During the pandemic, we all became armchair travelers by necessity, and I began to think about places I’ve been that do not exist anymore. 

In 1987, the border between Tibet and Nepal opened for the first time in decades, and I was lucky enough to go overland from Kathmandu to Lhasa.  From what I understand, most of what I saw there has now vanished.  Millions of Han Chinese settlers have out-populated Tibetans in their own country (a process that had already begun when I was there), and Lhasa, which when I visited had mainly dirt roads and a few white, rectangular Tibetan houses, is now filled with high rises. 

My two months in Tibet were a kind of dream.  I went to countless monasteries, met a boy Rinpoche who lived on the top of a small mountain; attended religious festivals with dancing monks wearing huge, colorful masks.  But the most memorable had to have been the trek to Nam-Tso. 

I first heard of Lake Nam-Tso with my traveling companion Miranda.  We met an American couple who were sitting next to us in a restaurant in Lhasa, laughing hysterically over their beers because they were so happy to have made it back.  “Wow,” the woman kept exclaiming, remembering some new, horrendous aspect of her trip. 

Of course, we were intrigued.  After eavesdropping on their conversation for a while, we finally asked to join them, and learned how we could make the trip ourselves.  

To get to Nam-Tso, we would take a bus from Lhasa, the biggest city in Tibet, to Damxung, two hours away to the north.  At Damxung we could try to find a truck that would take us 45 kilometers up the dirt road to the top of the pass, and from there we could walk four hours across the plain that surrounded the lake.  At the lake, we would find a complex of caves where Buddhist hermits had once lived.  The caves, we were told, were a good place to sleep. 

They also sounded irresistibly obscure, and Miranda and I looked at each other significantly, picturing ourselves in a faraway, pristine paradise as yet untouched by other Western tourists.  Among young, Western backpackers like us, there was always satisfaction in being the first of our kind to a new place. 

That was how we ended up disembarking from the bus at Damxung two weeks later, packs loaded down with canned peaches, hard-boiled eggs, and six day’s supply of instant noodles.  In fifteen minutes, we had walked the extent of Damxung, and sat down to eat a bowl of hot noodles at the truck stop, hoping with sign language and hopeful glances to persuade some driver to take up to the top of the pass.  All that day we tried to get a truck and failed.  The next morning at six, we started our 45-kilometer trek along the dirt road to the top of the pass. 

I had met Miranda at a meditation course for tourists in Kathmandu, where we both sat trying to imagine our bodies exploded in space so we could just “be breath.”  She was tall, with close cropped hair, and walked at a slow, deliberate pace.  We were both in our twenties, the time of life when you go away for a long time to try to figure it all out.  Until then, I’d been a solo traveler, and I’d foundered.   Miranda was my saving grace.

Assuming that no trucks came by at all, Miranda and figured it would take us a day to cover the 45 kilometers.  I walked as fast as possible, thinking that if we hurried, we could make it before nightfall.  Miranda walked calmly along behind me. 

It soon turned out there were things to enjoy along the way.  Our first sight in the mountains was a lone nomad’s tent, pitched on the green slop of a mountain whose summit was covered by clouds.  Father up the track, a whole camp came into view.  White canvas tents, each with their trail of smoke, were surrounded by groups of ragged, red-cheeked children who waved at us but did not come near.  Farther off, herds of yak trotted off skittishly at our approach, long hair jerking in the wind.  The air had turned icy.

At one in the afternoon, after hours of walking, Miranda and I reached a point where the river cut across the road, making it impassable.  Wondering how we were going to cross, we watched as a Tibetan splashed across on his horse.  Just then we heard the roar of a truck from around the bend.

A TRUCK!  Grinning like idiots, we watched it churn up the road and come to a stop in front of us; a beat up jalopy with two Chinese men in the front seat.  In the back, clinging to huge coils of steel cable, were three jovial Italians, one of them carrying a video camera.  They pulled us up, and the truck was off again.  So much for being the only Westerners around. 

During the ride to the top of the pass, we realized that we would never have reached it that day by walking.  Serendipity….Miranda and I looked at each other, smiling like two 19^th century explorer taking mental notes for our memoirs: And so once more we had triumphed against fate….

When the truck stopped at the top of the pass, we got our first glimpse of the lake, which spread out as far as we could see in a giant “U” shape, a brilliant turquoise, changing tones like a harp.  Pulling the cold air into our lungs, we took in the scene: around the crater of the lake, jagged purple-white peaks rose, screening out the world beyond.  Between the lake and the mountains, a green plain spread out, gradually giving way to foothills and then the mountains in the distance.

Forty minutes later the truck dropped us off on the other side of the pass to camp for the night.  With misgivings, we watched the three Italians drive away, determined to go their own way.  Three weeks later, in Kathmandu, we met the Italians again, and I was able to watch a video of myself looking up, dazed, as the truck drove away and I receded, a bewildered blur in the distance.

That was the first day.  “Where do you think the caves are?” Miranda asked the next morning, an hour into our trek.  “I think they’re that spot there.” 

“That looks less than four hours away,”  I objected.  We started our trek in high spirits because the American couple we had spoken to in Lhasa said the caves were only about four hours from the pass.  Compared to our walking the day before, four hours seemed like a mere stroll.  But that was before we had our first encounter with a nomad’s dog.

I’d studied a little Tibetan Buddhism before I left for my trip, so I’d seen images of Mahakala, one of the Tibetan wrathful deities.  Mahakala generally appears in temple art as black-skinned, with huge fangs that drip blood and a necklace made of human skulls—that particular Tibetan mastiff was a dead likeness, except perhaps for the skulls.  The dog followed us for half a mile, growling threateningly at us because we had walked within a 5-mile radius of its tent.  Picking up rocks to brandish and finally throw at it, we watched crestfallen as the dog took them up playfully in its mouth and tossed them into the air.

But that was only the beginning of a very long day.  “The spot doesn’t seem any closer,” Miranda said later, when we had calmed down over a chocolate bar.

“Don’t worry,” I said, with not a single bit of evidence to back up statement, “it probably doesn’t loom up at us till the very end.”  After a few more bites we continued our way across the plain, an endless green continuum where all sense of direction vanished completely, drowned out by the monotony of ground and sky.  In the distance, black dots could be seen, moving slowly: herds of yak, driven by a nomad on a horse.

In a fantasy novel I had read about Tibet, a group of characters makes its way across a giant plain toward a monastery, unable to reach it because a sorcerer lives inside makes the monastery appear further back on the plain each time the characters draw near to it.  Two hours later, I felt like a character in that novel, laboring in a trick landscape where no matter how much we walked, we never progressed.  At five hours, I conceded to Miranda that the lump we saw ahead of us, the one she originally pointed out as the spot where the caves were, must be the one—if we could only get to it.  At six hours, we agreed that we had both “had enough.”  The caves shimmered elusively in the distance, and we stood in front of a small river, wondering irritably how we were going to cross it.  Miranda walked upstream, determined to find a suitable ford.  “Over here,” I called to her, hopping nimbly across the water.  Immediately, I found myself waist-deep in mud and sinking, brought down by the weight of my pack.  If Miranda weren’t a strong woman, I might have remained there, a cautionary landmark for other travelers.

Things got worse.  It began to rain.  We got mired in a kind of swamp where what looked like solid ground from above turned out to be mud as deep as that I had fallen into.  Walking further and further into the swamp in search of a solid crossing place, we eventually had to turn around and come out again, then make a one-hour detour to avoid the mud.

By the time we reached the caves, it was getting dark and we had been walking for nine hours.  The tourists who were already at the caves told Miranda they thought she was a horse, she was walking so fast.

…And who were they?  The three Italians with the video camera, of course!  They had convinced the Chinese truck driver to take them to the caves for the day.  That was when I recalled the laughter of the American woman in the restaurant in Lhasa, with its strain of hysteria.  Yes, I thought cackling demonically, that’s very funny!

In 1987, some of the Buddhist monasteries that had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution were beginning to be rebuilt, but the caves at Nam-Tso were empty.  There were so many of them that before the Chinese invasion, they had housed some 300 monks.  Now they rested eerily intact by the lake, complete with walls, fireplaces, and mani-stones carved with Sanskrit mantras, that were strewn everywhere.  On the other side of the cave complex, facing the water, was an altar and a mani-wall, made out of stones on which Buddhist prayers has been carved.  Everywhere, it was as if the peace of the monks who lived there still hung in the air.

The next day, the Italians went their own way once again, and Miranda and I were left to ourselves to explore the caves.  The lake changed colors all day, washed deeper shades of turquoise as the wind blew across its surface, making a crosshatch of ripples.  At times, the clouds covering the peaks on the horizon would pass and they would come into view, unimaginably high.  The one nearest us we judged to be nearly 7,000 meters, almost as high as Everest.

Like many lakes in Tibet, Nam-Tso is a salt lake, formed by the ocean in the ice age and levitated with the upward movement of the Himalayas till it reached a point far above its original level.  Maybe this gave the lake its primeval quality and contributed to my feeling when I was there: that I was as far away from the rest of the world as I could be.  Maybe it was the fact that neither Miranda nor I had ever been in a place that was so empty before; nothing but sun, wind, and the continual, rhythmic lakescape.

After three days, our food supply was running now, and we decided to go.  The trip back, we agreed, wouldn’t be nearly so bad, since now we were forewarned.  We were right, for the most part, although after seven hours, when it began to rain and I was exhausted, chilled and aching, knowing didn’t seem to make anything closer.  Here it seemed to me that Miranda saved my life for a second time during that trek.  She stood in a cold rain waiting for me to catch up, the only vertical point of reference in an endless, mist-enveloped plain.

Arriving late in the afternoon at the bottom of the pass and the nomad’s encampment, we went to one of the tents to ask whether we could hire their tractor to take us back to Damxung.  An old toothless man wearing a sheepskin and Tibetan style boots came out to talk to us.  “Mindoo,” “no,” the tractor was broken, but we could come inside his tent and sleep if we liked.

That night, sitting across from the old man and his tentmate, another old man, we drank salted Tibetan tea heated on a yak dung fire and repeated Buddhist prayers that our host administered to us in the way of small talk.  A lapse came in the conversation, and we looked around and noticed an old 1920s-style radio.  The old man turned it on for us and flipped through the channels: static; a Chinese voice; more static; and then, miraculously, an English-speaking voice.  The BBC!

To my ears, there’s always something rousing in the British accent.  Maybe it’s the influence of all those World War II movies, but the BBC always sounds like the voice of “the rest of humanity” to me.  To the account of a parliament in a tiny British protectorate, Miranda and I watched the old men open the can of peaches we had given them, and solemnly, ceremonially, began to eat its contents.  Fixing each other with understanding stares, they rolled the syrupy fruit around in their mouths.

Miranda and I watched respectfully.  In this hushed crossing of two distant currents, it seemed like we were envoys of the world “out there,” and they were tasters, slowly poring over this sensation brought from far away.