On the road: Tibet - a very nice part of China

Dear Dalai Lama

It pains me to tell you - although I am sure you already know - that the country you once knew is now irretrievably part of the People's Republic of China. Your people are Chinese - they only look and dress differently, and practice a different religion. A bit like the indigenous people of the Andes and the descendants of the Spanish being Peruvians or Bolivians.

To Lhasa we tourists flock with such great excitement and expectation of an exotic otherness, only to find a thoroughly Chinese city, with a few quaint 'original' quarters.

We glower at the military guards at the Potala, your former palace, and try not to go to Chinese-owned restaurants, shops and hotels, but it's difficult because we don't always believe them when they tell us something belongs to Tibetans. And we know that we can't blame the average person for what's happened. (It'll be like resenting our German friends for the Holocaust, right?)

We are infuriated by the gross disrespect that is the People's Square with its obelisk like an obscene finger in the air - as in all other towns, mockingly facing your important monasteries, and most blatantly so your Potala.

And you were right about the train from Beijing to Lhasa. (The building of the railway line was an engineering feat, and even completed ahead of schedule.) It opened on 1 July this year, and already it has spilled more than 400,000 tourists into the streets of your city. The smartly dressed set demand the luxuries of Beijing and Shanghai, push up the price of everything and, together with the Westerners, shove their cameras in the faces of the 'quaintly dressed' pilgrims from out of town.

Your monasteries - those that survived the Cultural Revolution or, ironically, have been rebuilt by the Chinese - fill us with awe, but we have to confess to virtual monastic overload. One monastery stacked to the rafters with the most priceless Tibetan treasures per day fills the mind too much to contemplate a second.

But even we who didn't know the real Tibet question the authenticity and sincerity of the monks who perform their duties according to Chinese dictates and are surrounded by camera-toting tourists. The debating sessions, shown to the world by Michael Palin, feels like a circus, with the monks beefing up their palm-slapping for the greedy mass of digital cameras.

It brings a mixture of sadness and unpalatable taste in the mouth. How, do we ask ourselves and our shy guide, can real monks practice, learn, teach and evolve their religion in such an unquiet environment? The gentle (Tibetan) guide cannot or will not answer.

Some days we say it's not so bad - maybe because we don't look deep enough, the surface looks content and well-fed. Then, on the gringo grapevine, we hear of foreigners who witnessed the gunning down of 7 Tibetans trying to cross into Nepal, and the bile of helplessness rises again.

We notice, too, the new, bland, flimsily built housing - next to piles of rubble, and we know that your people's pretty, sturdy houses are still being destroyed in the name of egalitarian sameness. (Is this part of what some call cultural genocide?)

But you know all of this, don't you? Is that why you're no longer calling for independence for your country, but asking for it to be treated as an autonomously governed territory? For the freedom to elect your own religious leaders?

They still laugh, though
However, the spirit of your people is not completely broken. The young girls with the rosy cheeks giggle at the grandfatherly flatterings of our fellow overlander Yuda, and the men mock-wrestle him with great guffaws. And, admittedly very seldom, we feel deeply for the elderly man or woman who refuses vehemently to be photographed. There is a quiet pride that will not be crushed that easily.

We are at first repulsed by the people defecating in the open, sometimes on designated corners, other times whenever nature demands, but realise that in this arid, high-altitude country that it is the best path to rapid decomposition.

Speaking of high altitude, can you remember the crisp thinness of the air here? It at once intoxicates with its sweetness and nauseates with its lack of oxygen, until the brain and blood reach acceptance and we become ourselves again.

The Friendship Highway (who do the friends refer to? and how can it be called a highway? It didn't exist when you fled to India in 1959, did it?) from Kathmandu wends its way up gaspingly to Lhasa via Shigatse, Gyantse and the most spectacular views of Mount Everest. We foreigners are only allowed to visit on an 'official' trip, but the authorities are so sure of total surrender that these days we're allowed to stay on as individuals for a further 15 days. We don't get a stamp in our passport, only on our paper permit.

The barren bigness of the countryside takes our breath away, and your people harvest the barley in essentially the old way, although a few tractor-like harvesters are starting to appear. The whole family still work the land together.

I include a few pictures of Tibet - as seen through the eyes of foreigners spending 21 days on the roof of the world.