Nepal and Tibet

We survive the onslaught and suddenly arrive in Barkhor Square. Here the beggars and hawkers thankfully leave us alone. The square is a wide expanse in front of and surrounding the Jokhang Temple, the holiest temple in Tibet. Here are pilgrims in their hundreds who have come to pay homage in this holy city. Their religious leader, the Dalai Lama may be in exile and the communists may have tried to stamp out religion but these crowds are the most devout people I have ever seen - men, women, teenagers, children, nomads and city dwellers. Their spirit is strong! They circumambulate the temple in a clockwise direction. This in itself is a prayer. They twirl their prayer wheels, also in a clockwise direction, sending the written prayers within to heaven with every twirl; they finger their beads and mutter their mantras - so many prayers at once!

Many of the pilgrims are prostrating themselves in front of the Jokhang. This is amazing to watch. Most of them have a thin mattress, just the size of their body. They seem to tie their lower legs together with cord. Standing facing the temple, with the mattress at their feet, they join their hands in prayer and raise them above their heads, then lower them to their foreheads, their lips and their hearts and thrust themselves into a sliding motion onto the mattress with their hands encased in thong-like hand coverings as they slide them out full length in front of them, totally prostrating themselves to their God. This they do repeatedly. I have read that Tibetans use their prayers, prostrations and circumambulations almost as Catholics once used indulgences, each act purifying their soul and giving them atonement for their sins, thus giving them a better chance of going to heaven when they die. Some of the prostrating pilgrims look so very old. They can prostrate themselves as well as the younger looking Tibetans - practice has kept them fit. The life expectancy among the Tibetans, I hear, is very low. Perhaps these old people are not as old as they appear.

We decide to "go with the flow" and we join the streams of people who are circumambulating the temple. I love to people watch at the best of times but this scene is unbelievable. Where to look first? Most of the people are wearing their national costume as many of them do every day still. Some of the younger Tibetans now wear western fashions although they are very modest and do not appear in the mini skirts, and strappy dresses, which we see on the Chinese. Usually they wear jeans, t-shirts and the ubiquitous American baseball cap, often backwards. The nomads are here in their chubas, a coat with long sleeves which they wear in the most peculiar way. They use only one sleeve allowing the other one to dangle loosely or to be wrapped around the waist. These chubas are made of either yak skin or coarsely woven yak hair. They plait their long hair and weave the ends with great clumps of red wool, which they wind around their heads to have the red tassels hanging down the side of their faces. Their footwear is pretty special too. They wear very colourful, long, boots.

The women wear a long dress, which is usually a dark-coloured pinafore over a lighter long-sleeved blouse. Tibetan women always wear a lovely brightly coloured striped apron tied around the waist. They are often adorned in all their jewellery, which is usually a silver hairpiece decorated with turquoise and coral. These are items that they are given at the time of their weddings. There are many monks in the crowd, wearing not the saffron robes of the monks we have seen in other Asian countries, but the distinctive fuchsia robes of the followers of the Dalai Lama.

The young people appear to be quite tall and strong looking. The older ones are wrinkled and frail. Life here is obviously hard. We certainly know the climate would not leave you with a peaches and cream complexion for too long. The summers are very dry, very warm and dusty. The winters are very, very cold, with dreadful, icy, unrelenting winds.

As the crowd wanders around the temple kora, they spin their prayer wheels. These wheels can be tiny ones or very large mannish ones. We are amused to see that one little old lady has knitted a cosy for hers, perhaps to keep it from squeaking in the winter? Another has made a cotton cover with a pleated skirt which twirls out as she spins. One man has an enormous, silver and bronze number with a heavy polished-timber handle. Perhaps, the bigger and more ornate the prayer wheel, the better the prayers! We see women gossiping as they circumambulate, their wheels spinning feverishly. I envy them being able to do two things at once...or is that three things as the circumambulation is a prayer in itself?

Around the kora, are market-stalls. We have never seen so many market- stalls in any one place in our lives, and I am the queen of markets. I feel like I have died and gone to heaven. And what an array of interesting goods! The stallholders call out to us but are not too persistent. I see so many things I would like to buy to take home, prayer wheels, bells, as well as intricately crafted, bronze incense burners, prayer flags and musical instruments. I can also see things I would not like to take home such as cleverly carved and decorated yak horns. Just cannot think where I could put them! We leave the shopping for another day and press on with the pilgrims. No one in their right mind would try to walk around the temple in an anti-clockwise direction. It would be like swimming against the tide.

Back at the hotel, we go downstairs to the restaurant for our first dinner in Tibet. I do not think the dinner we have tonight could be anything like what the everyday Tibetan eats. We have a delicious buffet of soups, entrees, mains and dessert. What an array of food! Certainly some of the dishes are typical Tibetan dishes, momos, yak beef and potato stew and vegetable dishes. But I think some of the people we saw today would not eat as much food as we are given in a lifetime. This huge and beautifully cooked meal cost us fifty yuan, the equivalent of twelve Australian dollars. The young lady in charge of the restaurant has very good English and is able to provide plenty of gluten-free food for Robert. As usual, his diet has not been a problem so far.

After dinner, our main mission is to buy some water from one of our guides who has been provided with bottled water, at a very good price, by Karma. Throughout the trip, our guides have offered this very welcome service so that at all times we will have clean water available. They tell us that we should drink three litres a day, when at altitude. Our main problem is that James's room is on the fourth floor. It is a bit like climbing Everest. We huff and puff but eventually make it to the top. Mountaineers say that at altitude, one should climb high and then retreat somewhat lower to sleep at night to become accustomed to the thin air so we do as all good climbers do and retreat to the third floor to our Room 309. We hope we can sleep because one of the results of breathing thin air is sleeplessness. I am not a good sleeper at the best of times but tonight I feel I will be all right because I am dead tired.