Before we get to the why, let’s start with the how.

It all started six hours earlier when I remarked to Shanu, the owner of the guesthouse I was staying at, that I’d never experienced an Ayurveda massage, despite the fact I was now in India, the birthplace of the science, invented by the Ancient Rishis in the time of Lord Brahma (Ayurveda is the science of life span.).

“You want a massage?” Shanu asked.

“Um…sure…yeah, of course…um…yes, I’m in India.” I said with the unassertive confidence of a teenager ordering a beer on his first trip to a bar.

Of course Shanu knew somebody and, remembering my earlier insistence that I’d like to experience “life as the locals live,” he said confidently, “and it’s a REALLY local place, local massage, no tourists go there.

This led me onto the back of Shanu’s motorbike for a twenty minute ride away from the tourist town I was staying in, a walk through a series of cement alleys that cut between houses and ramshackle huts to what appeared to be some guy’s home.  As we knocked and walked in, I glanced through an open door leading to a side room, to see a contraption that looked just like a torture device straight out of the Dark Ages.  Shanu spoke to the woman, who appeared in the bedroom doorway, in Malayalam, the local language of which I understand none, besides “tastes good”).  After a few minutes of talking, he looked at me, “7:30?”

“Sorry?” I said not hearing him, because my ears were busy watching the Chinese water torture device still sitting in the next room.  “Do you want to come at 7:30 for a massage appointment?” Shanu asked through a heavy Indian accent.

“Um….I…umm….” I stammered, as the woman in the bedroom glared at me a bit.  “Of course…yes…I want a massage, 7:30 it is…”

Five hours later after again driving to the edge of town, down the cement alleys, past the ramshackle huts and back at the front door of the massage house, the time was now 7:30.

I was met by an old man with gray hair that still had wisps of black streaks that curled a bit over his eyes and across his extremely dark Indian complextion.  He led me to a room (past the Chinese water torture device) and had me sit on an overturned red plastic bucket.

“What kind of massage style was it again?” I asked, hoping he spoke English.

“Ancient Kerala martial arts,” he said. My back winched in anticipation.

A lone ceiling fan, with dust-covered blades, spun slowly above my head, casting ominous gray shadows on the dirt streaked green walls of the room.

“Oh,” I said, a bit nervous, “Me. First time to have.” I told him in simplified, broken English. “I had Swedish massage and Chinese massage before. First time for martial arts massage,” I remarked in what sounded like a poorly dubbed Hong Kong kung-fu flick.

“Take off your clothes and put here,” he said, pointing at a bent hook on the wall, making absolutely no effort to shield his eyes, leave the room or even break his glare at me.

“Right,” I said.  I imagined a drop of water rolling off the top of the Chinese water torture device in the next room, as the only sound to break the silence as now all my clothes were hanging on a rusty hook on the wall.

There I was, sitting on the bucket, totally naked, having reluctantly agreed to some sort of Jackie Chan-style massage from an old grumpy man in what felt like his hidden torture chamber in the bowels of his simple hut in the back streets of India. I had to smile, as the scene seemed pretty funny—and it was about to push the boundaries of the ridiculous.

He proceed to pull out a globular, ceramic container from high on a shelf on over the course of the next hour he covered me in massive amounts of coconut oil, flavored with what smelled like tumeric.  Covering every surface from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet, he methodically and meticulously massaged every muscle and loosened every joint.  Being it a “martial arts” massage, I expected a bit more violence in the room, but in fact it wasn’t too much difference from the Shiatsu massage that I once had at a sports health clinic in America…well, except now I was covered in 75 gallons of coconut oil….and I was totally naked.

I tell you that story, first cause its funny, and also because it was one of my first excursions on this trip into the world of holistic and herbal medicine.  Coming from the West in a country that is adamant about its “scientific proof,” I’ve never put a lot of stock in the fields of homegrown medicine.  In much of the developing world, which often doesn’t have access to clean drinking water, let alone expensive medicines, cutting-edge medical equipment and highly educated doctors, people must (and have for thousands of years) relied on homespun remedies to cure everything from an upset stomach to cancer.  Further, some of these cultures (particularly the Chinese and the Indians) have been developing these techniques over the last three thousand years, while many Western medical techniques date back to only the last century.

In China, I experience a few different forms of Chinese massage, from foot reflexology to a massage style in which they place a bag of really hot rocks on your back.  Skeptical about the foot reflexology (in which it is said most body aliments can be cured by touching specific parts of the foot or hand), I decided to give it a try and found myself in a local massage parlor in Beijing, being tended to by a masseuse from a small village in the Sichuan Province.  She spoke no English and didn’t have the patience for my terrible Mandarin, so we didn’t communicate at all during the two hour massage session—-except for one moment when, as I winced in pain as she was poking the bottom of my foot, she turned to my friend (who happened to speak the same Sichuan dialect) and said to him, “Tell him he has problems with his kidneys.”

“What!?” I said, shooting a look of horror at her.  She looked at me, smiled gently and went back to tending to my foot. “What does she mean by that!?” I demanded.  The woman didn’t answer.  For the next month every time my stomach hurt or I had a pain in my side I was afraid my kidneys were about to fail.

Elsewhere in China, if you are sick, you can simply go to the Chinese medical doctor, explain your ailments, then he measures out an assortment of herbs, twigs, bird’s nests, and other odds-and-ends, puts them in a sack and gives them to you.  Then you go home, boil the sack’s contents, drink it, and feel better.

Next door in India, nearly everyone knows that certain spices/herbs do certain things: Tumeric is good for coughs and asthma; phyllium husks are a perfect cure for diarrhea; yogurt helps calm an upset stomach.  All of which for me, at one time or another, proved to be true.

As I sat there lying on that massage table in Kerala, with the smell of the coconut oil filling the room, it was the first time I began to realize that these cultures with these medical practices and this knowledge—which are often written off by most of the West, has much merit to it.   Chinese and Indian cultures, both full of practitioners of such medicinal practices, are thousands of years old dating back to a few thousands years B.C.—that’s a lot of time to discover useful medical remedies.

We may be too quick to dismiss what seems odd and unfamiliar because we can’t immediately ‘prove’ its value, or it doesn’t fit neatly into our own cultural practices, though if we open ourselves it we’d find there’s certainly something to it.  It’s not weird, it’s just different.  And that’s why I travel: to get a first-hand understanding of such differences, as its the differences that keep our ever shrinking world interesting.

Besides when was the last time you walked out of the doctor’s office smelling like a piña colada.

Hand photo courtesy John Hayes under Creative Commons. Hand chart photo courtesy Cote under Creative Commons.

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• See some of my photos from India in ‘Indian Light’

“I don’t remember much about it now,” he recalls, “just walking.”

He was just five years old.

Illegally crossing the border, they smuggled themselves into India, finding work in hopes of making money to restart a better life once they could return to Tibet.  Eventually, his mother would return home, leaving Tenzin and his brothers to work and send money home.  Finally, five years ago, and nearly eighteen years since he arrived in India, it was Tenzin’s turn to return home—leaving one brother in jail and the other working in New Delhi.

I sat in their humble two room home in Lhasa, as Tenzin translated his mother’s version of their family story for me.  Framed by long strands of gray shoulder-length hair, the broad smile that had greeted me dissolved into despair as she spoke of Tenzin’s younger brother, still working in the outskirts of Delhi, who she hadn’t seen in years.

After finishing my seven day tour of Tibet, I had hoped to find a ride to India via Nepal, but I was having a surprisingly difficult time securing such transportation.  This predicament left me to wander the streets of Lhasa for a week, hoping an opportunity for a ride would turn up.  Due to the confusing permits required to travel within Tibet (see previous post), I had abandoned any thought of public transport or hitchhiking, as I didn’t want to be caught in a place I didn’t have permission to travel through.  I had come to Tenzin to ask his help in arranging such a ride.  “I want to go to Delhi,” I told him.  “My brother lives there,” Tenzin responded, and this conversation had led me to his home.

After his return to Tibet, Tenzin took a job with a tourism company.  Because he had lived in India for part of his life (his Indian accent being a telltale sign) he was not allowed by the Chinese government to be a tour guide in Tibet, one of the better paying jobs in the country, because of the risk that he may be working on behalf or have met the Dali Lama (who has been living in exile in India for years).

“There are monks who are spies in the temples and monasteries and they would turn me into the police if they caught me in the temples with tourists,” he said.

Tenzin’s brother was still in New Delhi, hoping to raise the necessary $4600 USD to pay a company that said they could get him a work visa in the US—a dream that held up all the hope the family seemed to have.  $4600 to a family that makes less than $100 per month is a fortune—and that was just for the visa.  I couldn’t find the courage to tell them that the plane ticket could cost $2000, living expenses in the US might be a few thousand dollars a month and that, is all assuming the promise for the visa was not a scam.

As I sat there on that couch across from Tenzin’s mother, being poured endless cups of hospitality and butter tea, I could see sadness in her eyes that came from the space separating her from her youngest son in Delhi, but I could also sense the hope in her voice as she spoke of her faith that her son would, one day, find passage and work in my country.  When she heard the news that I was headed to Delhi, she turned to me and looked deeply into my eyes before speaking.  Holding my hand, I could not understand the meaning of what she said, although I could feel the emotion that enveloped her words.

Tenzin translated, “She says, please when you get to Delhi, help my son if you can.  You are his hope.”  She continued, “I must ask you to give him something if you get there.”

“Of course,” I responded.

The broad smile returned to her face, wiping away any hint of despair, and she began exchanging words excitedly with Tenzin.

“My mom wants you to come back tomorrow.  After she gets done with her morning prayers at the temple, she will go buy something for you to take to Teslling, my brother.”

We sat together in the family room for another hour sipping tea and exchanging bits and pieces of our lives, before I said good night and slipped into the shadowy ancient streets of Lhasa, to return to my guesthouse.  I stopped by the next afternoon and though Tenzin was no where to be found (or to translate), his mother greeted me with a big hug, a smile and an offer once again for more butter tea.  Despite the fact I didn’t speak her first language and she didn’t understand mine, it seemed we both knew enough basic Chinese to have a rudimentary conversation for a few minutes, before she handed me a box.

“For my son,” she said with a proud smile, reaching out to touch my arm.

Inside was a simple pair of cheap white basketball shoes, but as I stood their in their humble home, in front of a kind old woman who possessed a faith that had carried her through a lifetime of struggles that I could never truly understand, I sensed that between the tissue paper and rubber soles in that box was not just a pair of shoes but a little piece of her family’s hope.

“Thank you,” she said with her eyes, as I tucked the box tightly under my arm and turned to walk out the door to begin the long journey to India.

(photo: carrying the shoes across Tibet, Nepal to the outskirts of New Delhi)

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If I were to say the word ‘Tibet’ to you, it would likely conjure, in your mind, images of temples, monks and mountains. It’s unlikely it would make you think of dance clubs. To assist you in such future visualization exercises, we bring you the next in the ongoing series of ‘What It’s Like’ videos, this one from Lhasa, Tibet. Breaking with normal form, in which I usually do not add much commentary to these videos, this one requires a bit of a setup.

After seven days of touring monasteries and temples, praying with monks and crisscrossing the Himalayan foot hills, we decided to try to get a glimpse of the contemporary life of young Tibetans and found ourselves chasing an invitation to one of Lhasa’s most popular dance clubs.

We arrived fashionably late and after the formalities at the door, we entered a cavernous room full of hundreds of rowdy, young Tibetans, mostly between the ages of 18 and 30—all crammed in circular booths drinking what else but cans of cheap, full strength American Budweiser Beer (Tibet is the country outside of America, where I’ve seen (and drank) the most of America’s favorite King of Beers).

We found a table on the upper floor, one of the last left in the place, despite it being only 8pm. Over the next six hours we’d be entertained with all types of amusement, including traditional Tibetan dances, karaoke, stage plays, pantomimes, drummers and singers (some of Tibet’s most famous), among other things. Every four or five acts, a Tibetan pop hit would explode from the speakers and the crowd would rise from there beer can covered tables to cram the stage for an all-out MTV Grind-style dance party, returning to their seats every single time after just one song. More amusing acts would follow, then once again a club-wide, single song dance party would ensue. I was actually quite impressed, as I realized a few hours into the evening, that they had not played a single American pop song, an experience you’d never have in Beijing, Bangkok, Buenos Aries, Pretoria, Paris or Perth. All the entertainment at this thumping Tibetan dance club was, surprisingly, Tibetan.

The menagerie of spectacle, the heavily pulsating lights, the cheesy re-creation of the Potallah Palace (the home of the exiled Dali Lama) on the stage backdrop under the clouds of cigarette smoke, left my head in a drunken state of confusion akin to a hallucinogenic trip on acid, on crack—or maybe it was just the Budweiser.

As our host would explain to us, the entertainment lineup would be the same night after night, the same songs, plays, performers and dances. Despite the fact that the audience could lip sync to all the songs, knew all the punch lines of the plays (and still laughed) and had done the same dances a hundred times over, it was all because everyone—all 400 people in that club—were in fact just waiting for one performance, and then its likely most people would leave for the night.

The promoters of the club were smart and put this one performer on stage about 3am. The anticipation of arrival grew as the hours passed on and the beer cans emptied. I knew we couldn’t leave until I figured out what had all these young Tibetans so damn excited, to come each night to put themselves through a show they’d seen a hundred times before and to drink beer that was about a half step up in flavor from the other ubiquitous Tibetan drink: butter tea. This performer, I figured, would have to be a show stopper.

I’m not going to tell you what happened at 3am, you’ll just have to watch the video and see who arrived for yourself.

Click here or the video player above to see the video.

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  • In A Karaoke Bar in Hong Kong
  • To Cook Chinese Cabbage In A Restaurant In Tibet
  • To Fire A Machine Gun In Vietnam
  • To Climb Down The Temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia
  • To Walk Through a House in China
  • To Buy A Duck In China

Traveling on one of the main tourist highways in Tibet, between Lhasa and Lake Namse, we decided to stop to take some photos at a particularly beautiful point in the road. As our driver pulled over to the shoulder, we hopped out and began making our way towards a grass field full of sheep, that were being tended by what seemed to be a pleasant-minded nomadic Tibetan family. As our group of six split up, the father came over with his two children and immediately started begging for money (this was fairly typical of what we had experienced at nearly all other stops on the road), while a few of us snapped photos of the mountains and sheep. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the father of the family began to push around one of my traveling companions and began speaking quite forcefully in Tibetan. She screamed back at him, “Get away from me!” as our Tibetan tour guide tried to stepped in.

“You took a picture of my sheep, you give me money,” the father repeatedly said in Tibetan, as our tour guide attempted again to intervene. “I didn’t take any pictures of your sheep,” my friend shot back. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the two small children, who had originally been begging with their hands out, now pushing another one of my traveling companions around, while trying to wiggle their hands into her coat pockets.

The argument between the father and our tour guide escalated, and without much warning, the man pulled out a dull blade from under the blanket that covered him and demanded, “She took a picture of my sheep, she must give me money.” At this point, as a few of us were swatting the kids hands away from our own pockets, we realized it was time to leave. We briskly walked back to the van, as the man continued to yell.

This became my first of many lessons on this trip about the human impact of living a life in despair under the passing shadows of buses loads of digital camera wielding tourists.

Give that father and his family a dollar and it encourages them to beg, don’t give them anything and be ready to see the manifestation of such desperation.

What was the right thing for me to do in this situation, I am not sure.

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• See past videos on ‘What It’s Like’:
  • In A Karaoke Bar in Hong Kong
  • To Fire A Machine Gun In Vietnam
  • To Climb Down The Temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia
  • To Walk Through a House in China
  • To Buy A Duck In China
  • In a Tibetan Dance Club
• Learn more about my 7 Days In Tibet or read some short stories
• See my photos galleries of Tibet in widescreen or regular size.
• These videos are intended to give you windows into places, read about another window I found in Cambodia

(all images are copyright 2008 Andy Stoll, and should not be used without prior permission.)

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 While I thoroughly respect Buddhism as a religion and, with all due respect to the Tibetans, after two weeks traveling in Tibet I couldn’t help snag the lingering thought that the Buddhism that Tibet is so famous for, might actually be what’s holding Tibet back.  Tibet was, and still is, one of the least developed places I’ve visited, where most people live in extreme poverty with little access to medicine, food and shelter, let alone the more modern amenities of life (e.g. jobs, trade, computers).  “In Tibet,” I was told by a man living there, “you have three options for your future: a nomadic herder, a monk or working in the tourist industry.”   Spending a week touring temples, monasteries and holy places, it amazed me how devout these people are, often spending 2-3 hours a day 1-2 time a day (or more) visiting temples, praying and giving alms.  I’d also guess that many people spend significant portions of their limited incomes on giving to monks and buying offerings (prayer flags, incense, butter candles) for their religions rituals.   Seeing them spend all of this well-meant time on their religious devotion, I began to wonder if it was keeping them from spending their time on other things that might help them develop the things that they need to prosper as a culture.

*  *  *

2. China, The Last Great Colonizer

My time in Tibet did not provide me with any experience that would allow me to comment with any authority on human rights abuses by the Chinese government in Tibet, but I can say that my time there gave me a much greater understanding of the concept of “colonization.”  Human rights abuses aside, it is clear to me that the Beijing government is putting a lot of effort into expanding Chinese influence and culture within the borders of Tibet (e.g. the new state-of-the-art train system direct from Beijing), while trying to suppress more traditional Tibetan culture (e.g. it is illegal to posses any images of the Dalai Lama).  Regardless of whether you think this is good or bad, my advice is, if you want to experience the Tibetan part of Tibet, get there on a visit before it is no more. For those readers who will immediately try to defend the actions of the Chinese government as an effort to grow one of the world’s poorest and least developed places, I’ll side with you in the fact that Tibet needs China to grow its economy and continue to provide basic goods and services to Tibetan people (in a land with few natural resources or industries to allow Tibet to be self-sustaining).  But I think the Chinese government uses these efforts to mask some of their intent to essentially blend the traditional Tibetan culture out by adding more Chineseness to the mix. Would I advocate they free Tibet (and make it is own country)?  No, because I think Tibet would sink deeper into poverty and probably become a new bastion of instability in a region of the world that’s already a bit shaky.  (Besides I believe China would never give up Tibet, which is currently a huge portion of its land mass, in a country whose past emperors were always judged on how they expanded or contracted the size of the empire).  I’ll side with the the Dalai Lama here, keep Tibet as part of China, but stop the cultural suppression and the shady business and make what is presently known as the “Tibetan Autonomous Regions,” actually autonomous.

*  *  *

3. The Little Boy With The Big Heart

 Since the above stories seemed to be a bit ‘doom and gloom’ I’ll leave you with a short story I received in an email from my friend Colleen (from New York City) who was traveling in Tibet about three week prior to my arrival. In an email, she writes: …Be sure to say “tashi dalay” (spelled “dalek” but pronounced “dalay”) to everyone you meet. Its their form of greeting but really means “good luck to you” — everyone was pleased when I said it.  Also, “too jay shay” is “thank you.” And if the kids keep begging you for money (which they will) DON’T give it to them… you might want to pick up a bag of candies or something that you can give to them instead of money. My guide said giving money to them only encourages them to do it more, which is not good. So just say “mean do” when they beg… it means “I don’t have any.” At one Himalayan village I went to, all the kids kept coming up to me and begging for money. I had accidentally left my bag with candies meant for the Tibetan children in the Land Cruiser, so I honestly didn’t have anything to give them. I continuously said, “mean do” (i don’t have any), but one little boy in particular kept begging, saying, “hello, money money money.” So I finally pulled my pants pockets inside out to show him I didn’t have anything. He sort of gave me a sad look and ran away. Hours later, after I had eaten and sightseen and taken tons of photos of his village, the little boy found me and ran up to me smiling. He then proceeded to stuff coins and bills into my pockets!!! Apparently he had begged others for money, and then hunted me down in order to give it all to me, because I had shown him I didn’t have any. THAT is the true Tibetan spirit. So generous. So happy. So loving. I wanted to give him the world, the little boy with the big heart….”

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Hometown: Tehran, Iran now lives in San Francisco, California

Where he traveled: Rishard is a well traveled guy. In the summer of 2006 he took a few months off from his job as an engineer and traveled solo through Japan, China, Nepal, India and SE Asia. (The photo to the left is of Rishard on Mt. Fuji, note the shape of the mountains shadow.)

Where our paths last crossed: Lhasa, Tibet

Rishard and I met only briefly but his enthusiasm for life and his travel stories make him a hard guy to forget. I replied to a note he had left on a travel board when I was trying to arrange a way out of Tibet (and onward to Nepal) and though are travel plans didn’t match up, we had a fine Tibetan dinner together with a group of travelers in Lhasa.

Rishard was born in Iran and grew up in there and in the US, he now works as a engineer in San Francisco. His summer trip was full of wild stories from finding himself stuck halfway up Mt. Fuji with no money and no place to stay, to being mistakenly arrested in Beijing (where he ended up getting a free police escort from the non-English speaking, embarrassed police officer onward to his intended destination), to being robbed of everything he had (passport, camera, photos, etc.) in Thailand. I admire Rishard for his sense of adventure, his energy and his desire to live life out loud.

Below is an excerpt from an email he wrote home right after his trek to Mt. Everest, and since I didn’t make it there during my time in Tibet, this is the closest you’ll get to a Mt. Everest story at noboundaries.org.

As you read, I hope you get a sense of the energy Rishard brings to his life and his travels.

We got to the Everst base camp (18,500 feet above sea level) and hiked two hours to the furthest point that people are allowed to go. With a couple of short cuts, a coffee break on tops of some rocks (made with our portable stove), we made it to what was supposed to be the final viewpoint, though once there we felt a bit unimpressed. So we decide to sneak by the guards and head towards camp 1 of Everest (20,100 feet ASL) though we only got about an hour further and found the most amazing view I have ever seen (though we had to take 4-5 deep breaths with each step to get there): a pond with turquoise water and a perfectly CLEAR view of Mt. Everest. This was going to be our rest area for the day.

By this time it was noon and the sun was so strong that we could feel our skin burning though our clothes. What to do? Well obviously, strip down and jump in the water (note the picture you see below is prior to all the clothes coming off). After two hours of bathing in the sun (we had to put our clothes back on after thirty minutes since the sun was burning us up), we decided to walk back since we saw clouds headed towards us. Within a half hour we were freezing again and all our clothes, jackets, and gloves were back on. All we could say to each other, between long deep breaths, was “What a perfect day, WOW, what a perfect day.”

Manifestation, things happen for a reason, how simple and pure we were at the age of 3, what is love and how much of it do we give on a daily basis, who are we and what is our mission in life, how has traveling changed us and what can we do to have more of our friends get the experience of traveling, and where have we been and what’s next—are just some of the conversations in our Jeep ride across Tibet to Everest and finally to Nepal, which is where I am now.

All I can say, is that you need to jump on making plans to get out here as soon as possible. The humans are changing the face of the earth, and it’s not all in a good way. Come and see this world in its raw stages before hotels and resorts are set up, and humans, with no respect for the land, just leave their garbage on the face of our mother earth. My pictures may tell you a story, and some of my words may resonate with you in one way or another, but no words or pictures can simulate the experience of sitting in front of the highest point in the world. You just can’t get enough of it. The energy that you feel is life changing. The view will burn in the back of your eyes, where you can see it again each time you think of it, and the thought of it will place you back in that spot where you sat and gazed at pure beauty and the power of the world, and you become balanced and energized.

I am now in Kathmandu, Nepal, as I got here last night. I met a guy in a bar that was going river rafting and invited me to go (the river is at its biggest and best now, as the rain season is near its end. I say near its end because we got rained on all day today). So we river rafted all day, the bus ride took 7 hours (though it should have been 3), and we are planning another 3 day rafting trip next (Nepal is one of the best places in the world for white water rafting),before I am to jump into the jungle and sleep in tents so I can maybe spot a tiger (and hope fully not be his or a Rhino’s meal).

I’ll be back on email in a week, until then….

Plan your next trip. Where do you want to go? What is your dream vacation? Just think about what place you want to go. Don’t think if you can do it or not, just write down where, and how many days, and what you want to do there. What is your dream vacation. It’s not hard to do it. So many people I meet are living their second or third dream vacations. I want my friends to live that out.

Talk to you when I’m done and in India. Again, thanks for your emails and wishes. I have the same for you all.

-Rishard

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When we stopped the car on the top of a mountain pass to take some photos, these teenagers—from a nearby group of nomadic people who were tending their sheep–came over to ask for money (and sweets). We ended up convincing them to take a photo with The Cow, and it has been the only time on my trip thus far I actually thought someone was going to steal the cow; right after I snapped this photo I thought for a moment the kids on the end was going to make a run for it. Instead we gave them some candy, which they proceeded to essentially beat the sh*t out of each other to get their share. A bit scary honestly. On a mountain pass in Southern Tibet.

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• Read more about my Seven Days In Tibet

The Chinese invented movable type and thousands of years later, with the same fervor the ancient Chinese built the Great Wall to keep out the advancing Mongols, it seems the modern Chinese government was now using such ‘fine print type’ to keep out this advancing mongrel traveler. 

As most readers will be even peripherally aware, Tibet is a sensitive issue and the intricacies of the debate are more complicated than either side will lead you to believe.  It was this debate that led me on a quest to decode the fine print and score a ‘tourist permit’ into Tibet.  It seems the rules and regulations of travel in Tibet change daily and even after subsequent calls to the Chinese embassy and extensive Googling, the rules and regulations on Tibetan travel made about as much sense to me as a brush stroked scroll of Chinese characters.  Adding to the mess was an incident that occurred a  few months prior, in which two American travelers unfurled a ‘Free Tibet’ banner near the Mt Everest base camp, which led to their expulsion from China, a complete lock down that kept all tourists out of Tibet for weeks and a stiffening of travel regulations in the region from there on out.

As it turns out, at the time of my travels, a tourist permit was required to enter Tibet (actually to even board the plane to Tibet) and permits could only be obtained through Tibetan-based tour operators who would also require that you buy a tour package.  No independent travel was allowed anywhere in Tibet, and technically, I was not even allowed to walk around the capital city of Lhasa without a tour guide in tow (although when we landed, this regulation was not being enforced in Lhasa). 

A mess of permits was also required to travel around Tibet and unless one could decode Chinese, it was nearly impossible to distinguish what was needed for where, thus a local tour operator was required.  Police road checks were frequent and the permitting seemed to be in full force.  Part of it is the way the government controls access to sensitive parts of Tibet and part of it is an excuse to make more money from a region that has few exploitable natural resources.  Regardless, once all of the necessary permitting had been taken care of from Hong Kong via a local Tibetan travel agent, and once I landed in Lhasa, I had no problems traveling independently in Lhasa and with a tour guide/driver outside of the city.

[TRAVEL WARNING: If you are reading this seeking tips on how to score your own tourist permit for Tibet and/or how to get around while there, be warned that policies seem to change daily and you should not, under any circumstance, believe that the rules during my visit in September 2007 apply at any other time.  Do your homework or you may waste a lot of time and money.  The Lonely Planet Thorn Tree is a good place to start.]

Having overcome the formidable visa form, I landed in Tibet and found the most beautiful scenic nature I’ve ever seen, full of a kind, friendly, simple, yet very poor people,  so devout in their religion I believe it hampers their development.  I traveled amongst the people through the fertile green valleys, on the shores of the sapphire lakes and underneath the endless cobalt skies of this great empire hidden for centuries at the top of the world, an empire whose culture is flickering and may soon disappear forever.

Over the next few posts I invite you to come with me as I share some photos, stories and perspective gained from my seven day tour of Tibet (and additional seven day stay; more on that later).  I hope you’ll join me, there’s no permit required.

What you can do now:

• Leave a comment on this post below.

• Read some of my thoughts on China-US Relations in my story of Marching in a for Democracy in China.

• Read about my visit to a Cheese Factory in a Tibetan village in Yunan, China in There’s No Sesame Chicken in China

• Visit The Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree Discussion Board on Tibet

• Don’t know much about Tibet?  Check out Wikipedia.

Walking through the remote Tibetan village that housed the Shangrila Cheese Factory, we were met by a number of curious villagers, who came out to see who we were. The father and son in this photo came walking by and we asked if we could take a photo—the father is leaning a bit funny because I think he wanted us to see his basket and he was also reminding his son to stand up straight.

Imagine what you’d do if someone, speaking a language you didn’t understand, came walking through your neighborhood and asked to take a picture of you?

• Leave a comment on this post below.
• See another installment of “In This Picture” of another father and son in Vietnam.
• Read more about Langdu Village and their Cheese Factory in There’s No Sesame Chicken In China.
• See more photos from the factory and village in my Langdu Village Flickr Gallery.

The black hole void of sesame chicken in a country I was once fairly certain invented the dish, is a topic for another time, as I’d like to take a closer look at another seemingly paradoxical culinary contradiction in the above mix: Chinese don’t eat cheese, yet there I was in a Land Cruiser on a bumpy ride through the mountains in search of the country’s first gourmet cheese factory, deep in a poor, remote Tibetan village high in the mountains of Yunan Province, China.

How a cheese factory came to be deep in the heart of China, complete with cheese advisors flown in from Wisconsin (America’s undisputed cheese capital), is a story of how two passionate young Chinese women came to the realization that sometimes it is such paradoxical thinking that can make all the difference.

Born from a winning business plan submitted to a social entrepreneurial competition thousands of miles and world’s away from Yunan, in the halls of Harvard University, Mei Xiang Cheese is the first business venture of Boston, Hong Kong and Shanghai based Ventures in Development. Harvard classmates, Marie So from Hong Kong and Carol Chyau from Taiwan, along with a few friends, disappointed in the lack of focus on development work in China, decided they wanted to do something for the millions in their home country that were being left behind, despite the headline-grabbing economic growth.

Starting with less than $50,000 USD, mostly raised from winning the business plan competition, they set up their non-profit/for-profit, a non-profit social entrepreneurial incubator that would work to set up sustainable, for-profit businesses in Mainland China that would direct their growth and profits into improving the quality of life in the villages that built the businesses. The profits and benefits of a successful business, it is hoped, will trickle down to create jobs and spread wealth within the village, plugging the villagers in a small way into the global economy that was, at one time, leaving them behind.

Ventures in Development’s most successful project to date: Mei Xiang Cheese, follows the women’s strategy to leverage readily available local resources, in the case of the cheese factory: Yaks. Yaks, sort of a cross between a buffalo and a sheep, live well in the high altitudes and harsh conditions of the mountains in China’s interior and have been a staple animal for the Tibetans for centuries. The women partnered with local organizations to scout out and select a village in Yunan to pilot their cheese making process. Then turning the more traditional model of aid a bit on its head, the organization sought paid volunteers from the village to undertake the leadership and management of the to-be-built factory. The found, after an exhaustive search, just one volunteer: Zhuo Ma and her family, who were willing to take the risk and learn about the foreign concept of gourmet cheese making.

With the startup money in hand and a local family to lead the project, they began construction on a cheese processing facility that would turn the Yak’s milk into China’s first gourmet yak cheese.  After flying in a professor and cheese expert from Wisconsin (USA), the factory developed a product line and worked to perfect its processing and aging techniques.

Nearly two years after the first brick was laid, on a beautiful piece of land nestled in a valley of pine trees on the banks of a crystal clear cold mountain stream, and four hours on treacherous roads over towering mountain passes to the nearest city (Zhongdian/Shangrila), our Land Crusier came to rest in the misty afternoon weather, were we were hustled into the factory’s restaurant for a cup of tea and—what else—deep fried cheese.

The journey from startup to their now weekly cheese output was not as simple as it sounds, as the challenges were numerous and roadblocks relentless, yet despite a lack of MBAs and large bank accounts, the villagers seem uniquely qualified to persevere.

While we sat comfy in our flashy winter jackets drinking our green tea, having just completed our 4-hour Land Cruiser ride, in the door came a woman with her young daughter who couldn’t have been more than 14-years old. The two, soaking wet and wrapped in thin blankets, had just walked for nearly a day and a half in the sleet and freezing rain over the same mountain pass our Land Cruiser had just bounced and tumbled. The young girl stiff and shivering was clearly in the early stages of hypothermia and was wrapped in a sleeping bag and laid next to the wood-burning stove. “They were walking from town,” we were told, “the only way for them to get from there to here.” None of the locals seemed to blink at the emergency because, as I later learned, adversity was so common here it seemed not at all out of the ordinary. A few days before we arrived, three villagers had been electrocuted and killed at the power station just across the road from the cheese factory. “Most people here live with the goal to simply get to tomorrow,” it was later remarked.

After lunch, we ventured up the mountain for a short tour and to meet Yak herders who were coming over the mountain to deliver the latest milk supply. The rain from the previous week had washed a tree across the only dirt road over the mountain, so the herders were leading their Yaks to meet us halfway.

After leading the yaks up slippery logging roads and trudging through knee high mud, their milk barrels were loaded on the back of our truck bound for the wood roofed cheese factory in the fertile green valley below.

Despite the adversity, these villagers, it seems, always find a way through.

* * *

Ventures in Development is still working to get approval from the USFDA and EU to export to the US and Europe, but their gourmet Yak cheese is now available from the company’s first shop in Zhongdian, Yunan (aka Shangrila) and a few other places in China, including Hong Kong. You can read more about Mei Xiang Cheese at www.shangralacheese.org or by visiting Ventures in Develop at www.venturesindev.org.

I’d like to pass on a special thanks to Ventures in Development co-founder Marie So, her sister Annette and Zhuo Ma and the crew in Langdu Village for allowing me a glimpse into their wonderful little cheese business in the heart of a country that I once thought didn’t know much about cheese.

The interior of the cheese factory has very strict sanitary rules and one of the challenges of building the business has been educating the villagers about the strict government sanitation requirements for food export.

The factory complex is built in one of the most beautiful, pristine and remote wilderness areas I’ve seen on my trip.

L to R: Marie, Ventures in Development co-founder; Annette, Marie’s sister from Hong Kong/London; Mei Ziang Cheese Factory Renaissance man responsible for cheese making/repairs/transportation/taking tourists on tours; Sheena, fellow traveler from Hong Kong and my resident translator (Thanks Sheena!).    

On the drive to fetch the milk canisters, we were taken on a short tour of the village and given a peek into a village home.  Hanging dried meat in the home’s living room (2nd picture above). The lack of electricity and the gray rainy day made it quite difficult to see when walking through the massive three story house.

The herders led their Yak’s through the mud and cleared the upturned tree to deliver the milk canisters that were necessary to avoid a halt in the cheese production for the week.

• Leave a comment on the post below.
• View more photos in my Langdu Village Flickr Gallery.
• Visit the website of Mei Xiang Cheese.
• Learn more about Ventures In Development and their other cool startups.
• Read a bit about my thoughts on why this is a great example of social entrepreneurship in A Hand Up, Not Out.

#1 Taken in a tourist market in Hong Kong, this place caters to the American in all of us. I can pretty much say there is not a single person of the 1.3 billion people in China that would fit in this shirt.

#2 In a country notoriously known for fake products, a pharmacy tries to set things straight. Sign in Macau, China.

#3 This one had me laughing for days. Ok, so Chinese pirated goods are pretty rampant and I got this gift wrapped present (below) while in Hong Kong. I recognize some of the designs on the package from other places, which leads me to believe that the “Espana” and little “cute precious moments” doll characters were stolen from existing wrapping paper and then the ‘pirate designer’ decided to add his own touch of English to really bring his message of LOVE home (look carefully at the English words by the ribbon; that’s really printed on the paper).

#4 English menus in China are an endless source of amusement, but most blunders do not make me laugh as much as this one did. I assume what we’re trying to order here is “Potato with crab,” but…well…see for yourself.

Look a little closer and you’ll find a couple more amusing Chinese>English translations on this menu. I’d offer to fix them, but I’d deprive future tourists of hours of amusement. Found in Lijang, China.

#5 For those who may not know, my last name is “Stoll” (It’s German). Continuing on with some translation blunder in Chinese>English signs….this one, well the jokes on me….I was greeted by this sign in a bathroom in Zhongdian, China.

• Leave a comment about this post below.
• See our first installment of “Things That Make Me Laugh” from Japan
• Read more Lost In Translation stories in I Bought A Camera From A Guy Named Fish
• Not into funny? Learn more about pirated goods in China in an entertaining story about my search for designer women’s handbags in Hong Kong Is A Shoppers Paradise.
• Submit your own photo from your own collection to be considered in the next “Things That Makes Me Laugh by emailing us.

• Leave a comment in the box below
• See other photos of the cow from around-the-world and with new friends.
• Read the cow’s story

Months later, as I crested an ocean front sand dune in Mozambique, the salty sweet smell of the ocean smacking me in the nose as I came face to face with a postcard perfect panorama of a few lone beach-front palm trees leaning in as if to take a drink of the turquoise waves of the ocean, the first thought that came to my mind, “I’m in a Microsoft screen saver.”

The thing that’s funny about modern life is that what is unreal has become more real than the real. What we think is real, comes from what we’ve seen in the unreal world: movies, television, media, zoos and amusement parks. That unreal is our reference point to what we think is real.

For the average person from the developed world, our understanding of lion behavior come from Simba (which means “lion” in Swahihi) and Scar, our benchmark for beautiful oceans come from airbrushed glossy magazine spreads in National Geographic and our closest brush with pirates came when we were face-to-TV with Johnny Depp.

This phenomenon leads us to two problems:

1) The Real Turns Out Not To Be As Exciting As What We Think Is Real: Because the real thing isn’t edited, scripted, “Photoshoped” and backed by a John Williams orchestrated score, when we see things that are real and they don’t measure up to our expectation, we instead desire for the unreal “real” version instead.

“The sharks were pretty sleepy. I thought they’d be more aggressive, I didn’t get any good photo,” remarked one disappointed woman on a Great White shark cruise in South Africa. Too bad her traveling husband with the camera wasn’t Steven Spielberg.

2) Our desire for this idealized version of the real (the unreal), causes many places to give us what we think we want. Since tourists have certain expectations of the places we go, it is no surprise that these places are going to give us what we think we want.

During my travels in China, I visited Lijang a popular tourist destination in Yunan. The area known as the “old city” appears to have been lifted directly out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with the crafty addition of neon lit pubs overflowing with Tsing Tao beer and Chinese women in short shorts, karaoke bars and kitschy souvenir shops.

Night on the streets in Old Town Lijang, Yunan Province, China.

The reality of China is that people don’t live in movies like Crouching Tiger and darkened cobble stone streets with glowing red lanterns are not where most Chinese exist in the modern era, but the image that tourists have of China is exactly that, so in the end the demand causes the unreal to become real.

A picture in front of my guesthouse in ‘Old Town’ Zhongdian, China.
A city that recently changed its name to “Shangri-la” for obvious tourist purposes.

So if on your next trip you find yourself watching Kenyans dancing and whooping around a camp fire to the beat of leather drums or Geishas bowing to you at the gates of Kyoto-esque temples or even cowboys and indians chasing each other around a dusty stage in South Dakota, enjoy it for what it is, but please my friend take a taste of the real, at least for a bit, and get out of the theme park.

• Leave a comment in the box below.
• Read more of Andy’s ego-talk, this one on American-Chinese relations, in his post Marching for Democracy In China
• See some “Photoshoped, glossy photos” from such reality in the Noboundaries.org photo galleries

(Xun Zhou, China) Everyone likes to save money, right? Of course, that’s why Americans invented Walmart and people worldwide flock to Ikea. During my visit to Xun Zhou, I got a pretty good lesson in why those stores are so cheap.

As I walked under the beating sun, as temperatures rose near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37 C), between the tightly packed passageways that separated the homes of this rural village, I noticed a number of large wooden squares maybe 6 feet (about 2m) by 3 ft (1m) and strung with ropes and fabric.

Eventually, curiosity got the best of me, and I asked innocently what they were. It was explained to me that many women in the village were being paid to hand-stitch sequins onto the fabric that would later be used to make blouses, dresses, and clothes that would, if you followed down the consumer food chain, be sold at a clothing stores near you. A shirtless, middle-aged man explained that this was an easy way for women to make a bit more money for their families, and that they were contracted (and give the supplies) by men from the nearby bigger cities. The men would come around a few time a month to collect the finished fabrics and pay the women per piece they had completed.

Though there was no way for me to determined where these particular blouses where headed once done, a quick Google search for “sequined ladies tops” turns up hundreds of similar blouses (see pictures below). Amazon.com sells one for $25 USD, spiegel for $75 USD, and some of the top designer from Louis Vuitton to Armani sell sequined tops for hundreds of dollar, if not more. (Disclaimer: I am NOT trying to imply that the shirts I saw in Xun Zhou were necessarily headed for any one of these shops in particular or that any of these shops practice such production processes–because frankly I have no way of finding out.)

Above: Some random Google grabs for ’sequined blouse.”List price (Left to right): $49 USD, $89 USD, $69 USD

I asked the village women how long it takes them to hand stitch the sequins onto a single shirt, and was told “about 3-4 days, depending on how much time we spend on it.”

I asked the women if they enjoyed their work. “It’s good to have work,” they said.

I asked the women how much they got paid per shirt, by the man from the big city.

“The equivalent of about 3/4 of 1 US dollar,” they said.

It’s often said, “it pays to shop around,” but after meeting these ladies, I wonder who really pays?

• Leave a comment in the box below.
• See some other photos from Xun Zhou Village, China
• Are you a Bush or are you a Clinton? Read more about my arrival on the island.

• Please leave comments about the video below
• See some photo from my visit to the island.
• See a short video about What It’s Like: To Buy A Duck in Xun Zhou
• “Are you a Bush or a Clinton?” Read more about my arrival on the island.
• Read Andy’s previously posted story “The Tower of Babel: An Instructive Guide”
• See past videos on ‘What It’s Like’:
  • In A Karaoke Bar in Hong Kong
  • To Fire A Machine Gun In Vietnam
  • To Climb Down The Temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia
  • To Buy A Duck In China
  • In a Tibetan Dance Club

Located on the southeast coast of China, Xun Zhou is a rural fishing village whose inhabitants make their living farming fish, clams, vegetables and rice. I spent five days there as a guest of the Zheng family, who graciously invited me to experience life in rural China (and being reported the first American to ever visit the island). The village had a population of about 1,000 people, no running water and, as far as I could tell, no English speaking inhabitants. My sincerest gratitude goes to my friend Sheena for guiding and translating for me and sharing her lovely family and village with me. Click here to see my gallery of photos from my time there, or click the collage above or here to see a Flickr Slideshow of the same photos.

• Please leave comments about the photos either below or on the Flickr site, as you view them.
• “Are you a Bush or a Clinton?” Read more about my arrival on the island.
• See a short video about “What It’s Like” To Buy A Duck in Xun Zhou
• See more photo galleries from my around-the-world trip on my Flickr page from the far reaches of the US, China and Japan.

Click here to see the video or click the video player below.

• Leave a comment about this video in the comment box below.
• Read more about the fishing village in my story, “The First American In China“
• Suggest a topic for a future “What It’s Like” video by contacting noboundaries.org.
• See past entries ‘What It’s Like’:
  • In A Karaoke Bar in Hong Kong
  • To Fire A Machine Gun In Vietnam
  • To Climb Down The Temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia
  • To Walk Through a House in China
  • In a Tibetan Dance Club