jul/aug 2010

Test Drive in Tibet

by Jo James

The highlands of Tibet are a sight to behold... and our Cruisers will go
anywhere we point them.

Ganzi, in the Sichuan province of China, is a rough-around-the-edges frontier town—take the atmosphere of your average Wild West town, add a monastery full of red-robed monks, the odd nun and replace the horses and saloons with motorbikes and teahouses and you’ll have Ganzi. The streets are a happy mess of market stalls, makeshift hotpot stands and haphazard groups of people—a jumble of the aforementioned monks, young men in scruffy suits with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders and local girls with their hair in long gleaming braids.

We’re stopping here on a driving journey from Chengdu in Sichuan to Lhasa in Tibet, and I, as the least experienced driver in the group, have been charged with driving our Toyota Land Cruiser as much as possible over the twelve days it will take us. Today that has meant negotiating several 4,000 metre passes and driving along lovely mountain streams engorged with melt water, through a region that was formerly troubled by bandits, past holy lakes and finally down a lovely broad valley lit by the setting sun, before driving into downtown Ganzi.

I should perhaps explain that when I say that I don’t have much driving experience, I really mean it. I’ve driven about 3,000 kilometres in my life and now I’m chauffeuring my boss Peter Schindler (a former racing car driver) and Mr Liu (a professional driver) across the eastern half of the Tibetan Plateau. We also have a guide, Xiao Li, with us, who is fast becoming my favourite of the three—as a non-driver, he’s the only passenger who can’t backseat drive.

Co-drivers aside, my efforts are helped significantly by the emptiness of the roads and by the quality of the vehicle—our new Land Cruiser. The madness of China’s city traffic is mercifully restrained to major cities and the main road hazards we have to contend with are (in this order): piglets, yaks and pilgrims. Pigs and yaks roam freely throughout the countryside, and piglets in particular seem prone to last-minute dashes across the road. Tibetan pilgrims, who prostrate themselves along the road from their homes all the way to Lhasa—some 2,000 kilometres away—seem to lurk on the far side of bends and on several occasions we round a corner only to find five or six very dusty people lying face down in a line along the road. Not exactly what my previous driving experiences had prepared me for but novel nonetheless...

Yunnan is home to more than half of China’s 55 officially recognized minorities... most of them have an unforgettable smile, as unforgettable as a driving journey through China.

It’s the same every time... first our customers cross the river gingerly, then they realize it’s a lot fun, and at last they go back and forth to see who can make it splash the most!

Yunnanese “highway robbery” ...locals dance and sing in exchange for a bit of money to let you pass.

 

Photos courtesy of On The Road In China