemerge. But the extasis lasts little: the ghostlike asphalt just gives comfortable access to a newly built petrol station and evaporates after 200m. We would wait in Drongpa for 3 days, along with two 20 year old French guys who had come overland from Istanbul and were going towards Vladivostock. Pablo, to whom I was starting to admire for his readiness to provide nicknames for everyone, needed little urge to produce a new one for them: the “Little Princes”. And it was quite accurate, considering the coats of the Chinses Army they wore ad their blonde hair. The three days in Drongpa constituted the critical mass in our Tibetan adventure. Not only it didn’t stop snowing in three days, but also there was nothing to do in town, except for drinking unhuman ammounts of tea in our pale hotel room. Something strange happened when we discovered that the TV in the room actually worked. The monotony of the plateau had casted such a spell that when the screen got filled with moving coloured figures we remained astonished as kids and started fighting for the remote control. Every channel was a source of wonder, and even a ping pong match between China and Uzbekistan seemed to us extremely entertaining. Somehow, it helped us to cope with the three days waiting. .

We finally managed to get tickets for a passing bus towards Saga. The task was not easy, since the driver initially refused to take foreigners, afraid himself of possible punishments. There was more than a reason to be happy. First, the fact of getting closer to warmer areas. The second, since Ali we hadn’t seen an ATM machine and now we had 20 dollards among the two. We assumed there would be an ATM machine in Saga, a town linked by road to Nepal. We would later discover that Saga had grown really into abig town in our expectations, a small metropolis with all the services we needed. But reality only granted a larger town with internet and quite a few supermarkets, but no ATM. We crossed the checkpoint at Saga on foot. This time we were indeed asked for our permits, that had already expired.. After Saga, the last listed town in the permits, we were at the mercy of the local authorities decisions. We walked along Bramaputra river. It was still another 700 km to Lhasa. 60 km from there, nevertheless, there was something that could change our fate: the meeting with the Northern Road, carrying most of the trafic between Lhasa an Ali back to the capital. The first day we covered half of that distance in a “Mad Max” as we had nicked those strange Tibetan tractors which are driven with motorcycle handles and really seemed to have been asssambled with the remains of a lost civilization.

The farmers dropped us in a village where the locals were slaughtering a yak. The difference of temperature with the outside caused the dead animal to realise smoke as if it were burning. Seated by the roadside we waited for local hospitality, since we were keeping our last 10 dollars only for food. A local family indeed saved us from pitching our tent that freezing night. The following day would we the most dramatic all together. Accompanied y a dog we had unvoluntarily adopted in town when handing her biscuit, we covered practically on foot the remaining 30 km to the Northern Road. All oour provisions had been reduced to a falsk with milk and two breads. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” –reminded to me Pablo, as we walked. More than once, we knocked the door of some farm to ask for tsampa, a flour made from barley that mixed with water turns into a tasteless but feeding paste. At the sight of our little dog, the farmers would add an extra ration. As we walked, the only hapiness came from seeing the red numbers in the white milestones change, slowly, from 1880 to desired 1902, where the crossing was. Every 2 or 3 km we would stop to rest, leaning our backs and packs against these stones, as if we were players gambling in a strange game: two backpacks to 1897… As hunger strikes in us, I discover there is nothing more painful than walking with a hungry cook.. Pablo (such his occupation) had started to compose a menu characterized by unnecessary extravagancies. One of the dishes was, if I remember well, pumpkins filled with cremy rise and baked crab meat…

In a bus we would take from the crossroad we reached Lhasa. After a month in the Plateau, we couldn’t less than feel joyful when the trees returned to the landscape. I remember to have looked at the first ones from the bus, as if thy had been leopards of giraffes. In Lhasa, the hapiness of reaching a city had its counterpart by the spectacle offered by the Potala and the now small Tibetan old town sorrounded by modern Chinese concrete boxes. The new train connecting Lhasa with the Mothrland has also accelerated the process of materialization of Beijing policies, and given China an irrevokable presence in the area. It has also granted easy access to a previously difficult to get land. As John Ruskin would say: “the train, an artifact to make the world smaller”. Letting this thoughts aside, the city has cheerful tone, with bunches of monks walking the streets, spinning their manikhors, chanting and postrating behind the Jokhang, the holiest of the temples in town, which is day and night sorrounded by pilgrims doing their kora. The Potala is like an abbandoned ship and works now as a museum. Pablo has turned to Spain, and in special ocassion he prepeares the menu the came to his mind while starving in Tibet. Who is writing, after 20 months of hitch hiking across the mountains, deserts, and plateaus of Asia has decided to take a rest from the big endeavours, the challenges and the conflict areas, as well as from the pen that describes them. South East Asia encloses, I assume, the calm and the frivolity I need to give perspective to the past, and let the covered distances settle, so as to gather again, some day, the peace required to unleash a new storm. Meanwhile I continue traveling, I have joined a bike transported circus, a group of 9 travelers who carry their musical instruments in doouble deck bikes and perform their circus and music show from town to town. Mi rol in the circus is not clear yet, but it offers a good opportunity to continue life in movement, and continue the exploration of the same wind. Just with different sails.

MOUNT KAILASH: AXIIS MUNDI AND THE VOID SYNDROME

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Our passage through the monasteries of Tirthapuri and Gurgam had been, to be candid, sacrilegious. The holy hot springs of the first had supplied us with a badly needed bath, while our infiltration in the second during a ceremony had left the resident lama clueless in front of all his community. It was clear that if we continued that way we would reincarnate in a bat. That’s why Mount Kailash, center of the Buddhist universe provided us a perfect chance to mend our karma. Pablo and I walked along desolate Route 219. It was a windy day, which explained why we were finding hats every kilometer or so. Hat number 3 was particularly cute, narrow winged, not without a certain Tango look. Maybe that was why Pablo adopted it immediately. So far only four vehicles had used the road that morning, all chartered jeeps that would never stop for us, but as soon as “number 3” touched Pablo’s head, a Lexus 4WD came out of nowhere and gave us a lift. Since then, number 3 was our lucky hat.

The driver was some kind of dandy, smoking blue filtered cigarettes and listening to classical music. All the Land Cruisers that had passed us, compared to our unicorn, were mere cargo beasts. To comfort we could add visual magnificence: in the horizon, towards the South, the snowed giants of the Himalayas raised perpendicularly from the ground, miniaturized by the distance but unperturbed by the continuity of the plains. Soon, Kailash showed up in the North. After having heard so much about it, its greatness didn’t reach me as obviously as expected, in the comparison with the spectacle still displayed by the other Himalayan giants in the south. The believes –and facts- around this “small” 6650m mountain dwarf all the other of its kind, with the exception maybe of K2 and Everest.

Four religions in the world –Buddhism, Hinduism, Jains and Bonpos- revere the mountain as the center of the universe. An axis mundi. Its four faces, well shaped as that of a pyramid, justify those who see on it the source of the cardinal points. Hindus spot in the top of Mount Kailash the abode of Shiva, while Bonpos refer to it as the place where their master reached enlightenment. Faithful ones of these four religions have caravanned to Kailash for at least two thousand years, but the West believed, until the 19th century, that the existence of a sacred mountain from which snows the four great rivers of the Subcontinent –the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Sutlej- melted could only be a fable.

After listening to so many references to the purity and sanctity of the place, we couldn’t believe our eyes when we realized that Darchen, the town in the base of Kailash, was a dumping site. I will not give the details of the composition of that trash-deco, but I must mention that brigades of street dogs patrolled the streets monitoring their empire over this or that trash mountain. Who would have said that the center of the universe was made of garbage?

Anyhow, Kailash was going to become a turning point in our Tibetan adventure, my own emotions confirmed by their reflection in the dialogue with Rich, Nicolai, and the other cyclists that we hadn’t met since Ali. All the cyclists that in Kashgar talked with enthusiasm about the trip to Tibet, here in Kailash, 1500 km of several nights camping at –15 C, bear in their faces the signs of who has just awaken from a nightmare. It seems as if they had just been chased by a street gang. Those that in Kashgar exposed with calm security the thousand and one methods to enter Tibet, now exchange advise of how to get out of there as fast as possible. In the middle, a syndrome that nobody had calculated had affected them (us), so many measures taken to prevent the mountain sickness only to fall victims of the “void syndrome”.

The enormous –and void- distances between town ad town, and once there, the difficulty to communicate with an already shy culture, the boredom, and the mental fatigue more than the physical one, cause most of the cyclists to climb their bikes to the back of a truck in order to travel faster through the desolate country. Hence, while outside it snows copiously, the conversation topic inside then tea house that sheltered us were the beaches of Goa and Thailand. Rich, overwhelmingly afflicted by the monotony of Tibetan cuisine swears he would sell his soul for dinning out at Katmandu’s Everest Steakhouse. Had there been comic stripe balloons over our heads, only palm trees and beaches would have floated there. I apologize ourselves remembering that in any case we were no less psychotic that the artists who painted the murals at Guge…

But for some reason all of us had made the effort to reach Kailash. The possibility to share the atmosphere of one the most remote and isolated pilgrimage sites is enough to tame a traveler’s soul. The pilgrimage in itself consists of a 56 km long kora (circle) around the mountain. After completing a lap, one can claim he has done something to improve his karma. When 13 laps are completed, one is automatically set free of the samsara, or circle of reincarnations from which man is a prisoner. Some foreign visitors imitate the local pilgrims, with the difference that while the last cover the 56 km in a day, jumping and chanting as light as butterflies, the foreigners do so in 2 or 3 nights, with less joy than fatigue and a heavy camping equipment in their backs. At that point is was clear to us that in Tibet all the actions aiming to harmonize the individual with the cosmos have a dynamic that includes the concepts of circle, periphery and intangibility. Always, a circle is described around a holy, unreachable, center. The pilgrim that performs his kora around a monastery or mountain, or that who spins his manikhor is always referring to an immaterial center. As Tao states; the utility of the wheel resides in the void in its center. Who knows, maybe the Tibetans see in Rich and Nicolai’s bikes strange prayer vending machines. I told the, to increase communication with the locals they should write “om mani padme om” around the crowns of their bikes.

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Personally, the sacred nature of the mountain didn’t seem to me reason enough to spend three days walking around it, specially after having spent 5 months traveling in, around and across the Himalayas. Pablo, who was fresher, did his kora together with four Frenchmen learned enough about the spiritual dimension of Kailash as to trace back to it all the European pagan beliefs. Next stop would be the equally sacred Lake Manasarovar, which the Hindus consider a mental creation of Shiva. The lake is situated at 4600 m, so when jumping out of the truck that took us there we found ourselves stepping over snow up to the ankles. There we took note that the winter that had been running behind us was now in fact ahead of us. Even inside the guesthouse at the Chiu Monastery, built with a certain Disney drama before a cliff, the glass of water I leave by the bed at night shows a thin ice film at the morning. The thermometer, in - 15 Celsius. With such cold, we barely bother to pay a quick visit to the shores of the lake where the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi were thrown, and continue our trip.

Personally, the sacred nature of the mountain didn’t seem to me reason enough to spend three days walking around it, specially after having spent 5 months traveling in, around and across the Himalayas. Pablo, who was fresher, did his kora together with four Frenchmen learned enough about the spiritual dimension of Kailash as to trace back to it all the European pagan beliefs. Next stop would be the equally sacred Lake Manasarovar, which the Hindus consider a mental creation of Shiva. The lake is situated at 4600 m, so when jumping out of the truck that took us there we found ourselves stepping over snow up to the ankles. There we took note that the winter that had been running behind us was now in fact ahead of us. Even inside the guesthouse at the Chiu Monastery, built with a certain Disney drama before a cliff, the glass of water I leave by the bed at night shows a thin ice film at the morning. The thermometer, in - 15 Celsius. With such cold, we barely bother to pay a quick visit to the shores of the lake where the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi were thrown, and continue our trip.

We searched around us: a sheep’s skull was immediately set aside. From across the road Pablo hurled a pair of rain boots. When we found a red kid’s sweater we realized we had the elements we needed for the artifact. We took distance to evaluate the visual impact, and we couldn’t help laughing at the sight of…. A dwarf with sheep head and rain boots hitch hiking by the roadside! Six hours after a driver brings his Jeep Cherokee to a halt and stares at the dwarf. Fish takes the hook. Five seconds later, as pirates knife in mouth jumping to the enemies sails, we “approach” him and pray in all known languages. What we couldn’t imagine was that the Cherokee was going only 22 km away, to another forgettable town called Horchu.

WESTERN TIBET: PSYCODELLIC PILGRIMS AND CONFUSED LAMAS...

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On the way to the monasteries of Gurgam and Tirthapuri we were surprised by a heavy snowfall and draw back to a teahouse in nearby Namru. There we had an instructive afternoon looking how the two enormous Tibetan women that ran the teahouse constantly fighting with the local bunch of drunks who even tried to play snooker under the snow. Well, I understand there is not much to do in a place where the absence of agriculture turns laziness into a natural state of the soul. While we drink our yak butter tea, the daughter of the cook enters the room shyly, looking at the ground, clearly intimidated by our presence, and wearing a kid’s size Chinese Army camouflaged jacket. Every day, images as such let us thinking in the strange way in which the past has coagulated for Tibetan people.

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The next day, after spending three long hours throwing stones to empty cans of “Red Bull” (the problems of urbanization have arrived to Tibet way before urbanization itself) we boarded a little truck towards the town of Montcer, crossing a heavily snowed pass. We were almost ready to start our trek to Tirthapuri when Pablo realized he had forgotten his sleeping back in the truck. The pink bed dress he bought as a substitute in a local, poorly provided shop, made him worthy of a list of unprintable adjectives which entertained us during the 2 hours long walk towards the monastery.

Action in Tibet, we understood, happens more outside than inside the monasteries. The pilgrims execute the circumference of a holy place, known as kora, performing a repertory of meaningful rituals. They follow a predetermined path along the monastery which is once and again celebrated by colorful tarchoks or Tibetan prayer flags, maybe the most famous element of the Tibetan religious paraphernalia. Tarchoks are colored pieces of fabric stretched in ropes tended over roads, mountains passes or even houses in order to purify the air. Buddhist sutras have been printed in each flag, and some of them bear the “Lung Ta” the winged horse whose job is to spread the teachings of Buddhism. Another of the religious devices the pilgrims meet in their kora are the manikhors, golden cylinders that enclose kilometric rolls of prayers, and which the faithful spin clockwise, promoting around the cosmos the Buddhist teachings and adding points to improve their karma. Many monasteries accommodate corridors with dozens of manikhors in their perimeters. Definitely not a place for Jim Morrison, who had said: “I cancel my subscription to the eternal life”.

We waited until the next morning’s prayers to attend the action within the yellow walls of Tirthapuri. Three monks of different ages, including a boy and an old man, sing and punctuate the melody with drums of different sizes. Seated ahead of an archive with Buddhist ancient texts, and highlighted in spite of the enclosure by the beam of light of a carefully placed skylight, the monks accomplish in loneliness the task of praying for al the beings of the universe. The polyphony created by a premeditated asynchrony gives the chant a depth that reminds of a chorus. Suddenly, the celestial character of the image is interrupted by a mighty snooze of the old man. Against the bets, the four of them look each other with complicity and laugh, without stopping singing, revealing in my opinion that they articulate with our mundane reality in a more honest way than our Christian priests. Under the holy purple garment of the boy is with some effort visible an NBA T-shirt…

After saying goodbye to Akatsuki, who hastened his steps towards Nepal where he planned to make a marriage proposal to his girlfriend, Pablo and I walked down the Sutlej valley towards the outlying Gurgam monastery. Hair-to-ground yaks graze calmly by the narrow fertile green strip at both sides of the river. When our presence sends them trotting away we notice that they move their tails in a very doggy way that hardly matches their prehistoric dimensions. Never such a sturdy looking animal was so harmless. The yak is sacred in Tibet, and their horns ornate the doors of each house of the hamlets we let behind. Undoubtedly, this is due to the syncretism between Bon, the animist local faith, and Buddhism. Some say that every Tibetan is a Bonpo at heart, what would explain the large number of superstitions and icons that have survived from a theoretically displaced religion. Something like the worship of Pachamama in the South American Andes, which has somehow be incorporated into the Christian calendar.

Half way to the monastery we eventually got a lift in a truck carrying pilgrims, just when the 3 PM snowfall was beginning. The men, with their wide curved wing hats, seem nothing but cowboys. The women try to protect their cutis from the elements by wrapping their face with colorful scarves that could be the flags of inexistent psycodelic republics. As if the colors were not enough, each married woman wears a pandem, or striped pattern cloth stitched to their skirts. Many pass the beans of their rosaries, and all of them laugh at the two unexpected pilgrims.

The Bon monastery of Gurgam was almost identical to the Buddhist ones, which is understandable, since the Bonpo teachings were reorganized to resist the challenged posed by Buddhism almost to the point of coincidence. The little differences with the Buddhist system seem primarily the offspring of pride: the swastikas decorating the Bon monasteries rotate in the opposite sense, and bonpos do their koras and rotate the manikhors anticlockwise.

At one point, the pilgrims we had met in the truck invite us to follow them. Logically, we don’t know where to. All the group climbs to a chapel built in a cave on the mountain slope; they take out their shoes, and enter the cave one by one. What’s inside? –we ask each other. Pablo bids: Elvis Presley? It would have been nice, but no: an old Lama lays seated cross legged in the center of a constellation of candles and images. He must have spent there a life time already, that man who didn’t wait for us. Without much a clue of what to do, we knelt down and bow our heads in universal sign of reverence. Spying under our eyelashes we realize the old Lama doesn’t know how to handle us neither. He looks around as asking to the metal Buddha at his side what to do next. He finally sips slowly his tea and starts a chant with such pusillanimity that it sounds like he sings along to a song whose words he has forgotten. Even if we secretly expected from him the wisdom to transcend the cultural differences and communicate without words, the emotions of the old Lama were only obvious when he discovered the note we had left as donation was a 5 Yuan one. Exiting the cave, all the pilgrims exploded in a thousand laughs…