8:30 a.m. Capital Express, T28, heading back to the capital 3,000 km down the 12,500 foot mountain, through Xi’an, along the Silk Road, then Eastward, to the industrial and populated coast, landing in Beijing, forty-eight hours from now. Tibet has been an adventure.
I’m glad to have the time to look out the window. It inspires free flowing poetics. The sun is rising over the sand-swept mountains, leaving behind China’s most isolated province. Lhasa is now a distant spoke connected to heart of the center, Beijing. Before long, vast, spacious valley’s emerge, miles wide, surrounded by snow-draped mountains.
Small villages cling to the side of the mountains, red drenched Chinese flags float in the air. Small oases of life, a small farm shack, dot the landscape.
Rivers and icy tributaries cross the rails from high. The animal are married to the wind swept golden brush, the white and brown march, the soft permafrost. Sheep marked red huddle. Horses don yellow and orange, their mains flapping in the wind. The graceful, cornered antlers of yak pray upward. A man walks. He is nowhere and everywhere. A truck chugs up a distant road. A black-cloaked woman in a red fur hat tills. The Han man across from me yawns and checks his phone for text messages.
Others play cards, more interested in me than what’s out the window. Another insists I accept a cup of rice vodka. I do.
A river runs through. Does the mountain make the valley, or the valley the mountain. They are inseparable, defined in relationship to one another.
If I were a God, this is where I would live. Where emptiness is wide enough to hold the world, where time is measured in ions and the marriage of heaven and earth is quietly consummated. The Tibetans and Chinese share in life’s struggle, even as one dominates the other. Despotism is a feeble attempt to mimic the imperial grandeur of the cosmos for which we are pawns.
“We
are here just a while. It will pass in time. You might as well smile” Alison
Kraus, on queue.
The train’s wheels are like prayer bells, clicking and clacking against the cold steel beneath. The rhythmic motion of the heart and breath, a reminder that opposites hold the world together. It’s no wonder that Tibetans and their form of Buddhism celebrate this truth.
Life and death are inseparable, just as are the white-tripped yak and the marshy grass, the pebbles in the streams.
The highest train in the world. It’s a journey between a beginning and an end, pre-determined but only discoverable along the way. It is the journey of one day and one voyage; and it’s the journey of a lifetime. Somewhere along its line, our destiny with death awaits. This much is certain.
We just don’t know where that crossing will be.
8:30 p.m. glide into Xi’an, where I began my voyage to Tibet. Many Chinese travelers debark. In my t-shirt and slippers and tea cup – standard fair among the Chinese – I jump on to the platform with a few other Chinese men who yoke cigarettes. Stretch. Chinese beer is 60 cents. The cold is upon Northern China, much more than Lhasa.
I’m exhilarated and refreshed after 36 hours of transformative motions down the mountain and back to the intersection of the ancient Silk Road that carried goods from Shanghai, north and south, to president day India, Afghanistan, Eastern and Central Europe. The platform bell rings and new passages scurry onboard with their boxes and. A young man from my carriage ushers me from the window, with a great deal of urgency, to get back on the train.
We begin to inch forward, on toward an overnight arrival in Beijing at 7:30 a.m., Monday, when President Obama meets with President Hu Jintao. I’ll be heading back to the pleasant Sanlitun Hostel, a few miles from the American Embassy and where Obama and his entourage will be greeting officials.