The Hotel on the Roof of the World (12 page)

In fact, pretty much, ‘a big hello to everyone'. The main part of the speech would deal with the great leaps forward against the ‘splittists', regardless of how recently the last riots took place, and would highlight all the wonderful changes that had occurred since the Chinese had taken over in Tibet. The Cultural Revolution and the destruction of over 6,000 monasteries was temporarily overlooked. No mention was ever made as to whether new fire extinguishers had been ordered for the police station.

There were also some warnings for Western spectators. The 1991 speech contained this frightening sentence concerning the movements of the Chinese: ‘Strong socialist China now erects like a giant in the east of the world.'

Some interesting facts concerning Chinese policies in Tibet were also revealed:

‘Since the peaceful liberation, under the correct leadership and kind attention of the central committee and state council [oops, they forgot to mention the Cultural Revolution here] we have scored great victory of democratic reform, and established a new political power – the people's democratic dictatorship.'

The speech following the National Day message is always read by the Nepalese Consul General. He speaks in English, but his Nepalese accent is so strong that little of what he says is intelligible. Luckily the wording of the speech follows the same format as Communist Chinglish, so that the interpreter is able to understand and all the Tibetans and Chinese nod in agreement with whatever it is that he is saying.

The speech runs around the monotonous theme of the good cooperation between the two great countries. It is true that it has been a long time since Kukri-wielding Gurkhas invaded Tibet, but even Chinese speech writers would have a hard time describing the Nepalese excursions into Tibet as entirely peaceful and the Nepalese Consul General carefully avoided the subject.

It was after forty-seven minutes of speeches, with the boredom threshold long surpassed, that the flies started to drop out of the sky. The fly spray had been used in such quantities that not a single
diptera
in the room had a chance of survival. Chef paced up and down his buffet, pinching them out as they landed. The Nepalese Consul General droned on in the background as we watched the first fly crash-land on table six. It had landed on the rim of the living Buddha's glass of Lasa Beer and teetered dangerously from side to side. We watched it in eager anticipation: it was 50–50 as to whether it would fall into the glass or onto the table.

‘Ten yuan the glass,' whispered Harry.

‘Ten yuan the table,' Derek replied.

The fly carried on its walk around the rim. Harry tugged the tablecloth. With one final rub of its front legs it stood back and dropped straight into the glass. The living Buddha was unperturbed. He pulled it out with his finger and placed it gently on his napkin where it would dry out. The next fly to hit the table made an impressive spiral nose dive, landing directly in front of our translator, who pretended to ignore it. But this one was closely followed by an entire squadron of the innocent insects, who bumped noiselessly onto the table in their last seconds of life.

Beyond boredom is that dangerous zone where your eyelids take over control of your body. Regardless of the message from your brain that this is not the right place or time to fall asleep, your eyelids close and your head lolls forwards. You only realise this has happened when you jerk your head back, opening your eyes wide and staring out at the person opposite you. But even the intense embarrassment is not enough to save you from your eyelids taking control again and your head drooping forwards. Several at table six had entered this zone when Mrs Chen shrieked into her microphone to announce that the Nepalese Consul had finished his speech and that we would shortly be warmly welcomed to start the buffet.

The guests of the head table and the tables nearest the door set off first and a queue 30 feet long and three people deep formed across the centre of the room. Unfortunately the person at the head of the queue had not realised that you should start a buffet from one end and then move along it, from the hors d'oeuvres, soups, main course, through to the desserts. Instead, he had walked to the middle of the long buffet table and was now at a loss as to whether to turn left for the main courses, or right for the starters. The rest of the queue had to follow him and soon the congestion at the buffet table became chaotic, with hungry banquet guests going both ways, colliding as they attempted to cross the large queue which now firmly blocked off the middle section.

Our table six translator was still saying ‘please help yourselves, please enjoy yourselves, warmly welcome you to enjoy yourselves', and the living Buddha was going through one of his long silent phases, when we were warmly welcomed to enjoy the buffet and asked to join the queue into the melee. The military commanders were already pushing their way back through the line, with plates piled high in triumph as we joined the end of the queue.

There are many deep-rooted misconceptions between Chinese and Westerners but none deeper than the Chinese idea of how to tackle a Western buffet. Some mischievous Westerner has told the Chinese that there are special rules to follow when attending a Western buffet and these rules are now taken to be unbreakable:

1. You are to use
   one
   plate only. A bowl is optional for soup but only if it can be carried at the same time as the one plate used for the buffet.
   
2. You are allowed
   one
   visit only to the buffet table and on no account are you permitted to return.
   
3. You
   must
   absolutely stuff yourself but only in accordance with the limitations of rules 1 and 2.
   

With these false rules firmly implanted in the minds of everyone who attends a Western buffet, the line up at the buffet table becomes a competition to see who can load up his plate highest. As we stood in the queue we watched Mr Pong (from a safe distance) make his way along the buffet table. He was an expert at Western buffets and had broken out of the ‘T' formation that was stuck in the middle of the table and moved along to the beginning of the hors d'oeuvres to stock up his plate. First, a few slices of imported cold meats and tomato salad. Next a bowl of turtle broth and a slice of bread balanced on the plate. He made room for a spoon from each of the hot dishes: a scoop of spicy aubergine, a pile of frogs' legs, a dollop of mashed potato, a pork chop, a spoon of hacked chicken splinters, sliced beef with pepper, a yak steak – just enough space for an extra scoop of frogs' legs, some cabbage, a piece of cauliflower and just a bit more room on top of the pile for two croquette potatoes. The dessert was always the trickiest part and showed the experienced Western buffet diner from the beginner. Mr Pong expertly balanced a large slice of sponge cake on top of the flattened peaks of mashed potato and smothered it with a generous helping of yak yogurt. A black banana was curled around the rim of the plate and, content that he could fit no more on top, he negotiated his way through the crowd back to his table.

Eating from the mountain of food on the plate is interrupted periodically by a very Chinese custom which is as alien to us as buffet dining is to them. It is the custom of
gambay
, which can be translated as ‘bottoms up'. Banquet drinking is a serious business and revolves around a particular alcohol called ‘Mao Tai'. Every few minutes someone at your table will suddenly blurt out
‘Gambay'
and everyone at the table has to stop whatever they are doing and drink a small glass of Mao Tai. It is one of the most insidious drinks known to mankind and although they claim that the deceptively colourless liquid is a rice wine, it has a smell and a taste that bears a striking similarity to distilled cow dung – or at least to what you would expect distilled cow dung to taste like. If you hold your breath and swallow the tiny glassful in one go, you are spared the foul taste and only feel the burning sensation as it slowly dissolves your intestinal tract. It is incredibly powerful and can render the most solidly built person incoherently drunk within minutes.

Unfortunately banquet drinking is a matter of honour and no one is allowed to escape. A refusal is a sign of weakness and a loss of face for the work unit. As few can drink much of this toxin without being seriously ill, cheating is rife. A common trick is to keep the Mao Tai in your mouth, pretend to wash it down with a drink of something harmless such as orange juice but when the glass of orange juice is at your lips you discreetly spit the Mao Tai into the orange. This has the disadvantage that your glass of orange fills up over the evening which is a bit of a give-away and it also means that you taste the vile liquid while it is in your mouth. The best way of cheating is to fill your Mao Tai glass with water. This is a very common practice and if you are challenged to a
gambay
by someone approaching you with a glass, it is more than likely that they will have filled it up with water before coming over to your table.

Cheating goes to the extent of bribing waitresses to fill personal Mao Tai bottles with water so that the other party guests will see your glass being poured from the bottle and will believe it is the real thing. I once saw an entire table cheat by pouring Sprite into their Mao Tai glasses. They would have got away with it, but the bubbles in the Sprite would not go away and they had to tap the glasses continuously on the table in an effort to dislodge them. Cheating is a risky business and those caught in the act bring disgrace to their unit and must pay the heavy price of drinking at least one full glass of the authenticated liquid.

The real Mao Tai comes from a small village in the south of China and, as with wine from the Champagne district of France, labelling is strictly controlled. There are many fakes and imitations and the Mao Tai connoisseur can apparently tell the difference between the real cow dung distillate and its imitators.

Considering that one bottle of Mao Tai costs twice as much as a worker earns in a week, banquet drinking is also an extremely expensive pastime. Fortunately, none of the individuals have to pay for the excesses, as it is always the work unit that hosts the banquets.

The use of Mao Tai for official banquets had been curtailed by the Beijing government in one of their major austerity drives. It was calculated that if every government banquet were to reduce the amount of Mao Tai drunk, a saving of millions of yuan could be made. But as Lhasa is an Autonomous region, the officials turned a blind eye to the Beijing rules. Judging by the amount of Mao Tai consumed at the National Day banquet, they would soon be turning a blind eye to everything.

Although Westerners find the
gambay
custom extremely difficult to follow, it has been easy for the Tibetans to adapt to this particular whim of the Chinese. According to Tibetan tradition it is very impolite to leave a party without showing the host that you are drunk.

Fortunately, the National Day Banquet does not linger on all night and the
gambay
s come to an end as abruptly as they started. Shortly after the last frog's leg has been chewed and the mountain on the plate reduced to a pile of bone and debris spat out onto the table and the floor, the VIP guests thank everyone for a wonderful evening and then make a quick exit. Within a matter of minutes the rest of the room empties. There is no question of staying on with coffee, petit fours and liqueurs and no one is asking for any more Mao Tai. Conversation amongst the expatriates is left to how well we cheated with the
gambay
s. ‘I had fourteen,' Charlie chuckled, ‘only three real ones!' Derek was not so lucky, he had been caught cheating and had been forced to drink the real thing. It was just as well there would be a day off work on National Day.

I made the mistake of crossing the lobby on the way back to my room and was confronted by a group of American guests demanding to see ‘someone who spoke god-damned English!' Even though I had cheated with all my Mao Tai
gambay
s, an encounter with seething guests was all I needed after the National Day banquet. One of their party had been struck with altitude sickness and they had been trying to call their insurance company in America to fly out a helicopter. Just where they thought a helicopter would come from I didn't have the heart to ask. ‘We've been locked up here all day and I've just about had it with you!' blasted one of the group.

It fell into the familiar pattern of complaining guests. They feel stronger in packs and one of the mob eggs the others on.

‘Go on Bert, you tell him. Tell him we weren't allowed to the Barkhor today.'

Bert told me that they went to the Barkhor anyway and were sent back by the police.

‘Yeah, the police! Tell him about that guy we saw with a machine gun. I mean Christ, what sort of a place do you run here?!'

All their pent-up frustrations and petty problems come pouring out in the lobby because at last they have found someone who is wearing a suit and speaks English. The Chinese in Tibet, military on the streets, his office hasn't contacted him, his wife has a headache, he doesn't know if his shares have gone up or down, he should have booked Aspen again, and it is all my fault.

The ringleader of the group pointed his finger at me and with his head tilted slightly to one side and his face wrinkled as if there was a bad smell under his nose, he hissed menacingly:

‘I need to make that phone call right now.'

A DAY OFF WITH THE VULTURES

Telecommunications between Lhasa and the outside world were far from perfect. Each room was equipped with a large orange telephone which sizzled when it was touched. The sizzle stopped when the receiver was picked up but two seconds later, exactly when the receiver would be next to your ear, a piercing screech of feedback would scream down the line causing temporary deafness in one ear. The screech took several seconds to die down to a low buzz and then you could dial the number of the Lhasa Hotel operator. When the operator picked up her phone you could give her the number that you wished to call. She would ask a series of questions in a set sequence that had been memorised by heart. A heavy Chinese accent shot the questions out in short staccato bursts which crackled down the line:

A reply out of order to any one of the questions and there was no chance of your call being made. If you had answered all the questions in the correct order, the operator would make a call to the Lhasa city telephone operator repeating the message in Tibetan or Chinese.

If the line was not busy, the Lhasa city operator would then call the Beijing operator and give her the same information in Chinese.

The Beijing operator would then call the number that you had requested and place the call back to the Lhasa hotel operator via the Lhasa city operator.

Did you follow that? The telephone operators rarely did. Opportunities for error were endless and it was exceptional if a line was ever connected correctly. The line from Tibet to Beijing was constantly busy and unforgiving guests ruthlessly harassed the operators into making impossible calls to countries that the operators didn't even know existed. It was a lonely and thankless job. They spent day and night shifts in a cold room, surrounded by nothing but reams of interconnecting wires, flashing lights and junction boxes. They were housed in a separate block of concrete away from the main hotel buildings and only saw the interior of the hotel when they were summoned in for a reprimand. Between calls they would sleep, be chatted up by the security guards and slurp from their jam jars of tea.

The Lhasa city operators were far worse and seemed to spend most of the daytime and certainly all of the time after 9 p.m. asleep. Beijing operators were generally quite efficient but it was already very doubtful that your call would get that far.

The pack of angry guests who had cornered me in the lobby had been waiting for their call to the insurance company for over eight hours. Their ringleader glared at me, his lips curling downwards and his eyes narrowing. His skin grew pale, highlighting the little lumpy bit on his nose. He had not been particularly impressed with my detailed description of the workings of the Lhasa telephone system. One of his complaints was that no one at the reception desk could tell him the hotel fax number. I informed him that this was probably due to the fact that there were no fax machines in Tibet.

‘No fax?!' the ugly guest shouted at me in disbelief.

I might as well have told him that a herd of flying yaks was coming in to land behind him, waiting to whisk his message away. ‘That's impossible!' he blurted out at me.

It is surprising how often it is the tourist who wants to live in the quaint old Tibet where time has stood still, who also wants to be able to fax his office immediately.

‘Let me get this straight. You don't have a fax.'

‘No.'

‘There is no other fax in Lhasa.'

‘No.'

‘The phones don't work.'

‘Not terribly well.'

‘There are no other phones in Lhasa better than here.'

‘No.'

‘You can't get me a helicopter.'

‘No.'

Even the most stubborn guest gets the message in the end and the irate American finally lifted his arms up in the air, asking for help from the heavens. As if in answer to both his wishes, and mine, a man in a white coat rushed across the lobby towards us. It was Dr Grubby, the hotel doctor. I was hoping he would manacle the guest and drag him away, but unfortunately he just came to announce the good news that the guest's wife only had the usual first-day-at-high-altitude headache. There was no need for panic, calls to insurance companies or helicopters.

Dr Grubby was an affectionate man with a warm smile and an excellent knowledge of altitude sickness but sadly his appearance did nothing to convince foreigners of his medical abilities. He spoke a smattering of English which is why the People's Number One Hospital had assigned him to run their clinic in the hotel. Although he was a fine doctor, personal hygiene was not one of his strong points. Unintentionally, this worked to his advantage; his permanent patchy stubble and creased white coat with nauseating stains frightened most guests into staying healthy. His success rate, in so far as it could be measured, was remarkably high as very few patients ever ventured into his clinic for a second time.

Dr Grubby's advice to the angry Americans was to return to their rooms and try out the hotel's oxygen service. The guests backed away, staring at Dr Grubby in wonder.

‘It's alright,' I reassured them, ‘this is the doctor from the People's Number One Hospital. He is the top high altitude specialist in Lhasa. He is very good. Really.'

They didn't reply but turned down the corridor that led away from the lobby and ran off in the direction of their rooms. ‘Slowly!' Dr Grubby called out after them. ‘Don't strain at high altitudes. Bad for the heart!'

He shrugged. Foreigners were very strange people to deal with.

It was one of the most peculiar claims to fame of the hotel – no fax, no touch-dial telephone – but nearly every room had a private supply of piped-in oxygen. A branch pipe from the hotel's main supply arrived in each of the superior rooms beneath the bedside table. The gaseous mixture of oxygen-enriched air bubbled through the metal pipe into a small glass bottle of water, and when a tap on the bottle was turned, the mixture carried on through a green rubber pipe and out into the room. A slight dose of oxygen in the room had little effect, so the guest, or ‘patient' as Dr Grubby referred to all hotel guests, would have to hold the green rubber pipe up to the nose to benefit from the oxygenated air bubbling out of it.

For the rooms without mains oxygen supply, an oxygen pillow could be ordered. This consisted of a canvas bag, similar to a small inflatable mattress, which was filled with oxygen from a canister in the Housekeeping department. A rubber tube sticking out of the canvas bag was crudely tied in a knot to maintain the pressure on the bag and the knot could be untied when oxygen was required. Although some guests treated the oxygen as if it was pure, clearly this was not the case, otherwise the hotel would have been blown sky high when the first guest, or patient, lit a match. We often thought of trying to produce a richer oxygen mixture and giving it a go.

It was the Japanese and Taiwanese groups who took their oxygen particularly seriously. For some completely unknown reason, these guests suffered from the highest ‘drop factor'.

Harry and I calculated the drop factor on how many guests of a group checking-in one afternoon would not make it to the lobby the next morning for the first excursion of their tour. Bets would be placed in the evening after studying form at the group buffet and the final drop factor would be revealed at half past nine the following morning, when the guests gathered in the lobby to await their local guide and tour bus. The drop factor for Japanese and Taiwanese groups could be as high as 20 per cent but as there is no known correlation between age or fitness and altitude sickness it was impossible to predict an accurate figure.

Japanese and Taiwanese guests are generally more aware of the health hazard at high altitude and there is a theory that the very action of worrying about high-altitude sickness is enough to bring on the first signs: a severe headache and nausea. It is possible that these symptoms are entirely self-inflicted. The paranoia is taken so far that some Japanese groups even arrived with special wrist straps that monitor oxygen levels in the blood stream, so that it could be seen which group members would drop first.

It was when a party of thirty Taiwanese guests appeared in the lobby each in a synthetic scarlet tracksuit, topped with a fluorescent yellow baseball cap and carrying personal oxygen bags with the tubes taped up their nostrils that I decided I had to get out for a day. Nothing to do with the altitude but staying in the hotel for long periods was not conducive to mental stability.

The only real escape after the excitement of the Barkhor and the great monasteries of Lhasa was the lure of the surrounding mountains. I had survived the depths of boredom at the National Day banquet by gazing out of the window at a conical rock formation and planning imaginary routes to the summit. The peak was on the south side of the Kyi Chu, or from where I was sitting, just to the left of the Vice-Governor's head, above a cluster of aerial masts on the staff quarters. I had found that I was not alone in my longing for escape into the mountains. Mark Waite, the quintessential Englishman who ran the Save the Children Fund in Tibet, had also been warmly welcomed to attend the National Day banquet and between cheating at
gambay
s we had arranged for an assault on what, for lack of a better name, we termed ‘the big one'.

The only day it could be tackled was on a Sunday. Every other day of the week was a full day of work and even Sundays were not always sacred. Heather calculated a duty roster at the beginning of each month, when she would chart evening and weekend duties for all the hotel expatriates. A Sunday towards the beginning of November was set aside: Heather promised not to put me on duty for that day, and Mark gave himself permission to take a day off from saving children.

Very early on a cool Sunday morning, while the guests slumbered in their beds, we met by the north gate of the hotel. The air was decidedly crisp and our breath left small vapour trails across the hotel car park. The giant green sign of Holiday Inn had been silenced for the night and none of the city street lights showed any signs of working. There was still a glow around us, not enough to light the hotel forecourt, but strong enough to lift our eyes upwards until we were craning our heads back like Chef doing a turtle impression. Diamonds on blue velvet pierced the night sky… thousands, millions, billions of them, twinkling away as if there was no tomorrow. The Great Bear, the Seven Sisters, Orion; the constellations I remembered from home, shone brilliantly all around us. The Milky Way bellowed across the sky ceiling in great clouds of stars, so close that you could reach up and touch it.

Mark had arranged for Dasang, a Tibetan driver who had use of a Beijing jeep, to meet us at 4:30 a.m. at the north gate but at 4:45 a.m. there was still no one to be seen. The hotel security guards slept silently in the sentry box and even the pack of dogs in the hotel grounds had not yet woken. As we turned the corner to the front entrance of the hotel, we came face-to-face with three Japanese guests standing in the forecourt with their heads pivoted skywards. At first I assumed this was some kind of altitude acclimatisation technique – perhaps they had inserted the tubes too far.

They talked excitedly and pointed across the heavens, stabbing the sky with their mittened hands. I recognised them as the three Japanese scientists who had checked-in on Saturday afternoon. Harry had bet that none of the three would have made it to the lobby by breakfast time but he had underestimated the staying factor of Japanese with a mission. They were preparing for their journey to Yambajing, some 90 miles north of Lhasa, where they would be housed in one of the most gruesome government guest houses on the Tibetan plateau. Their mission was to set up what the Chinese called ‘an ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray observing station.' It was to be the highest cosmic-ray observing station in the northern hemisphere, with the advantage over their sea-level colleagues of having 13,000 feet less atmospheric dust to penetrate before being in touch with the heavens.

They returned to the warmth of the lobby and headed for the breakfast room. Mark and I followed them to the lobby, where we could wait in the warmth for our driver to arrive. At least I had expected the lobby to be warmer than the hotel car park but for the first time I experienced the curious Lhasa phenomenon that the temperature inside the hotel lobby was even cooler than the temperature outside. The night receptionist stood huddled behind the reception desk wearing a purple anorak and a woolly hat. I asked him why it was so cold.

‘No heating,' he beamed at me in a Tibetan smile.

The first set of tour guests of the morning shuffled across the lobby in search of the breakfast room. The buffet breakfast was served from 5 a.m. onwards so that guests could eat before leaving for the early CAAC flight and could avoid the horrors of the CAAC lunch-boxes given out on the plane. They saw the receptionist and walked over to him to complain about the cold.