by Tom Czaban
Adventure Travel Category Winner – Intrepid Travel Contest
Shangri-La isn’t just cold, it is bloody cold. I sit next to the fire, hoping that one day my hands will thaw out. My handwriting on the check-in slip looks like it has been written by a five-year old child who has fallen behind the others in his class. When I order breakfast I am presented with a fried-egg decorated with eggshell. The sorry French looks like it has been cooked in a tumble drier, worse still, it is all cold. It isn’t the chef’s fault; the food was probably red hot when it left the kitchen but it is so cold in here that it relinquished all heat on its journey to the table.
The showers are a rickety hut – the shutter doors almost conceal my body but do nothing to keep in the heat. I allow the cold water to wash over me for as long as I can bear, which isn’t very long. Wrapping my towel around my waist I dash through the courtyard to my room. Then I empty my bag and pile every item of clothing I own onto my body. For the first time since yesterday afternoon I am almost warm.
Many people think Shangri-La doesn’t exist, and it didn’t, until eight years ago. Back then it was a place dreamed up by author James Hilton. In his novel, “Lost Horizon,” he describes a paradise isolated from the outside world. Several places in India, Pakistan, Tibet and China claim to be the inspiration behind Shangri-La, but few have taken the next logical step. This place used to be called Jian Tang Town, but the authorities felt it looked so much like Shangri-La they changed the name. Today its narrow cobbles are filled with shops. There is a “Cheap Trading Store” which is wildly overpriced, “Cigarette Retail” which sells alcohol, “Factory Outlet of Rare Stones” which sells fruit. The only honest shop-sign is “Products Store,” and only because the owner has covered all his bases.
This is a beautiful place, but I wouldn’t call it paradise. Against the soaring mountain backdrop the miniature scale of the town makes it feel like you’re trapped in a model village. I once read that paradise isn’t a place but a state of mind – the word represents humans’ innate longing for something different, something better. You can’t chase paradise by moving house; you have to cultivate it by finding out what you enjoy. A Backpacker stops to talk to me in the town square. If you ask a Backpacker for their vision of paradise I guarantee it will include the phrase “no tourists.” Honestly, it’s always the same, finding they have been somewhere where I haven’t, they shake their head as though I should re-think my entire life, and announce: “You should go there man.”
“Yeah? What was it like?”
“You won’t find it in a guide-book.”
“What did you see?”
“I’ll tell you what I didn’t see; tourists thinking they are having a raw experience.”
“Where did you stay?”
“There weren’t any hostels so I stayed in a native’s house.”
“What was the family like?”
“Not sure; they didn’t speak English.”
“So how did you arrange to stay?”
“I just pointed at my pack, they got the message.”
“How much did you pay?”
“They probably didn’t expect anything.”
“You didn’t offer them a penny?”
“I gave them a gift, something I knew they couldn’t get there.”
“What was it?”
“Ticket stubs from the London underground.”
“Useful, what was the town like?”
“It wasn’t much; a few blown out factory buildings. No-one hassled me to buy anything the whole time I was there.”
“So what did you do?”
“I walked around for a while, then at six it got dark, there weren’t any street lights, no restaurants either, so I was in bed by seven.”
“Where did you go after that?”
“There weren’t any buses so I waited at the highway for six hours and hitched a lift with some guy transporting wood.”
“What was he like?”
“Not sure; he didn’t speak English.”
Seeing my unimpressed face he adds: “I’ve got a photo,” then points to a series of bemused locals until he reaches a photo of a grim man standing next to a truck which is piled with wood.
“That’s his wood.”
“You’re kidding?”
“There weren’t any seats or overpriced tickets to be stamped so I had to sit on top of it.”
“How long did it take you to get here?”
“Thirty three hours, look at these splinters.”
“Sounds like it was really worth it.”
“Yep.”
I gaze out at the tiny wooden village and the mist-soaked mountains beyond, “What do you think of this place?” He scans the horizon until his eyes rest on a happy foreign couple walking hand-in hand. Then he swigs from his beer, absolutely disgusted, “It’s full of fucking tourists.”
A monk in a yellow gown stands at my shoulder as I tap away at the guest-house computer. When I nod “hello,” he returns my greeting with a Tai- Chi move. From the back of the room a female voice confirms: “He is a monk, he wants to make a friend with you.”
I shake the monks hand and he jabbers at me in Mandarin. “He is a very famous monk,” his friend tells me, “he is an artist.” When he agrees to show me his work I prepare to head for his studio. Shaking his head, he sits down at the computer, browses the internet and seconds later his face pops up on the monitor. Below the mug-shot are a series of sublime acrylics, “Each painting takes him seven days to complete” the woman tells me.
This is the modern world, I muse, as I scroll through the images, a world where a Tibetan monk has his own web-page.
The cold morning morphs into a sweltering day. A headache begins as a dull throb at my temples but soon the pain is unbearable. By the time I have decided to go to bed I can only stagger. Some people say altitude sickness is like a hangover, I don’t know what they drink. This feels like I have spent six months in a cell with just fumes for company, only glimpsing light when the guard slaps more paint to the walls and forces me to sniff glue.
I climb into bed and switch on the electric blanket. Shivering until the blanket has heated, I then proceed to sweat. The light clicks on and a shadow stands over me. The monk cocks his head like he’s trying to see through my eyes and into my soul, then begins to talk. I consider rolling over but I don’t want to appear rude – I’m no authority on Buddhist scripture but I’m pretty sure turning your back on a monk isn’t good for your karma. So I just lie there and wish him away. Rifling through his bag for what seems like hours he produces a tin mug then mimes how he intends to drink from it. I watch the performance with all the enthusiasm my body can muster: an under-whelming nod.
When I’m sure he has left I let my head flop against the wet pillow. Then I realize he hasn’t bothered to turn off the light, where is the karma in that? Over the next twenty-four hours the sickness fades but never leaves my body entirely. On the third day I visit the monastery. The bus that takes me there is packed with monks, they talk in soothing whispers or stare contemplatively ahead. I wonder what they are thinking about, all I’m thinking is “I’m definitely on the right bus.” We arrive at an empty lake where primitive houses ride into the hill. I climb the stone steps, past pigs chewing down litter and brambles. The peak is scattered with temples and their golden spires jack-knife into the clear sky. On the horizon the Tibetan mountains boast brilliant blue rocks and clean white snow.
At one of the smaller temples, two monks explain there are over seven hundred monks and they live on the houses on the hills. I point to an open-fronted shop: “Yak butter tea.” They tell me to sit down and minutes later produce a mug and a large bowl heaped with powder. With their eyes boring into me, I swig the pale drink. Its odor hits my mouth before the liquid; it smells like a zoo. The taste isn’t much better and coupled with the tepid temperature it feels like I am sucking it straight from the yak’s udders. Smiling and patting my stomach I force the offensive liquid down, then reach for the powder and ladle the spoon high in the hope that it will dilute the taste. It clogs my mouth and clings to anything moist; teeth, tongue, tonsils, I might as well be eating glue. Fortunately a second helping of the Yak tea washes the powder way.
Smiling at the monks through gritted teeth I think to myself; “is this some sort of joke?” One of the monks says something to his friend, who replies briskly, then they both laugh. I know what they are saying: “Look at the foreigner, we give him yak’s milk straight from the teet and he slurps it down, then we give him ash from our incense sticks and he chomps these down too.”
“So it is true what they say; the fat westerner will eat anything.”
The monks refuse to let me pay so I bid them goodbye, turn the corner and vomit into a bush. There isn’t much to do in Shangri-La, apart from eat. There must be two restaurants to every person that lives here, so the problem isn’t finding food but deciding what to have. The other problem is that every restaurant has a pet cat. Cats are my least favourite animal, I don’t like anything about them – the way they buzz, their coarse tongues, their gummy mouths. Don’t get me wrong, I love animals, but cats? They give me the creeps. Every time I enter a restaurant the damn cat is at my feet, on my table or worse still, in my lap. I shoo it away under my breath, aware of what everyone else will think of me if I show so much as mild dislike to the screeching ball of fur. Pushing the cat away from my plate with one hand I eat awkwardly with the other. When I look to the waitresses for cat-relief, they just giggle; mistaking my cat-pushing for jolly play.
The other diners are even less useful. Seeing the cat sprawled over my table, shedding fur and licking God knows what from its paws, they sidle over as if we are all united by the pleasure the rotten creature brings. When they become bored of tickling its underbelly they tease the cat with a bottle top or pepper pot. With the cat worked into a frenzy, they nod goodbye and leave me to deal with it. It claws at my jumper and when I ignore it sees this as another invitation to play. It should have been the cats not the witches who were burned at the stake. I don’t enjoy a single meal in Shangri-La, instead I forlornly wander from restaurant-to-restaurant, being chased away by the cats.
*****
This story won the Adventure Travel Category for the Intrepid Travel Contest.
Tom Czaban has worked as a reporter in both England and West Africa. Having majored in Screenwriting at University, he is currently writing a TV pilot that will hopefully be shot in the summer of ’09. He loves to travel/escape and last year spent five months traveling overland from England to Thailand. What did he learn? Even buses are expensive when you catch a lot of them…